A trainer costs roughly a hundred times what an app costs, and some things only a person can do. Here is an honest split of what each one is good for, and how to use both without wasting money on either.
Which should you pay for?
If nobody has ever taught you to squat, pay for a handful of sessions with a good coach. If you know how to lift and your problem is what to do next week, an app is the better use of your money.
The 2 compete for the same job less often than the marketing on both sides suggests.
What does each one cost?
A personal trainer in most cities charges $50 to $100 an hour. Twice a week for a year, that comes to $5,200 to $10,400. Online coaching, where a person writes your plan and reviews your videos from a distance, usually costs $100 to $300 a month.
Workout apps cost from nothing to about $50 a month, and most serious ones cost $2 to $16 a month.
One month of in-person training pays for several years of any app in this category.
What can only a person do?
Be honest about this, because this is where the money is worth spending:
- Watch your technique. No app sees your knee cave in on rep 4. A coach fixes it in one session, and the fix lasts for years.
- Correct you in real time. A hand on your back or a cue mid-rep that fixes your bar path or your brace is different from reading about it.
- Handle the unusual. A history of rehab, a competition or the demands of a sport need judgment no app can offer.
- Make you show up. A person expecting you at 7am is the strongest accountability there is.
What does an app do better?
- It is there every session. A trainer sees you twice a week for an hour. The app is in your pocket for all of it.
- It remembers every number: what you lifted in March, which session ran too hard, which exercise bothered your shoulder in week 2.
- It costs the same whether you train twice a week or 6 times.
- It never reschedules.
What should most people do?
Buy 3 to 5 sessions with a good coach at the start. Learn the squat, the hip hinge (the deadlift movement), a press and a row. If they offer it, ask them to check your technique on video afterwards.
Then run your training with an app. Go back to the coach for a session when a lift starts to feel wrong or a new exercise enters your plan. You get what only a person can give you, and you stop paying $100 an hour for someone to count to 12.
What Trackist does, and does not do
Trackist is an app, not a person. It takes the planning off your hands. It writes a plan of 4 to 12 weeks from 14 questions, with every exercise, set, rep target and rest chosen, and a deload (an easier week) at the end of any plan of 6 weeks or more. It suggests each session's weight from your last session's sets and how hard they felt.
It also reacts to what you tell it. Say an exercise hurts, and it swaps in one that trains the same muscle. Say sessions are too hard or too easy twice in different weeks, and the coach rewrites the day or rebuilds the rest of the plan. The next plan is written from this one: your logs, your check-ins, everything you reported, and a few notes the coach keeps about you.
What it does not do is watch you lift. That is still worth paying a person for, at least once. See how Trackist compares with the other apps.
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Log your next session in Trackist
Trackist writes a plan around your week and your gym, and every session suggests the weight from the sets you logged. On the App Store now. Android is coming.
