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Zwift comes with multiple programs; for example, there is Return to Running, which lasts for 8 weeks and steadily increases in difficulty as you improve. Each plan includes stages to add variety and increase difficulty over time. Especially important for beginners, but useful at every level. Video demonstrations, form cues, and clear descriptions of each movement reduce injury risk and improve training quality. Apps that assume you already know what a Romanian deadlift is are excluding a huge audience. We’ll email you 1-3 times per week—and never share your information.

SCALE YOUR COACHING BUSINESS

The workout feed shows recent workouts from people you follow. It’s like Instagram, but instead of food photos, you see training sessions. The app’s philosophy centers on speed and flexibility. Show up at the gym, pull up the exercise you’re about to do, see what you did last time, and aim to beat it. As a baseline, aim for ~0.75g per kg of bodyweight per day (e.g., ~50g for 65kg). If you’re training hard/heavy, 1.4–2.0g/kg can be appropriate.

Setgraph: Best Overall for Strength Training

Track the number of total workouts you do, how many times per week you train, and the number of consecutive weeks you stay active. Yes, you can log any workout from the library anytime. Multiple running and cycling plans are available with a paid subscription. Yes, log any gym, bodyweight, cardio, or sports activity. Most athletes use separate apps for running and lifting.

Female First, Cycle Synced Training

Once you have a plan, logging workouts is straightforward. The app shows you what exercise is next, what you did last time (if applicable), and lets you log your sets quickly. There’s no complex navigation or hidden features to discover. Progressive overload (gradually increasing the demands on your muscles), is the foundation of strength training. The best app to log workout for this purpose needs to make tracking and beating previous performances effortless.

Best fitness app for running beginners

That blend of fitness and nutrition support turns WeGLOW into a full fitness and wellness toolkit, not just a set of videos. For the best workout app overall, our testers chose BetterMe due to its diversity of training regimens and simple, user-friendly interface. I madmuscles review like using a simple training journal to track workouts and progress.

Hevy – Best Free Workout Tracker for Experienced Lifters

Apple Fitness sets the same daily goal for you, regardless of how well you slept or how hard you worked out the day before. It’ll prompt you to adjust this set daily goal once per week, but it’s ultimately a fitness app—not a recovery app. Strong maintains your data even if you downgrade to free, but you lose access to some features. Other apps may restrict access to historical data if you cancel premium.

Are paid strength apps worth the money?

Apps with large pre-built libraries (JEFIT, Hevy) sometimes make adding custom exercises more cumbersome because they assume you’ll use their database. Don’t choose a workout app based on integrations unless you have a specific need. Choose based on how well it tracks workouts, then consider integrations as a bonus if they exist. Setgraph, Strong, and Hevy all integrate with Apple Health. This means your strength training workouts contribute to your daily activity goals. The best app to log workout for you depends on which features align with your training style and goals.

Boostcamp deserves mention for beginners who want to follow established programs. The app includes popular beginner routines like Starting Strength, StrongLifts 5×5, and GZCLP. You select a program, and the app tells you exactly what to do each session.

This is another reason to choose apps with data export—you can backup your information regardless of subscription status. With a well-designed app like Setgraph or Strong, logging a complete workout takes 2-5 minutes total across all sets. If it takes longer, the app’s interface is too complicated. Speed matters because time spent on your phone is time not spent training. Setgraph excels at custom exercises—you can name them whatever makes sense to you and start logging immediately.

Exercise Instructions

• Setgraph, Strong, and Hevy all integrate with Apple Health.
• Features don’t matter if the app sits unused on your phone.
• Some training apps feel like a random list of workouts with no progression, others lock you into rigid flows, repeat the same classes or assume you have a huge home gym and hours to spare.
• Heart rate data during strength training isn’t particularly useful.
• Practice is for sports coaches to design and share practice scripts with coaches and players.
• Learn how to combine both for strength, hypertrophy, and longevity.

Workout trackers and fitness apps are a dime a dozen. Testing them to find what works best for you can be daunting. We hope our seven recommendations narrow the list and that at least one meets your needs. However, if you want a social-driven experience with an active feed, options to follow and interact with others, compete, and compare, Hevy is a fantastic gym option. Strava and Zwift are great options for running and cycling with a community aspect.

You can share workouts, follow other users’ programmes, and participate in challenges. If social accountability helps you stay consistent, JEFIT provides that environment. StrongLifts 5×5 is the simplest effective strength programme available. Three workouts per week, five compound lifts, five sets of five reps, adding 2.5kg each session. It’s linear progression in its purest form, and it works remarkably well for beginners who have never touched a barbell.

StrongLifts тренировки в зале

If your squat jumped 10kg, it recalculates your working weights across related movements. This is the single most important principle in strength training. If your app isn’t systematically increasing load, volume, or intensity over time, it’s not really training you. The best apps track your performance and adjust accordingly, whether that’s adding weight to the bar, prescribing extra sets, or introducing harder variations. There are some pre-programmed routines, or you can create routines with some basic knowledge, but it doesn’t look like it is coaching you. I think that’s the main distinction with Peak Strength, which is asks you what is your goal, asks you what equipment you have or don’t have, and then creates a specific workout plan based on that.

Announcing Hevy Trainer

The app supports freestyling your workout too, which is a nice touch; I was able to start a blank workout and add exercise types and reps/sets as I went. Hevy also worked nicely with my Apple Watch, which meant I didn’t have to hold—or keep checking—my phone the whole time. Bite-sized education on programming, planning, and performance made for real coaching schedules. Plug-and-play training templates built by high-level coaches designed to save you time and keep your programs dialed in. Setgraph, Strong, Hevy, FitNotes, and JEFIT all work fully offline.

The key is programming them together intelligently so they complement rather than compete. An app like Edge handles this automatically; with other apps, you’ll need to manage the balance yourself. This is where apps like Edge have a genuine structural advantage. Because Edge programmes strength alongside running and conditioning, it manages the total training load across your week. Your Monday squat session accounts for your Wednesday run.