Training is in beta. Reps are spotted from your GPS course — the least reliable thing the app measures — so a drill can miscount or miss a rep. Trust the trend across a session more than any single rep, and tell us when it gets one wrong (Settings → Support → Send Feedback). Your track is always recorded in full regardless.
A guided workout has a goal and an ordered list of activities, each with a target — reps (Tacks × 10), a duration (Upwind VMG Hold 3 min), or both — and an optional rest between reps.
- Tacks / Gybes / Roll tacks — detected automatically and scored for speed loss, exit angle, and how fast you rebuild speed. Once you've done four, each one is judged against your own usual turn in that drill. A turn is scored as soon as you're back up to speed — or, if you aren't, the moment it's been long enough to call it a slow rebuild.
- Upwind / Downwind VMG hold — too-high/too-low cues and a "% on target" score.
- Straight-line speed run; Race start (each rep runs a countdown and is scored at the gun; needs a start line); Hold station (stay inside a small area; drift is recorded).
- Penalty turns, mark roundings, acceleration drills, capsize recovery — tap +1 per rep.
- Custom activity — name your own, rep-counted or timed.
Learning a maneuver
Tap a drill's name wherever you see it — in the workout preview before you start, in the activity editor, on a training recommendation, or beside a rep count when you review a session — and that maneuver gets its own page.
Summary says what the maneuver is, why you'd choose it over the plain version, what a good rep looks like — measured against the same numbers the coach scores you on — and the mistake most people make. How to is the step-by-step.
Most maneuvers also draw a diagram. A tack or a gybe shows the no-sail zone with the good zig-zag riding its edges, and the two ways it goes wrong drawn against it: pinched up inside the angle, or turned too far past it. The angles are your own boat's, so a scow and a keelboat get different pictures of the same maneuver. A mark rounding shows wide-in, tight-out — the turn carved right around the mark — against the tight-in, wide-out that throws away the exit. A race start shows the line with four approaches: on time and at speed, slow, late, and over early.
Roll tacks and gybes add a Crew Weight strip: four frames seen from astern, showing where your weight goes through the turn. A roll tack sails exactly the same course as a plain tack — the difference is entirely what your body does, which is why it gets a picture of its own.
History is your own reps of that maneuver, gathered from every guided session you've sailed: how many you've drilled and across how many sessions, your average speed loss and recovery each shown beside the number the coach grades them against, your best rep, the fault you make most often, and your recent reps grouped by session. A hold shows its own measure instead — the share of the time you held the angle. Reps you added by hand with +1 count toward the total but never move an average, because nothing measured them. On the free plan, sessions past your allowance can't be totalled, and the tab says so rather than pretending you've never sailed the drill.
Holds, speed runs, hold station, acceleration drills, capsize recovery and penalty turns have no diagram. What goes wrong in those is a pattern over time, not a shape on the water.
Creating and editing workouts
Settings → Training → Workouts (or Manage Workouts… in the hub's workout picker). Eleven presets ship — Tacking Basics is tacks-only and free; the rest include Pro drills. Presets can be tuned and hidden but not renamed or deleted. New Workout: a name and goal, then Add Activity with reps, duration and rest. Every built-in drill has a Technique instruction shown on screen while you drill; edit it to coach in your own words, or clear it to restore the default. The row beneath it — ⟨drill⟩ guide — opens that maneuver's own page: what it is, how to do it, what to look for, and your own past reps. Technique sits at the top of an activity, above the reps and rest — what the maneuver is comes before how many of them you're doing. Drag to reorder; swipe to delete.
Running a guided session
- On the Sail tab, tap Type on the rail. It opens Setup at Session Type: choose Training, then Choose a Workout — or Free Training for a plain recorded session. In Training the rail's last column shows your workout under TRAINING; tap it to come back to the same step, to change the workout or switch to Race or Cruise.
- Set the wind on the rail at the top — a workout with tacks, gybes or VMG holds is coached against it — and, for a Race Start drill, the start line. If one is missing when you tap Start, the app tells you which and takes you to set it. Until you set the wind yourself, the app uses the weather forecast for where you are, and shows it on the rail. A forecast can be 20–30° off near a shore, so if it doesn't match what you see, re-set it before you start — point the phone at the wind or type it in Setup. If the wind reads 000°, the app asks whether that's really the wind before it starts: due north is a real wind, but it's also what a wind that was never set looks like.
- Tap Start. After the countdown the coach screen takes over the whole phone. It shows one big word at a time, and the color of the whole screen tells you what kind of call it is before you've read it:
| Color | Means | For example |
|---|---|---|
| Blue | Do it now | TACK |
| Green | That rep was clean | GOOD |
| Amber | Fix this | HEAD UP, BEAR AWAY |
| Red | Over early at a start | OVER |
| Navy | Everything else | HOLD, SETTLE, REST |
Across the top: the drill and your count (TACKS 4 / 10), and a bar with one segment per rep — green for a clean one, amber for one with something to fix. Race views and metric pages are out of the way until the workout ends: the drill is about sailing the boat.
- After each tack the coach reads SETTLE while it scores the turn, then gives its verdict for a few seconds — GOOD, or one thing to fix: HEAD UP (turned past your angle), BEAR AWAY (pinched out of it), SMOOTHER (lost too much speed in the turn), SPEED UP (slow to get going again). If a rep has several faults, only the biggest is called. Then SPEED UP until you're back to pace (or 20 seconds), because tacking a slow boat scores badly for reasons that aren't your tacking. In a VMG hold it reads HOLD, and BEAR AWAY 4° or HEAD UP 4° when you drift off your angle. Mark roundings add TIGHTER; race starts add OVER and SOONER. Drills are sailor-paced by default; in the editor, Call each rep for me sets a cadence — TACK IN 3… 2… 1… TACK.
- Every call is spoken, and the phone buzzes with it. Choose which device speaks under Settings → Training → Speak Calls From — iPhone, Watch, or Off; the buzz always stays. Between drills the coach says Rest and which drill is next, and at the end Done with how many reps were good. The app advances when you hit the target, with a rest countdown if you set one. +1 if a rep wasn't detected, Next Drill to skip ahead, Skip Rest, and Ready to begin each race-start countdown.
- End when you're done — it asks first. Unfinished activities are fine: the session is saved and marked partial.
Starting a guided session from the watch
Open Race Setup on the watch, tap the type tile, choose Training, and pick a workout or Free Training. The tile is orange until you pick, green after. If the workout scores your start line and the watch has none captured, Start asks first too: Set Line opens Race Setup's Marks step, or start anyway. If the workout is coached against the wind and the watch hasn't captured one — or has it at 000° — tapping Start asks first: Set Wind opens Race Setup, where you point at the wind and tap the Wind tile, or start anyway. Wind is asked before the line. The Action button starts without asking. The watch lists the same workouts as the phone, including yours — build and edit on the iPhone, choose on the watch.
With the phone mounted, start the countdown as usual and the mounted iPhone runs the workout with the same cues and scoring; the phone never holds up a start the watch sends. Without the phone — or with it left in a pocket — the watch runs the very same coaching itself, right down to the maneuver scoring and the verdicts; nothing about a drill needs the phone along.
The watch becomes a coaching screen for the drill either way — the same call the phone shows, one word at a time, full-screen color and all: blue for act, green for good, amber for something to fix, red for a foul, navy for waiting or resting. A strip along the top tracks reps for the current drill. The metric pages step aside until the drill ends, and End stays one swipe away; wrist-down, the color fades to the watch's dim ground with the word still readable. Pick which device speaks under Settings → Coach Calls → Speak Calls From on the watch too — it's the same setting either device changes; with one device in the drill, that device always speaks regardless of the setting. Wrist Taps is separate and always fires the tick/action/good/fix buzz, whether or not the watch is speaking. A watch-alone drill adds a second page beside the coach screen — +1 for a rep that wasn't auto-detected, Next Drill, Skip Rest, and Ready for a race-start drill's countdown; on the Ultra, the Action button itself doubles as +1 during a drill and never ends one. Free Training, a race, or a plain watch recording keeps the usual metric pages instead — only a coached drill, watch-alone or driving a mounted phone, switches to the coach screen.
Reviewing a workout
Open the session in the Logbook. A Workout section at the top shows the goal, whether you completed it, and a row per activity with reps, average speed loss and % on target; tap one for the per-rep notes, or the (i) beside its rep count to read up on the maneuver itself. The map drops a numbered dot wherever a rep was scored — green for a good rep, orange when there's something to work on — matching the numbers in the list; tap a dot to read its cue. The legend under the map toggles each marker type. Sessions that weren't guided workouts get the same maneuver scoring on the Coach card.