Everything, explained.

01Getting started

The whole loop is four steps, and every one of them starts with an actual workout.

There is no way to buy coins with money and no way to get cards without logging workouts. The gym is the only faucet.

02Tracking workouts

A workout log is one exercise: sets × reps × weight, on a date. Log each exercise separately.

Weights are stored in pounds and heights in inches no matter what units you picked — the app converts for display only, so switching between lbs and kg never changes your numbers or your coin payouts.

What counts as a "day"

Several award types count distinct calendar days with at least one logged workout, not the number of logs. Six exercises on Monday is one day. Your highest streak is the longest unbroken run of those days.

Bodyweight exercises

Push-ups, pull-ups and dips have no plate weight, so the app substitutes your saved bodyweight scaled by 0.35 — an estimate of what actually lands on the working muscles. A push-up doesn't load your chest the way a bench press of the same number does. Set your bodyweight in the Profile tab or bodyweight lifts will be valued off a 150 lb default.

03Finding exercises

The exercise search is deliberately loose. Type what you'd say out loud.

Tokens can arrive in any order, plurals work, and common gym slang is recognised: pecs, lats, delts, bis, tris, quads, db, bb, ohp, rdl.

04Coins

Coins are the only currency. There are exactly three ways to get them.

Logging workouts

Each log is scored on volume against the exercise's own difficulty rating, then adjusted by a bonus tier based on total reps:

Weighted lifts carry a 1.5× multiplier so iron pays competitively against calisthenics. Harder exercises have a lower divider, so they pay more for the same volume.

The daily free pack

The first workout you log on any given calendar day earns a free Common pack. One per day, claimed automatically. Miss a day and it's simply gone — there's no backlog.

Burning duplicates

Every duplicate converts straight back to coins. See Collection & burning for the full price table.

Awards

Fifty-plus one-time milestone payouts, from 200 coins up to 30,000. See Awards.

05Packs & odds

Every pack contains 8 cards. Paying more doesn't just raise your ceiling — it raises your floor, by replacing low slots with guaranteed high ones.

Pack contents are drawn on the server, slot by slot, at the moment you open. Holo is rolled per slot — which is why a pack stuffed with high tiers pulls holo far more often. The "at least one holo" figures above are the per-pack chances, which is what actually matters to you.

06The GAINZ card set

884 collectible cards, built from 13 gym animals. A card's identity is character × base trait × tier.

The 13 characters

Each one is a gym archetype, and each carries its own printed stat line — the rep range, set count and rest time that archetype lives by. They run from the guy who never trains to the one who never stops.

Base traits — the six looks

Every character is printed in six variants. This axis multiplies through every tier except Sketch.

The five tiers

Tier sets the border colour, the rarity, and what a duplicate burns for. Higher tiers also layer on their own trait axis — an Enhanced card is Cyber, Royal, Ancient or Space; a Corrupted one is Glitched or Haunted.

How the set adds up

637 artworks back 884 collectibles, because a holo is the same artwork with a foil treatment — a separate card to collect, not a separate picture. Sketch collapses the base-trait axis: one card per character, 13 in total.

Card numbers

Every card has a fixed dex number from 1 to 637, assigned tier by tier, then character, then base trait, then tier trait. Base runs 1–78, Enhanced 79–390, Corrupted 391–546, Mutated 547–624, Sketch 625–637. A card's number never moves.

07Holo printings

Holo is the foil printing: same artwork, shimmering treatment, and a separate card in your collection.

Only Corrupted, Mutated and Sketch print holo — 247 of the 884. Base and Enhanced never do. Owning the normal print of a card doesn't give you its holo, and vice versa; they're two collectibles that happen to share a picture.

How often you pull one is a property of the pack, not the card. The server rolls holo on each slot it fills, so a pack full of high-tier slots pulls holo far more often:

Gold packs carry an extra 3% roll for a second holo; Purple carries ~25%.

08Collection & burning

The Collection tab holds all 884 slots — owned and unowned. Sort by character, tier or trait, and filter to holos or to duplicates ready to burn.

Burning duplicates

Extra copies convert back to coins. You always keep one copy — the server caps every burn at (copies − 1), so you can't destroy a card out of your collection by accident. Burn one at a time, or clear every duplicate you own in a single action.

Base and Enhanced have no holo printing, so their holo column never applies.

09Awards

One-time coin payouts for milestones, in Collection → Awards. You claim them manually — nothing expires, so an unclaimed award waits indefinitely.

Workouts

Packs

Collection

Battle

Battle awards live in the same place, on wins, ELO reached, and battles fought.

10Battle arena

Head-to-head lifting against another lifter, refereed by AI. Battle tab.

What you win

Rating moves on the standard ELO formula with K=32, floored at 100. Beating someone rated well above you moves you a lot; beating someone below you barely moves you at all.

11Your Gainz Card

Your own card: a photo, your lifts, and the collection you've built. Shareable at gainz.cards/@yourname.

Build it under Profile → Your Gainz Card. Add your squat, bench and deadlift for the Lifter card; add pull-up 1RM, muscle-ups, chin-ups and dips and you also get a Street card for calisthenics.

Top % ranks

Each lift is scored against the wider lifting population to estimate what percentile you're in. Double-tap your card on the web to flip it and see the ranks. These are estimates, not measurements of the Gainz userbase.

Going public

Your profile is private by default. Nothing is reachable at gainz.cards/@yourname until you turn on the public toggle yourself — and an unknown username and a private one return the identical "doesn't exist or keeps their gains private" page, so nobody can tell which is which. Turn it back off and the page goes dark immediately.

A public profile shows your username, join month, lifts, card photo, workout and pack counts, and your card collection. It never shows your email, your coin balance, or your individual workout logs.

12The card migration

Gainz used to hand out cards of exercises. The GAINZ animal set replaced them completely — and old collections could not carry over.

The reason is mechanical: card ids were exercise ids, and the same number now means an entirely different card. There was no honest way to map an old collection onto the new set, so every legacy collection was archived, cleared, and paid back in packs.

Compensation scaled with both the size and the quality of what you had — total cards, how many were high rarity, and how many awards you'd claimed. Bigger collections earned more packs; rarer ones earned better packs.

Your old collection still exists in cold storage for support queries. If your compensation looks wrong, get in touch.

13FAQ