I recently started working out after realizing my body needs physical activity. My job involves typing on a computer for 8+ hours a day, so my lifestyle is sedentary. While my workouts are sorted thanks to a personal coach, the biggest factor that deters me from hitting the gym every day is motivation (or the lack of). After speaking to a few friends who have been working out for a while, I figured tracking my workouts and analyzing the data could be a good source of motivation.
My Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 can detect and track workouts, which was a good starting point. However, the Galaxy Watch can only track workouts such as running, walking, cycling, and swimming. However, it doesn’t track many gym workouts such as bench presses, squats, lat pulldowns, and bicep curls. Most of my workouts prescribed by my coach involve these activities. How do I track them? A developer who was probably in the same situation as me came up with an app to solve this problem. It’s called Hevy, and it changed how I track my workouts.
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What is Hevy?
What does it do that other apps don’t?
Unlike most fitness apps on the Play Store, Hevy doesn’t track your usual set of activities. If you use the elliptical machine in the gym or run on a treadmill, Hevy has nothing to do with it. Instead, the app taps into the unexplored portions of workout tracking that smartwatch and fitness tracker manufacturers have missed: logging gym workouts.
When working out at the gym, you tend to perform pre-decided workouts depending on the part of the body you’re targeting. Whether it’s leg day, chest day, or arms day, an Apple Watch or a Fitbit cannot track individual workouts that aren’t a part of the activities list. So, all your usual exercises, like bench presses, bicep curls, and shoulder presses, are not accounted for. While your smartwatch may track the number of calories burned, there’s no way to track your progress over time. That’s where Hevy comes in.
Features and functionality
Track, measure, and visualize
The primary use case of Hevy is to create workout routines that you follow regularly and track them when you’re at the gym. Here’s how it works. You select the workout you’re engaging in, and enter relevant details linked to it, like the weight, number of sets, and repetitions per set. Hevy tracks the duration taken to complete each set, calories burned, and heart rate.
When you complete a set, select the checkbox next to it, and the app measures the parameters for the next set. You can have rest timers between each set, which is a handy inclusion. When you finish a workout, you can move to the next one. At the end of it, Hevy gives you a summary of your workout, which includes the time you worked out for, total volume of weight, the part of the body affected by it, and more.
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My favorite feature of Hevy is the ability to create workout routines. There are a bunch of workouts we all perform on a certain day. If it’s your leg day, you can create a routine consisting of workouts that target the muscles in your leg. Create multiple versions for each part of the body. Then, when working out, start a routine and Hevy lists all your workouts and tracks them one after the other. If you’re a beginner and unsure of the type of workout for each part of the body, Hevy has pre-built routines that suggest exercises.
Post workout, Hevy shows your progress in the form of a graph that spans different muscles, showing you the emphasis of your workout on every part of your body. You can also track your workout progress in terms of how much weight you added over time, and how quickly you wrapped up sets. There’s also the ability to track weight loss/gain progress.
Compatibility and community
It’s a cross-platform app
Hevy is available on Wear OS, Android, watchOS, iOS, and the desktop via a web app. I like leaving my phone at home when heading to the gym since my smartwatch has LTE connectivity. So, it’s handy that the smartwatch app lets me launch routines and log workouts. However, you cannot create new routines via the smartwatch. You need the app to do that. After you’ve tracked a workout, you can view the details and stats on the Hevy website.
Apart from tracking workouts, Hevy has an active community of athletes and people who work out regularly. You can join the community to follow insights from renowned athletes or participate in discussions with them. Think of it as the Instagram for fitness enthusiasts. I say this is because the app’s UI resembles Instagram.
Hevy
Hevy is a workout tracking app that lets you log gym workouts like bench press, bicep curls, squats, etc.
Accurately track every single workout
Even if your watch doesn’t support it
While I use Google Fit, Starava, and other fitness apps to detect generic workouts, Hevy is my go-to for keeping a tab on all activities I perform at the gym. I don’t have to count the sets and repetitions I do, plus I get charts that show my progress, which motivates me to show up at the gym every day. The onboard community is supportive and can act as a motivating factor for many users. If you lift or work out regularly in the gym, Hevy is a no-brainer. The best part is that it’s free.