Welcome to the fifth issue of Homescreen. Here you can find ideas, thoughts and reasons why I choose which app deserves to stay on my phone and my tablet.
This week, I discuss my year-long test to find the best fitness monitoring app during 2024, and which app I settled for.
As I discuss every now and then on my fitness-focused public diary, I’m very much looking for the best way to know my fitness level at any time, and how to get the best insights into how much to train in the current day and week.
Over time, I tried a copious amount of fitness monitoring, planning and tracking apps and especially during 2024 I tested a few ones that eventually made me simplify my selection down to the core. To make it as smooth a reading as possible, I’ll use three categories: tracking, managing and monitoring.
Tracking for me means apps that I use to track how much I train. I almost never use the standard Workouts app on the Apple Watch, but use specific apps for each specific type of activity, and only use the Workout app when I run or walk.
When I lift weights, in fact, I use GymLife. I used to have a big widget on my iPhone for it, but now I simply click on it with my Apple Watch and very rarely use the iPhone app. GymLife is great when you have a coach that gives you training plans (like me), that I customize to the finer detail including rest time, supersets, expected weights and more. It also automatically imports workouts from the Health app to show an estimate of the muscle fatigue for each specific muscle zone. I plan workouts on iPhone, then always use the Apple Watch to track them.
When I play tennis I use the free version of SwingVision, I think the only app that can accurately track tennis play, including shots, backs and with an estimate of the speed of a shot. It’s interesting because I can track how much I train specifically (meaning how many shots I did last time vs. today, for example) and can potentially improve on those specific data points. I’ve been using SwingVision for a little less than a year now, and I believe this year I’m going to purchase the paid plan with video tracking via the iPhone and more data points available. I use SwingVision primarily on Apple Watch to track, but also occasionally use the iPhone app to engage with detailed stats in the dedicated Fitness Page.
Managing means checking if all activities are in stored in the right places and if they are stored correctly so that no duplication or missing data can alter the health trends.
I use Fitness, Strava and RunGap for this.
I use Fitness like a proxy for the Health app: if an activity has been correctly imported in the Fitness app, it means that it’s also in the Health app, and that other apps can import it either manually or automatically. From iOS 18, I also use Fitness to input my perceived effort on each non-natively-tracked workout so that I can use the Training Load feature to assess my effort trends week over week. When an activity is correctly imported, I then immediately go to RunGap to export those activities into the apps and services that don’t support automatic importing for non-native workouts, like Strava and TrainingPeaks.
I don’t use TrainingPeaks anymore, but I keep on using Strava primarily as a community tool to benchmark myself against the community and my friends.
As I said, I don’t use TrainingPeaks anymore as of this year - I stated my reasons in this entry of my fitness diary, so I use Gentler Streak as a fitness monitoring tool instead.
I tried many other apps like GS, but GS is very simple and effective: some other apps that I tried, for completeness, are: Bevel, Athlytic and Gyroscope. These and GS use three different ways of calculating and showing effort, training load and fatigue. I decided to stop with TrainingPeaks mainly because it was too expensive for what I intended to use it for, and those other apps are also pretty expensive, and don’t provide the extreme simplicity that GS provides.
I want, after all, just to know if I can train safely today or not, and if I’m increasing my fitness level, even if not in a numerical display.
I’m fairly confident that I can settle on this workflow for the rest of 2025 and beyond, but who knows really. And if there will be smoke changes, I will post some updates and notes in this newsletter.
For now, i stay focused on improving my fitness literally every day!
Thanks for reading!
If you have ideas about new apps to try, don’t hesitate to shoot an email to hey@jaack.me
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