Is Your Workout App Better Than a Google Sheet?

Three flavors of broken

There’s roughly three categories of lifting apps.

The cheap trackers. Their uselessness is a question of when, not if. They do zero effort in guiding me. What do I actually get? A cramped table with input fields? A GIF of the exercise execution that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and can’t show the interesting parts (bracing, feeling a muscle, pulling with your elbows). A line that plots my daily 1-Rep Max and the luxury of not having to manually create a workout from scratch every time I’m in the gym?

OK and… that’s it? That’s what I get for 40 bucks a year? You know what else allows me to input numbers, save them and render a GIF? A Google Sheet. Where’s the actual product? This is 2008 amateur hour, student-built-this-for-class vibes.

The program generators. They pretend to crunch some crazy math while providing a generic program that they never revisit on a deeper level than “add 2.5kg” or “add a rep”. No sign of mid-workout adjustments. Learning preferences means adding two thumbs icons to each exercise that I can tap.

Why is my programmed Push Day starting with Bench and has OHP second? Why not the other way around? Why 8 reps instead of 5? Who knows. Certainly not the folks who built it. Or the other extreme, where you pay 300 a year to structure and sequence your mesocycles with the gym equivalent of a plane cockpit before you even exhausted your linear progression gains.

The lifestyle apps. Commitment theater apps living entirely off vibes and treating you like an idiot. Three screens in the onboarding just to hype you up.

I AM COMMITTED - “ARE YOU REALLY COMMITTED??” - YES I WILL DO THIS!!!! - “ONE MORE TIME! ARE. YOU. COMMITTED? HOLD THIS BUTTON FOR 5 SECONDS TO SHOW YOUR COMMITMENT!!!”

Like what the actual fuck.

All three are broken differently. None of them respect the person using them.

The onboarding that changes nothing

They know nothing about me except some generic questions that are mostly performative - as if a chubby guy is gonna do different exercises than a thin guy. As if a woman is gonna get different exercises than a man. As if someone trying to lose weight will get different exercises than someone trying to get more muscular. Either you build muscle and get stronger, or you don’t. If I want to lose weight, then there’s little my gym program can do about that. If they would at least add steady state cardio directly or suggest portion sizes. They pretend like the performative questions they ask actually make a difference to the program when they don’t. Either I want a toned butt or I don’t. Either I want a strong upper body or I don’t.

It does not matter what sex I was born with, nor does it matter if I’m already lean or not. They can’t determine the exercises based on my sex or body fat percentage. They can’t determine my gym experience based on my muscle mass. Hell, they can’t even determine my starting weight based off my muscle mass. Just because I got a huge chest doesn’t mean I can coordinate my two arms to push a 2-plate barbell up in a perfect straight line. They trade the hard, but useful part (observing, suggesting, inquiring, adapting) for the easy, performative approach (stretched-out onboarding) and call it “smart”.

One interface for everyone is an interface for no one

The onboardings obsess about whether you want to “be strong like those people lifting barrels for sports” or “be jacked like that celebrity” while disregarding the way more important question:

Do you know what to do when you’re in the gym? Do you know what to do when things don’t go as planned? Do you know what to do when you can’t seem to progress anymore?

The desired experience shifts entirely based on these answers. Why do I have to use three different apps at three different stages of my lifting journey, with none of them being actually great for any of these stages?

The app doesn’t notice

They don’t acknowledge the reality of a need for continuous calibration from the starting point. Just because I needed a half-screen exercise GIF the first three times doesn’t mean I need one now. Just because I started with linear progression doesn’t mean I’ll be able to keep it up forever. Just because I benched 100 before my injury two months ago doesn’t mean I can pick right back up at the same weight. Just because I hated squats as a beginner doesn’t mean I didn’t start appreciating them more as I developed.

And that’s really the key part missing: I develop as a lifter, but the app doesn’t adapt. Why do I have to proactively swap an exercise? The data is all there! Why do I have to tell them proactively that I’m coming back from a break? The data is all there. Instead, the app has plotted its course the moment I installed it. Here’s my prescription, I don’t know you, but if you don’t do exactly what I tell you, you failed and your set is marked in red to make sure you know you didn’t hit the targets I came up with.

Like it’s a high school exam each time I go to the gym that I either fail or pass.