Nothing below is a secret, and none of it is ours. It is the oldest, dullest, best-evidenced way for a beginner to get stronger, and the only thing First Rep adds is that it carries the arithmetic and the record so the method survives a week when your life does not cooperate.
i. Open it and there is one session
Not a library, a planner, or a split to choose. One session: three lifts, the sets, and the order to do them in. Monday and Friday are squat, bench press and barbell row; Wednesday is squat, overhead press and deadlift. Five lifts in the whole program, and no accessory menu to build.
You can read the entire week in the car park before you go in, which is deliberate. A program you cannot remember at the door is a program that loses to a bad Wednesday.
ii. The weight is already decided
Beside each lift is the number to load, worked out from what you lifted last time. Small, boring increases: a little on the presses and the row, a little more on the squat and the deadlift, and only after a session you actually completed. Nobody adds weight for showing up and missing.
Under the number is a plain sentence about what five reps at that weight should feel like — heavy but moving, the last rep slow, the bar never stopping. RPE is a scale you earn after a year of feeling these things. A description is one you can use this morning.
iii. Log the set as you rack it
Tag the lift, confirm the weight, mark the reps you got. It takes about as long as re-racking the bar, which is the only speed a gym log can survive at.
If you got the reps, the next session's number is already higher when you next open it. If you did not, the app records that too, without comment.
iv. Miss twice and the weight comes down
Miss reps on the same lift in two consecutive sessions and First Rep takes a tenth off that lift and puts you back on it. There is no confirmation screen, no note about consistency, and no change in tone. Then you climb back up, usually past where you stalled.
This is the step the programs describe in a footnote and beginners discover as a crisis. It is the ordinary operation of the method, and treating it as ordinary is most of what keeps people training.
Why it was built this way
Most lifting software is written for people who already lift. It assumes you know what RPE 8 feels like, that you want fourteen accessories programmed, and that you will follow a twelve-week block to the end. In the first six months none of those assumptions holds, and every one of them is a place to quit.
So the design brief was narrow: remove every decision that is not "did you come today", and make the day after a bad session cost nothing. Everything the app does not have — the food log, the feed, the coach, the ring — is absent for that reason and not because it has not been built yet.
What it does not do
It does not coach your technique. It cannot see the bar, so it has no way to tell you a lift is safe and will not claim to. Get a session with a coach if that is available to you, and if it is not, learn the lifts properly from the established teaching sources before you load anything heavy.
It also has no opinion about what you eat, what you weigh, or what you look like. Your training log stays on the device, the register is used once, and nothing you lift is shown to anybody.