If the counter is sitting still while you are working, the fastest thing you can do is stop guessing. The app keeps the detector's own measurements for the set you just did, and it will show you which check refused a rep and why.
Start here: ask the app what it saw
Open Settings and tap Reps not counting?. You get the detector's own lines: the joint angles it measured, the timings, and the reason each rep was accepted or refused. The report is not sent unless you tap send.
Most of the time reading those lines is the whole fix, because the reason is usually framing, and framing is different for each movement.
What has to be in shot
- Push-ups and the plank. Lay the phone on the floor, propped at a slight angle, so it can see your head, shoulders and arms.
- Squats. Your legs have to be in frame. A squat is judged on the angle at your knee, so a shot that only catches your upper body has nothing to measure.
- Sit-ups. Stand the phone up at your side, roughly level with your waist, so it sees you side-on.
Light the room reasonably, and start with one slow, full rep so you can watch the counter respond before you commit to a set. There is nothing to calibrate: the depth the app looks for is fixed, not learned from you.
Push-ups: what stops one counting
Depth, and only on the way up. A rep is credited as you push back up, not as you go down, so a negative you lower into and never press out of is never a rep. Shallow reps that do not reach depth are ignored.
Too upright to read as a plank. Wall push-ups and high inclines do not register, because the app cannot tell them from standing. Where a moderate incline stops working, we genuinely cannot tell you: that number comes out of threshold arithmetic nobody has checked against a real device, and we would rather say so than invent a figure.
Hand and foot placement are irrelevant. Diamond, wide and decline all register as ordinary push-ups. If a variation is not counting, the cause is depth or posture, not where your hands are.
Speed never blocks a push-up. Tempo can only ever earn you a bonus. A rushed rep is still a rep.
Knee mode trades posture for depth, and this surprises people. Switching to knee push-ups makes the posture check looser, so a more upright body still reads as a push-up. It also makes the range of motion requirement stricter, not easier. If you switched to knee mode because reps were not registering and things got worse, that is why.
Squats are judged by different rules
Squats run through a different detector, so do not carry your push-up instincts across. Two things that can never reject a push-up will reject a squat.
- Going too fast. Reps closer together than about six tenths of a second are not counted. For push-ups this would be a bonus question; here it is a hard gate.
- Moving your feet. If your ankles travel far during a rep, it reads as a step rather than a squat. That is deliberate: it stops "prop the phone, walk back to your spot" turning into a free rep.
Three more things decide a squat. Depth is the angle at your knee, and it has to reach roughly parallel or deeper; a quarter squat does not count. The rep completes on the way up, as your knee straightens again. And your hips have to actually drop, on top of the knee angle, which is what stops a knee bend on one leg registering as a squat.
If your legs never come into view during a rep, the app falls back to how far your hips travelled instead of the knee angle. It is a backstop, not the main path, so getting your legs in frame is still the fix.
One honest gap: whether jump squats, goblet squats or box squats register is not something we have measured. The detector reads knee angle, so anything that reaches depth plausibly counts, but that is inference rather than a tested answer.
Sit-ups
Sit-ups are measured as how far your torso has rotated up off the floor, against a floor line the app learns for you at the start of each set. That is why a wedge, a mattress or a sloped floor does not throw it off.
Two gates catch most missed sit-ups. Reps closer together than about six tenths of a second are not counted. And your shoulders have to travel while your hips stay roughly where they started, which is what separates folding up from sliding your whole body along the floor.
The plank is a clock, not a counter
Nothing is being counted during a plank, so "it is not counting" means something different here. The clock starts after a short run of good posture readings and breaks after a longer run of bad ones, which makes a hold harder to break than it is to start.
Seconds you have already earned are never taken back. Breaking the hold pauses the count and keeps everything banked, which is why there is no pause button: breaking the hold is the pause. Credit truncates to whole seconds, so a second you did not finish holding is not credited.
If the camera loses your body completely for a couple of seconds, the hold ends. And the plank screen uses the full posture rules even if you normally play in knee mode, so a knee-mode habit does not buy you a looser plank.
If it is still wrong, send the report
The report from Settings, Reps not counting? carries the detector's measurements, your app version, your push-up mode and which exercise you were doing, attached to your account. It carries no video, no imagery, and nothing describing a body. There is more in the privacy policy.
Those reports are read. Several of the gates described on this page exist because a player sent one: the hip-drop requirement for squats was added after somebody demonstrated that a heel-to-backside curl on one leg was counting.
One thing that is not a symptom
If the app shows "We counted N. Is that right?" at the end of a set, it is not telling you something went wrong. That question appears on a schedule, after a number of camera sessions and at most once a day on a device, and the decision takes no account of how the set went. It asks whatever the count. Tapping No opens a stepper so you can say what you actually did.
