The lacing gap is the number you're actually managing. Everything else — the natural waist measurement, the hours logged, which corset you wore — is context for why that gap moved or didn't. Without a daily record, you're guessing at your own progress curve, and the corset community has enough mythology about timelines already.
The Gap Between Anecdote and Data
Waist training progress is nonlinear. You'll have days where the internal waist reads a full inch tighter than yesterday, and weeks where nothing moves. The pattern only becomes legible when you have 60 or 90 entries to examine. Lacing Gap is the anchor field — it tells you how close the busk edges are from meeting, which is the single most reliable indicator of seasoning progress on a new corset and ongoing reduction on a broken-in one.
Natural Waist is the control measurement, taken uncorseted, ideally at the same time of day because morning measurements and evening measurements on the same person can differ by 1.5 inches. If your natural waist is shifting alongside your corseted measurements, you're seeing actual tissue adaptation. If it's static but your external and internal readings are improving, you're getting better at lacing, not reshaping. Both are useful to know, but they're different achievements.
External Waist and Internal Waist together tell you how well a specific corset fits your body. External is what you measure over the corset. Internal is the waist tape result through the corset, which reflects the actual compression being applied. A corset that shows 4 inches of external reduction but only 2.5 internally has a significant gap that usually indicates the torso length is wrong for your anatomy — the waist tape is sliding off your natural waist position.
Seasoning a New Corset
The Notes checkboxes are the field that separates a serious training log from a basic wear tracker. "Seasoning a new corset" is the one to check religiously for the first 40 to 50 hours on any steel-boned piece. Seasoning data tied to a specific Corset entry — because you're identifying it by name or ID in the choice field — lets you track how each piece in your rotation behaves. Some corsets season fast and become the daily workhorse within two weeks. Others fight you for three months. You won't know which you have until you have the hours logged per corset.
"Slept in corset" is relevant because overnight wearing dramatically accelerates seasoning and lacing gap closure, but it also puts different stress on the bones and seams than daytime wearing. If you develop a pressure point or bone migration, knowing which nights preceded it is useful for identifying where the problem started.
The Wearing Window
Start and End timestamps with the calculated Total Time field are what turn this from a diary into a training log. The cumulative hours per corset are what you reference when a piece starts showing stress — if that busk pin is spreading at 120 hours of wear, that's different information than if it's spreading at 800 hours.
Total Time auto-calculates from the datetime fields using the script. The output in hours gives you a running account of each session without manual arithmetic.
Bloated, Cramping, and Allergies in the Notes checkboxes are the discomfort indicators. Logged consistently, they show patterns — certain corsets correlate with cramping, certain wearing positions correlate with rib pressure. The Comments field is where you write what the checkboxes can't capture: the specific location of the discomfort, the tightness at which it started, whether the hip spring is wrong for your structure. That qualitative note next to the quantitative lacing gap reading is what turns data into diagnostics.