Health and life stages · Training seated
If you train sitting down, you get a different programme — not a smaller one.
Most apps hand a wheelchair user the standing programme with the standing exercises deleted. Do that to ours and the first week comes out empty. So we built the seated week from the seated movements instead.
Why filtering does not work
Delete the standing exercises and there is nothing left.
Our first training phase is built around balance. Every slot in it is a balance movement, and it deliberately refuses anything done seated, lying down or on a machine — because sitting with your back supported takes the hips and trunk out of the movement, which is the whole point of that phase for someone who stands.
Filter that phase for a seated client and you get an empty week. Not a thin week — an empty one. This is the thing a tick box cannot fix, and it is why “accessible” usually means the hard parts were skipped. A seated client needs a week built from the movements that work, not the standing week with holes in it.
So that is what the app does. A seated week, in the same order a trainer would run a session — chest, back, shoulders, legs, arms — carrying the same phase’s sets, reps, tempo and rest as everyone else’s, and passing through the same injury and condition gates. It is the same training model. It is not a lighter version of it.
Three questions, not one tick box
Two people in wheelchairs do not get the same week.
“Uses a wheelchair” is not enough information to write a programme, so the evaluation asks what actually changes what you can be given:
- Can you stand and exercise without holding on?Anything but “yes, steadily” and the seated week becomes your default — and unstable surfaces, landings, anything ballistic and any floor-to-standing scramble come off whichever programme you train. Choose the standing one anyway and it still cannot hand you a squat on a wobble cushion.
- Do your legs work?If they do not, the leg machines come out of your pool entirely rather than appearing and being skipped every week.
- Can you get onto a machine seat on your own?If not, you are left with what can be done from your own chair. A programme that assumes a transfer you cannot make unassisted is a programme you cannot do.
Four places we say no
The parts we left out on purpose.
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The camera does not count your reps.
This is the feature we are best known for, and on this track it is switched off. The pose-estimation models this kind of counting is built on perform poorly on wheelchair users, because wheelchair users are under-represented in the data those models were trained on — Huang W et al., WheelPose, ACM CHI 2024 (read it). A rep counter that miscounts your set logs your training wrong, and wrong data is worse than no data.
The form watch still opens on these movements as it does on any other, so you can look at yourself. It is the counting and the automatic logging we withhold, and we would rather tell you that than quietly give you a number we do not trust.
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No exercise balls.
Two of the seated movements in our library are done sitting on a stability ball. They are tagged seated, and they are excluded here, because an unstable surface is the exact thing someone who cannot stand safely must not be handed.
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Nothing from the floor.
One seated press is performed on the floor. Getting down there and back up is its own hurdle, so it is off this track rather than offered and quietly skipped.
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There is no seated core work yet.
Our model has not filmed a core exercise seated, and rather than borrow a standing one and call it close enough, the track tells you the slot is empty. We would rather have a gap you can see than a substitution you cannot.
What a seated week looks like
Up to four days, and it refuses to fake one.
Two to four whole-body sessions a week, which is the recommended frequency for this phase for anybody. One movement per muscle group per day, groups in session order, and where a group has two options you alternate between them — so the same session never runs twice in a row.
When there is not time in the session for every muscle group, the ones that sit out rotate. An earlier version of this shifted that window by one group a day, which sounds right and is not: it trained shoulders every single day and biceps never, for the whole life of the programme. It was found, named and fixed.
And if your answers leave fewer than three muscle groups available, the app says so instead of building you a week. Three is the floor for something to be a programme rather than a gesture. A seated week that cannot be made properly is a thing you should be told about, not handed.
Before anything else
We are not a rehab programme.
VeraForma is coaching, not medicine. It does not know why you use a chair, it does not diagnose anything, and it is not a substitute for anyone treating you. If nobody has looked at you yet, that is the first appointment.
If a physiotherapist or doctor has given you instructions, log what they told you and the app follows them everywhere, on a free account. Their word overrules ours.
The evaluation, the seated track and the programme it builds are free. If something here does not fit you, we keep a page about that too.
