The default is the decision

Most apps that added a social feed did it to an existing pile of private data, and quietly changed what that data was for. We decided the other way round: a session is private when it is written, it stays private, and nothing in the app changes that except you choosing to share it.

What sharing actually means

A shared session is readable by anybody signed in, not only your followers. That is a deliberate simplification of an earlier design where following someone unlocked their training, which turned out to be a promise the app could not keep clearly: people could not tell which of their sessions were visible to whom, and neither could we without opening the database.

So there are two states, not a ladder. Private, which nobody else can open. Public, which anyone can. The one you are in is on the session, not buried in a settings screen.

Links do not widen it

A shared workout has a web link, and the page behind it shows the title, the date and the handle, nothing else. Not the exercises, not the sets, not the volume, not the photos. A private session's link shows nothing at all, and does not confirm that the session exists.

Private does not mean device-only

Progress photos are private to the account and never appear in the social feed by default. They are also synchronized through private cloud storage so they can return on another device. That is different from publishing: access stays restricted to the signed-in account unless the user separately chooses to share other media.