Strength & hypertrophy — app 05
Plan the mesocycle. Grow on purpose.
Iron Corner is evidence-based hypertrophy and strength training that plans your mesocycles, autoregulates your volume from weekly feedback, and teaches the why behind every set. Fully offline, on your phone.
Try it now
What it does
Plan a real mesocycle
Volume landmarks (MV/MEV/MAV/MRV) set each muscle’s starting sets, progressive overload builds week to week, %1RM waves handle strength, and a deload is planned in from the start.
Volume that autoregulates
Every set carries a target RIR. Each week Iron Corner reads your soreness, pump, and workload and moves each muscle toward its landmarks — more sets when you’re recovering well, fewer when you’re buried.
A database built for growth
131 exercises rated by stimulus-to-fatigue, tagged for lengthened bias, and filtered by a joint-aware selection wizard that routes around cranky joints. Prescribed rest runs on a backgrounded timer, with plate and warm-up calculators a tap away.
The numbers, and the why
An analytics suite — volume against your landmark bands, e1RM trends, a feedback heatmap, deload adherence — plus automatic PR detection. A 26-entry learn-while-you-lift layer explains every prescription with one tap, so you understand each decision.
How it works
- 01
Pick a template or build your own mesocycle. Iron Corner sets each muscle’s starting volume from evidence-based volume landmarks and lays out the weeks — build, overload, deload.
- 02
Train the session it prescribes: sets, target RIR, and prescribed rest with a timer running in the background. Log your soreness, pump, and workload in a tap.
- 03
Each week it autoregulates — volume moves toward your landmarks from your feedback, e1RM trends and PRs update, and a one-tap explainer tells you why every number changed.
Pricing
Free to start. Buy it once if you love it.
Free forever — upgrade to Pro whenever you’re ready.
Run a full mesocycle, free.
Open Iron Corner- 1 active mesocycle from templates
- RIR autoregulation & deloads
- Rest timer, plate & warm-up calc
- Current-meso analytics
- Backup & restore — both ways
- Works offline
The full training system.
Get Monthly- Everything in Free
- Custom mesocycle builder
- Full analytics history
- Multiple concurrent mesocycles
- Home screen widgets
Most will pick this.
Get Annual- Everything in Monthly
- Priority on new features
- Founding price locked
Buy it once. Updates forever.
Get Lifetime- Everything in Annual
- Pay once, no renewals
- Founding-user pricing
- A founding-user thank-you
Already using Iron Corner? Buying doesn’t start you over. You’ll be emailed a licence key — enter it in Iron Corner under License and Pro unlocks on that device, with all your training still there.
Payments run securely through Lemon Squeezy — your card never touches us. Cancel anytime. Your data stays on your device, and is never sold.
Put it on your phone
No app store. Add it in three taps.
Iron Corner installs straight from this page — no store, no account, no download queue. Once it’s on your home screen it opens full-screen, launches offline, and keeps your data far safer from the clear-outs browsers run on ordinary tabs.
iPhone & iPad
- 1Open this page in Safari and tap Share in the toolbar.
- 2Scroll down the list and choose + Add to Home Screen.
- 3Tap Add. Iron Corner gets an icon and opens full-screen.
Android
- 1Open this page in Chrome and tap Install when it offers.
- 2Or open the ⋮ menu and choose Add to Home screen.
- 3Confirm, and Iron Corner behaves like any other app on your phone.
Questions
What makes Iron Corner different?+
It synthesises the published hypertrophy and strength research across many researchers rather than following one coach’s system, and it says where that evidence still disagrees: how much volume is worth it, how close to failure to train, how much a deload actually buys you. Every prescription carries a one-tap explainer — 26 topics in all — so you can see the reasoning behind a number instead of taking it on trust.
Is the free tier actually useful?+
Yes. You can run a complete mesocycle from a template — autoregulation, deloads, the rest timer, calculators, and analytics for your current meso — entirely free. Paid unlocks the custom builder, your full analytics history, and running multiple mesocycles at once. Backup and restore is free, both directions.
Do I need to be online?+
No. Iron Corner runs entirely on your phone and works fully offline — plan, log, and autoregulate in a gym basement with no signal. Install it to your home screen and it behaves like a native app.
Where does my data live?+
On your device. Iron Corner is local-first — no account, no server, no database of your training to leak. Export and restore a full JSON backup anytime, free, in both directions.
When can I use it?+
Now. Iron Corner is live — open it from any button on this page and start planning a block in the browser. Install it to your home screen and it behaves like a native app. The free tier runs a full mesocycle, and the founding price on the paid tiers is locked while it lasts.
The evidence
What the programming is built on
Iron Corner’s method is drawn from the published hypertrophy and strength literature — dose–response volume research, proximity-to-failure trials, and the fitness–fatigue model among them — synthesised across many researchers rather than cloned from any single program, including the parts where that science is still settling.
Each muscle starts at a sensible weekly volume and progresses toward its landmarks. The dose–response between weekly sets and growth is one of the best-established findings in hypertrophy — with clear diminishing returns past your recoverable ceiling, not a straight line up.
▸ ▾ The evidence
- Schoenfeld, Ogborn & Krieger (2017). Dose–response relationship between weekly resistance-training volume and increases in muscle mass: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073–1082. doi:10.1080/02640414.2016.1210197 ↗
- Van Every, Lees, Wilson, Nippard & Phillips (2026). Load-induced human skeletal-muscle hypertrophy: mechanisms, myths, and misconceptions. Journal of Sport and Health Science, 15, 101104. source ↗
Volume autoregulates from your own soreness, pump, and workload, and every set targets a set number of reps in reserve. Training close to — but not always to — failure is what the proximity-to-failure evidence supports.
▸ ▾ The evidence
- Refalo, Helms, Trexler, Hamilton & Fyfe (2023). Influence of resistance-training proximity-to-failure on skeletal-muscle hypertrophy: a systematic review with meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 53(3), 649–665. doi:10.1007/s40279-022-01784-y ↗
The database tags lengthened-biased movements — the ones that load a muscle hardest while it’s stretched. Training at long muscle lengths looks promising for growth (Wolf, Nippard & Schoenfeld 2025 among the recent trials), but the effect is modest and the research is still young, so Iron Corner treats it as a useful tilt, never a rule.
A deload is planned into every mesocycle, not bolted on once you’re already buried. Adaptation happens during recovery, and sleep in particular sharpens the work you’ve already done.
▸ ▾ The evidence
- Mah, Mah, Kezirian & Dement (2011). The effects of sleep extension on the athletic performance of collegiate basketball players. Sleep, 34(7), 943–950. doi:10.5665/sleep.1132 ↗
Tiers mark how strong the evidence is — A (meta-analyses / RCTs), B (emerging), C (coaching practice, labelled, never dressed up as proven). The full method and bibliography live on the studio’s method page.
Iron Corner · live
Train the next block with it. Lock the founding price.
Iron Corner is live and free to start — no account, no card. Leave your email if you want the release notes and a heads-up before the founding price goes up.