Gymaholic App Review: The Best Gym App for Workout Tracking

I’ve been using Gymaholic religiously for exactly a year now and have tracked every workout with it. Below is my review.

I’ve been paying for the premium version for about a year now and so the below review doesn’t distinguish between what’s in the free vs. the paid to keep it simple.

First, Let’s Talk Design

Design is just such a big thing to me. I have to love using and being in the app. At first, I hated Gymaholic’s design — I’ll admit it. I even think I deleted it because it was so complex. I tried to get used to it and I just gave up. But when I tried other apps, it made me realize just how good Gymaholic actually is.

The fact is, tracking your workouts to a point of actually being useful is very number based in nature. The only way to get around it is to dumb it down. What I now appreciate about Gymaholic is they didn’t dumb it down, but they’ve worked to keep their interfaces as clean as possible. For example, the Apple Watch app looks great, but is incredibly useful. They’ve cleverly hid advanced features and controls behind force touches (or long presses) that make the Apple Watch app itself seemingly complete app on its own— so much so I don’t even open the iPhone app while working out.

Once I got the hang of it, I began to love it. It had a steep learning curve, but as I got used to it, I really appreciated just how much it can do. It’s very flexible to my needs and gives me more data than I ever need (or want).

Oh, and two words: Dark Mode. Yes, one of my favorite things about it. And it has a true dark mode. Straight black. Looks great on my iPhone X with the OLED screen. (Side note: I think it was actually originally made with a black background and they added white later)

The last thing I’ll say about the design is something I thought was a total gimmick, but turned out to be pretty useful. It uses augment reality (AR) really well. For every built in exercise in Gymaholic, you can see a video of a person doing it. You can spin them around and see the model perform it from different angles. But with AR, you can actually bring the model out of the app and into the space around you. I thought this was a gimmick, but for complex exercises (like a barbell row or deadlift), seeing the model in the gym, performing the exercise, with the ability to zoom and twist, actually helped me learn and improve my form to prevent injuries.

AR helps teach proper form and give cues for what muscles to use.

Overall I give Gymaholic’s design a 9/10. Pretty much everything is great, but the reports + charts leave a little to be desired.

How it Works

The app has a ton of Exercises you can group together as a Workout. Each exercise has a 3D model to show you how it’s done and what primary and secondary muscles the exercise works. There is also a description to help explain it and help provide the right cues to make sure you do it right. They have all kinds of exercises from dumbbell, barbell, body-weight, machine, kettlebell, and even cardio exercises. If they don’t have an exercise you like, you can add a custom one and enter the data yourself.

You can make as many workouts as you want. A Workout is essentially just one session. You can group together multiple Workouts if you’re following a program.

ONE: List of Workouts. TWO: Detailed Workout View. THREE: Detailed Exercise View.

After you complete a workout, it sends all the data to the Health app. The Gymaholic home screen will also show you what muscles need resting and which are at 100% so it’s easy to pick out your next workout. I’ll get to more about reports further down, but you can also see reports of how much you’re working out the different parts of your body so you can see if something isn’t even.

Working out with Gymaholic on the Apple Watch.

I’m using an Apple Watch so during a workout, I do everything from there. The Apple Watch app tells you what exercise is up, which set you’re on, and how many reps you need to do at what weight. Once you do it, tap the “set ring” and it logs the set while starting a rest countdown timer (which you can customize on a per exercise OR workout basis).

They just added the ability to swipe right to see the model performing the exercise, or swipe left to control your music or audio — which is SUPER convenient (AHH I just love how the devs keep adding little touches that just make this app perfect).

ONE: Home screen on Apple Watch. TWO: Looping video of exercise on swipe right. THREE: Music controls on swipe left.

Here’s where it gets even more convenient. What if you need to adjust your workouts on the fly? You can force touch the set ring to open a hidden menu of options where you can adjust the number of sets, the reps, or weight. You can even add in another exercise if you want!

Force touch opens a ton of options for mid workout adjustments.

Force touch (or long press) on the Apple Watch allows you to edit sets, reps, and weight on the fly. You can also add in new exercises.

At the end of the workout, Gymaholic gives you the option whether you want to save those changes to the Workout so next time you do that Workout, you’ll do the adjust sets, reps, weight, exercises that you modified. Or, you have the option to not.

I could go on and on about what else this app does, but I’m going to leave it at that for functionality. I would be impressed if this app doesn’t work with your workout routine.

In terms of functionality, Gymaholic gets a 10/10 easy.

Tracking Progress

In the History tab, you can see a monthly calendar view of all the days you’ve completed at least one workout. Or you can switch to list view and see all your workouts completed from most recent to oldest including the workout name, date, and duration.

At the bottom is a row of prebuilt charts and reports. In terms of habit tracking, my goal is simply to go to the gym 4x per week — nothing more detailed than that. The most important thing for me is to make sure I keep getting my ass to the gym. Tracking this is wonderful in Gymaholic. I love how it just has a simple bar chart for the number of Workouts completed per month. You can adjust the date range to show the data just how you want. Me? I like to see the last 12 months.

ONE: Calendar of completed workouts. TWO: Or a list view. THREE: You can add your favorite charts to your home screen.

After you cycle through the built in charts, you can pin them to your Gymaholic home screen so they’re always right there when you open the app. I always know how many times I’ve been to the gym this month vs last month. I always know what muscles are rested, too.

Not only can you track progress of your workouts and strength gains, you can also track progress with your body. You can take progress pics and add measurements for most parts of your body so you know beyond just wait what parts of your slimming down, what parts are getting bigger, and how your body is changing.

There’s so much more in tracking progress and the reports that I could keep going, but this covers the major parts of it. If you’re a real gym rat or data nerd, you’re going to love the details and stats these reports offer. Overall, I give Gymaholic’s tracking and reporting features a 9/10. It tracks a lot, but I wish the charts were a bit more customizable and looked a bit more polished, but for the most part, it gets the job done.

Price

Gymaholic does run on a subscription model, but it’s SO worth it. To get all the features with the premium version, it costs $4.99 per month or $31.99 annually.