Auriga for Athletes: Getting Started

Your coach has made the wise decision to spare you from Google Sheets and move you to Auriga. We're sure that you'll love it, but first you have to get to know it! Let's run through what Auriga offers, and how to get started.

Let's start with sign-up. Once your coach registers you for an athlete account, you'll get an email with a sign-up link from us. Here, you'll be able to tell us about your lifting, link your competition history with OpenPowerlifting, set your PRs, and all that good stuff.

Then you'll reach your dashboard, which, like every page on Auriga, is represented by a Tarot card. Each card has symbolism related to what the page does for you.

The sign-up and login pages are associated with Tarot too: The Fool, which represents new beginnings and limitless potential.

At the top of your dashboard is your current block, its training structure, and a little chart showing which days you completed, did late, or had to skip.

Next is your upcoming session, clicking it takes you straight to the training log, but before we show you that, there's a bit left here.

Below that is a spot to log your externals, like sleep, weight, and steps.

And finally, a spot to see your upcoming and recent competitions. If you skipped importing your old competitions from OpenPowerlifting and want to do it now, clicking "show all" will reveal a button to do that! Here's the top of it, current block and your next session:

Strength is your training log. Clicking one of the training days on your dashboard brings you straight to that day, ready to go. If you want to log a different session, you can do that too, with the dropdowns at the top of the page.

At the top, you can make some notes about how you're feeling for the session, which can be super helpful to look back on later!

Next, the meat and tatties: completing your program. Exercises will appear in cards like this:

You can log the weight, reps, RPE, bar speed, and notes on each card. You can also record warmups by clicking "add warmup", or record bar speed for each rep by clicking the plus.

At the bottom, you can record some final notes, rate how you found the session, and record your externals. If you have to skip a session, there's a button here to mark it as skipped too.

When you click save, a window will pop up with a quick summary to share with your coach. If you and your coach have added your phone numbers, the WhatsApp button will bring it straight into your WhatsApp chat! Or click the share or copy buttons to send it another way.

That's all you need to get lifting on Auriga. From here on out, it's all extras that are nice to have, but not necessary to train.

The Wheel of Fortune is how you can look back at past training to see what you lifted, what you were feeling, how it moved, and when!

Select a block at the top and a grid of cards will appear. Each column is a separate session, and each card in it is a different exercise.

At the top of each column is information about that training day: what lifts you'll be doing, whether they're primary, secondary, or tertiary, and the number of sets programmed. Here's an example:

Each card in the column below is colour-coded to what lift it is: squats are pink, bench is sandy, deadlifts are blue, accessories are purple, and physio/rehab is green.

At the top of the card is the exercise programmed, next to markers for whether it's volumized and what type of set it is. For a volumized exercise, the number of sets and reps change week to week. That's the same progressive overload principle your coach is applying; we've got a whole article on why it works, if you're curious. The set types are "normal", "time-based" (like a plank), or "cap-AMRAP" (your coach gives you a weight and you do as many reps as you can, capped to a certain RPE).

Below that is the count of sets and reps your coach has given you, then the log itself: each week is its own row, with columns for the prescribed RPE and what you actually did (achieved) on the day.

Clicking the number for a week will show you all the notes you made that week.

The Hierophant is our training analysis page. By default you'll only be able to see your externals analysis, but your coach might let you see more. Let's run through externals analysis first.

Here, you can see graphs tracking your key externals, like bodyweight, steps, sleep, food, and exercise calories, with a summary showing your averages. Over time, the system learns how you manage your weight and starts giving you trends and analysis to help you manage your lifestyle and weight.

The training page analyses your lifting to produce personalised relationships between bar speed, RIR, and load, and uses them to track your e1RMs and GL over time. We've written more on why these individualised Velocity-RIR curves matter, if you want the full picture.

The competition page uses your competition history to provide insights into attempt hit rates, and can help you think through an attempts sheet.

And finally, the programming page crawls through your training logs and uses your session enjoyment data to highlight what sessions and blocks you do and don't enjoy. It can highlight aspects of programs that lead to consistently less-good blocks, and learns about you over time, so it gives better and better insights as you go!

Tell it your target and track your attempts as you go, then watch The Moon keep track of what you need and when, to make sure you hit your numbers: sparing you from a trip to the calculator app.

The Moon is the attempts sheet, and just like the rest of Auriga, there are clever things going on inside. See your coach's conservative, standard, and aggressive attempts, and enter your attempts as you go. If you enter a target total or GL, The Moon will dynamically offer different scenarios, telling you what you need to hit any goal you have.