Import your training history from a notebook into NoteFit

1.The history is what holds you, not the app

Nobody stays with a paper notebook because they love paper. They stay because three years of loads are inside it, and moving that by hand is an afternoon per year, if patience holds. The usual outcome is starting from zero in the new app and leaving the history behind, which is the worst of the two options: you lose the comparison that gives training its meaning and you still carry the notebook in your bag.

The mechanical part — reading a page, working out that "BP 4x8 60" is bench press, four sets of eight at sixty kilos, and writing that into a week with the right date — is transcription. It is exactly what an assistant with access to your account is good at, and it calls for no coaching judgement at all.

2.Two ways in: the photo or the file

Claude and ChatGPT both read images. Photograph the notebook page, drop it into the conversation and ask for it to be put into NoteFit. You do not need to type it out first — typing it out is the job you are handing over.

If it is already a spreadsheet it is more direct still: export to CSV or paste the block of cells into the chat. Almost any sheet exports CSV, and the format matters more than the tidiness — oddly named columns and different orders are not a problem.

For photos, three things help more than any scanning app: light that is not casting a shadow into the fold, the whole page inside the frame, and one page at a time. A photo of two pages at once reads worse than two photos.

3.What happens next

The assistant reads the page, maps what is on it to the plan’s fields, and creates the block with its weeks and sessions inside — in a single call, with dates in the past. The loads come in attached to each exercise, not as a second step.

The part that tends to surprise people is that your shorthand survives. The reps field takes what a coach would write by hand: "8-10", "AMRAP", "30''", "8-10 · RIR 2", in any language. You do not have to normalise the notebook into the app’s format — the app takes the notebook’s format. Per-side loads and barbells have their own places too, so a "20+40" on the page is not lost.

And either the whole block goes in or none of it does. If one week comes back malformed, the creation fails entirely rather than leaving you half a year written and half not, which would be worse than never starting.

4.What stays the same, and what does not

This is worth saying plainly: NoteFit stores the plan as written, and has no separate notion of a "completed" session. What you import is your notebook transcribed and dated — what was written on that day — not a separate execution log. If the page said 4x8 at 60 and you managed 4x7, what lands is what you write down, exactly as in the notebook.

In exchange, the history becomes usable. One exercise’s progression over time, training volume week by week, one block compared with the next — all of it now reads the years you imported and not only what you do from today. One practical note: the history views look at the last few months by default, so seeing 2023 means asking for that period explicitly.

5.Where to start — and it is not 2019

Import the most recent block first, one only. Then open it in NoteFit and compare it against the page: that is where you find out whether your handwritten "3" is being read as an "8", whether the units are right, whether the exercise you abbreviate was understood. Fix what is wrong, and only then carry on backwards.

This is not excessive caution — it is the difference between correcting five mistakes in one block and finding the same five repeated across thirty. Once the first block checks out, the rest goes quickly, because the assistant has seen how your notebook is written and starts getting it right.

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