A workout tracker for women who want to get stronger

Light weights forever is not a plan

Plenty of workout apps for women are a list of classes: light dumbbells, high reps, and the same session every week. That keeps you moving. It does not make you much stronger, because nothing asks for a little more next week.

Women build muscle and strength on the same principles as men: hard sets, enough of them, and a bit more weight or reps over time. Our guide to progressive overload explains how.

What changes when you answer female

One of the 14 questions asks which describes you: female or male. Both the plan and the Strength Score use the answer.

Trackist tells the coach to treat sex as a small tilt, never a stereotype. Your goal, experience, focus areas and feedback come first. When it writes a woman's plan, it tells the coach to keep heavy compound lifts and adding weight in it, never light-only or high-rep-only work, and to make sure upper-body pressing and back work are there.

The Strength Score compares your best lifts in the last 90 days, relative to your body weight, with standards for women. Every line drops with age, so a woman of 45 is measured against women of her age. For a woman aged 18 to 29, the intermediate line is a squat of 1 times body weight and a deadlift of 1.25 times. You get a score out of 100 and a Strength Age.

Train the muscles you care about

You pick one of 4 goals: build strength, build muscle and tone, lose weight, or get fitter and feel better. Then you can pick muscles to bring up: glutes, legs, calves, core, back, chest, shoulders or arms. Trackist tells the coach to give them extra volume and put their main lift early in the session.

For glutes, the library has the hip thrust and its variations, glute bridges and kickbacks, alongside squats, lunges and deadlifts. Glute work does not move the Strength Score, which reads squats, hinges, presses and pulls.

From your second session of an exercise, a line above it suggests today's weight. Hit the top of the rep range on every set at your heaviest weight, and it suggests a step up: 2.5 kg on a barbell, 2 kg on dumbbells, 5 kg on a machine or cable. Fall short and it keeps the weight, takes about 5% off or leaves the call to you, depending on how far short you fell and how hard the sets felt.

See the change the scale misses

The scale moves slowly when you build muscle and lose fat at the same time. So Trackist tracks body weight against a goal and 9 measurements: chest, waist, hips, and both arms, thighs and calves. It shows the change since you started for your chest, waist, hips, arms, thighs and calves.

With a goal to lose or gain weight, the progress share card shows a change only when it heads toward that goal. If you want to lose weight and the scale went up, the card leaves it out.

What Trackist does not do

• no cycle tracking: Trackist tells the coach not to plan around the menstrual cycle
• no plans for pregnancy or after giving birth, so ask your doctor or a physio what training suits you then
• no exercise videos: every strength exercise has written form cues and a muscle map
• no food or calorie-intake tracking
• no classes or follow-along workouts

What helps most

• A plan written for you: 4 to 12 weeks, with every exercise, set, rep target and rest chosen.
• Records as they happen: a personal record is marked the moment you beat your previous best.
• A rest timer that keeps going: tap play and it counts down the plan's rest time, on the Lock Screen too.
• A lighter session on a bad day: after a poor night, on low energy or with soreness in the half of the body you train today, Trackist offers one set fewer on each strength exercise that has more than one, 30 seconds more rest and no finisher, at the same weights. It changes today only.
• An exercise that hurts, swapped: name the exercise, the joint and how bad it is, and Trackist swaps in one that spares the joint, usually for the same muscle.

Start in 3 steps

1. Get your plan: answer 14 questions, pick your goal and the muscles you want to bring up, and Trackist writes the plan.
2. Log every set: weight, reps and RPE, a rating of how hard the set felt from 1 to 10.
3. Watch the numbers: records, your Strength Score, your measurements and your body weight against your goal.

Get stronger, and see it

Check where you stand today with the strength calculator, which uses the same standards for women as the app. To see how much muscle you carry for your height, try the FFMI calculator. Want a plan to start from? The full-body plan for beginners is a good first one.

Trackist is on the App Store for iPhone, with no ads.