2026-06-10

Why one Arc at a time

I had a marathon in October and a padel tournament in August. I was using five apps — Strava for logging, Google Calendar for scheduling, Notes for how sessions felt, MyFitnessPal for sporadic nutrition, a Garmin app for heart rate. None of them talked to each other. None of them understood I was training for two things at once.

So I built Orva around one idea: the Arc.

What an Arc is

An Arc is a commitment block — a bounded period of training toward goals you declared at the start. A marathon Arc. A marathon + padel Arc. A body-composition sprint. You describe the goal in plain language, the AI drafts a session-by-session plan, you refine it, you accept it.

Then the rules kick in:

• One active Arc at any time. Want to start another commitment? End this one explicitly.
• The goal set is locked. You can reschedule sessions, adjust intensity, extend the end date — but you can't add a new goal mid-Arc. Want to do Hyrox too? That's the next Arc.
• Arcs end. When the date comes, the Arc becomes history and you start the next one — a deliberate moment, not a slow drift.

Why constraints, not features

Every training app I tried wanted to track more: more metrics, more integrations, more dashboards. But my actual failure mode was never "not enough data." It was scope creep — chasing five goals at once and burning out on all of them.

Orva makes scope creep impossible. That's the product. The AI briefings, the meal tracking, the assistant that remembers every session — those are glue. The discipline is the feature.

If that sounds like the constraint you've been missing, try it. The free tier is a full 6-week Arc — enough for a 5K block, a tournament prep, a real commitment.