The muscles should grow
I love it after road bike season going back to the gym and pumping, just like I love getting back on the road with my road bike in the spring. As I reported in my last post, I'm going to try these this winter 5 x 5 method for muscle and strength building.
training plan
Of course, for a good workout you need one training plan. The challenge at Strength training and muscle building lies in constantly increasing. This doesn't have to happen with every workout, but you have to have a record of how much you lifted last time. Whether you improve yourself or not, you don't want to under-challenge yourself. In other words, as an athlete you always need a good overview of past performance. When I'm cycling, I rely entirely on Strava, but unfortunately Strava doesn't help me when I'm pumping.
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An app for performance measurement when pumping is needed
I've searched the App Store for such apps for the last few years, even before I was spoiled by Strava, I never really found anything. Now that I have a precise goal, I knew what to look for. Very often you have to face a problem before you can formulate the right question. After testing a few apps, all of which were bad (no, I don't want to name them here), I came across Gym Hero. An app that already offers many useful features even when it is free.
Gym Hero, my fitness tracker
Honestly, if I hadn't been so desperate and had so many disappointments, I wouldn't have tried the app. The APP icon, which is also presented in the App Store, and the preview images are not exactly nice. But as is so often the case, there is also love at second sight. Behind the not particularly shiny shell hides a really powerful APP, especially if you buy a few premium features.
Gym Hero Pro
I tried the free version first, but you quickly reach its limits. Before you buy feature by feature individually, I recommend buying the Pro version. This costs EUR 3,99 in the Apple App Store and includes all premium features. Incidentally, it is also cheaper to buy the Pro version than to unlock the features individually.
gym hero offers a very simple interface. You start with a workout and enter exercise for exercise, of course with weight, number of sets and repetitions. Every exercise that has been created once can later be pulled into a new training session. So you only make the effort once. If you drag an exercise you have already completed into a new training plan, the right-hand side shows how much weight you lifted last time. So you can see what you have to put on it without having to scroll back and forth.
In addition, you can copy complete training sessions and thus complete them again, especially those who have a long-term goal and train a lot will appreciate this function very much. For each workout you can also write notes that are quickly accessible. For example, I always make a note of which exercise I would like to improve on next time and which ones I would rather not.
Tracking in Apple Health
Gym Hero is rounded off by the fact that the training is written to the Apple Health app with training time and estimated calories burned. Health has become the central monitoring app for me anyway.
Conclusion
Gym Hero is my fitness tracking app of choice and I highly recommend it. You have to spend a few euros to be able to use it sensibly, but then it does what it is supposed to do and that much better than other fitness studio apps.