Strong helps you track your gym progress in a meaningful way.
We may earn a commission from links on this page.
Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
When I started taking weightlifting more seriously about a year ago, it quickly became apparent to me that I needed to keep track of how much I was lifting. I started jotting down my reps, sets, and weights in my iPhone’s native Notes app, then moving all that into a spreadsheet when I got home. The spreadsheet was difficult to access on my phone itself, which made all that data useless when I was back in the gym and trying to remember what weight I’d done on a certain exercise last time, but I thought it was the best I could do.
I was wrong. The best I could do was an app called Strong, on iOS and Android, which is easy to use and, most importantly, actually useful for tracking and maximizing gym progress.
Strong’s features
Strong has one main function and it performs it well: It keeps track of your lifts. You start by starting a new workout in the app. As you’re moving around the gym and taking on different exercises, you just search for the name of the exercise and add it to that day’s workout. You can then enter in how much weight you’re lifting, how many reps you’re doing, and how many sets. You can fill out additional details, like if you train to failure or complete a drop set.
That’s basically it; there’s nothing overly involved going on here. You don’t get a bunch of explainers on how to complete any movements, there are no fancy graphics, and the whole thing is pretty bare-bones. That’s why I love it. All I need or want is to be able to see exactly how much I lifted and what I did.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson/Strong
When you repeat an exercise you’ve done before, the app tells you the last weight you did it with. It’s auto-populated in there, so you can just start with that weight if you want or make adjustments. You can also revisit old workouts in the calendar portion of the app to review what you did previously more in-depth. Finally, you can save workout templates once you’ve built them out. If, say, you like to do the same exact routine every single leg day, you can just save a template and have all those exercises available in order the next time you use the app.
You can pay $29.99 per year to unlock unlimited custom routines, but you can use the free version if all you want is to mark down a few details about your workouts. Personally, I’m happy to hand over the $30 once a year because I find the app extremely valuable and worth keeping in my rotation as I work on my fitness goals.
Its simplicity is its strength
What I enjoy about Strong is that for all those useful features, it really stays out of your way when you’re using it. Since there are no bells and whistles, there’s nothing to distract you while you work out. You just enter in your values and you’re done. There is an optional feature that counts down two minutes for cool-downs between sets, but I toggled that off.
What do you think so far?
Strong also syncs up with your phone’s health-tracking software. I actually disabled its connection with my Apple Watch because I prefer to track my lifts using Peloton’s manual tracker of the native Workouts app. Strong was inadvertently causing me to double-enter workouts in the Workouts app, but disabling it was easy in settings.
The only issue I run into when I use it is that sometimes I can’t find an exercise I want to track. For instance, I always do tricep pushdowns (or pulldowns, depending who you ask) using the cable machine, but those aren’t included in the pre-loaded list of available exercises on here. You can add exercises yourself, but I haven’t bothered so far; instead, for convenience, I’ve started marking all my pushdowns as face pulls, since those are in the list of available exercises. The trick is just that I have to remember when I’m reviewing my workouts that “face pulls” are actually tricep pushdowns. I don’t actually incorporate face pulls into my workouts, but if I ever want to, I’m going to run into some problems. (Ok, I should probably just add pushdowns to my list manually.)
I like seeing my progress, and Strong makes it easy to look back and see how far I’ve come, which is motivating. There’s also a section of the app where you can track the measurements of all the different parts of your body. I don’t use that one myself, but I can see how it would be motivating, too. You can look at any exercise, see the history of when you did it, see your personal records at a glance, and get a better understanding of where you’re doing well and where you need to work a little more.
Overall, I recommend this more than other strength training apps, especially if all you’re looking for is a simple way to keep track of the numbers. I don’t need gifs of people performing an exercise, a fancy interface, or bright colors. What Strong provides is precisely enough, and the price is right, too.