Guide
Reading push, pull and upper/lower balance
"Balance" is the claim a training dashboard makes most confidently and supports least. The grouping behind the chart decides the answer before you read it, so it is worth knowing how the sets were bucketed before deciding your back is behind.
Six buckets, and what lands in each
Hevy Analyzer maps the muscle each exercise names into six groups:
- Chest — pectorals, upper and lower chest
- Back — lats, traps, rhomboids, upper and lower back, neck
- Shoulders — front, side and rear delts
- Arms — biceps, triceps, forearms
- Legs — quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, adductors, abductors
- Core — abs, obliques
A set counts once for every group the exercise trains, direct or indirect. A barbell row adds to back and to arms. This is deliberate — it is closer to what the tissue experiences — and it means the six numbers sum to more than your session set count. They are not shares of a pie.
Why push/pull is not one of the six
Biceps and triceps both land in Arms, so a strict push-versus-pull ratio cannot be read off the six buckets: the arm column contains both sides of it. The body map is where that granularity lives — it counts the individual muscles as Hevy names them, rather than the six-way grouping.
Read at bucket level, the useful pairing is chest + shoulders against back, and upper against legs. Both are rough. Both are still enough to catch the two imbalances that actually show up in real logs.
What an imbalance means
Less than people claim. The common assertions — that a push-heavy split rounds your shoulders, or that a ratio prevents injury — run well ahead of the evidence. What the chart genuinely tells you is simpler and more useful: where your sets went, which is usually not where you think they went.
The patterns worth acting on:
- A bucket under ~5% of your sets over 90 days. Usually core or legs, usually because those sessions are the ones that get skipped.
- Back trailing chest by a wide margin. Bench work is easy to keep doing; rows are easy to shorten.
- A muscle that only exists at the end of a session. Rear delts, hamstrings and calves live there — and they are the first thing cut when a session runs long.
Fixing one
Add sets to the low bucket before you take any away from the high one — removing work you are doing well is a strange price for symmetry on a chart. Give it four to six weeks, then look again: the bar chart moves slowly by design, because a single week of catch-up should not read as a corrected imbalance.
If the low bucket is low because sessions are being missed rather than programmed out, that is a consistency problem wearing a balance problem's clothes.