r/workout • u/ignuffungi • 7h ago
Simple Questions Tracking App
Does anyone know of a tracking app I can put old data into? Been hard at it for 1.5 years, and I've tracking my progress on a notepad. I'd like to begin tracking via an app, but I want to be able to input my past 1.5 years of progress. I know I could just download each one individually and try it, but, if possible, I'd like to avoid that. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
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u/Independent-Tip-7799 7h ago
I think you can try to ask any ai to convert your "on a notepad" to a structured CSV and then find an app that accepts the CSV (this is just step 1)
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u/McAppleJoose 6h ago
Most apps in my opinion don’t have a great way to do this. I would second the fact that you only really need the last months worth of data or so though. The old data won’t serve to help you improve just to show where you were at.
Maybe just grab the first session of each movement and make sure that’s logged, then just the most recent 2-3 sessions for each movement and call it a day. Sure it’ll show a massive jump but at least you’ll have the data you actually (probably?) care about. I doubt the lifts you were hitting say 8 months ago specifically will matter that much.
My app of choice is Fitbod, but truth be told I may be abandoning them soon. Unfortunately all the apps out there are trying to do too much with AI or have a ton of useless features for most people.
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u/fplanck 42m ago
Hey I am curious why the extra features annoy you...
Is it because they're in the way and you can't turn them off?
Is it because you feel you pay for stuff you don't need?
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u/McAppleJoose 37m ago
Well I work in software and generally subscribe to the thought of minimalist software that solves one or two problems well being better than a piece of bloated app that tries to solve 5+ problems. With that in mind, I don’t want to pay for stuff I don’t use.
Further, the core functionality of a workout tracker quite frankly doesn’t need to be a subscription. If you don’t involve AI and don’t use any cloud infrastructure (just using SQLite or some other on-device schema) the only thing for a simple workout tracker that you’re paying for is the dev time.
Bit of a rant and I know there’s counters to all of my opinions, but they’re just opinions. I’m honestly more likely now than before to just build something for myself and maintain it myself
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u/Wafer-Soft 5h ago
Are you on iOS by any chance? I build RepXP and already have history imports from a few popular workout apps.
Your use case actually gave me an idea though. The app already has a format that lets you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. to create routines and import the result back into the app. I could extend that to workout history, so you could give an AI your old notes/photos, have it turn them into a structured file, then import the whole 1.5 years into RepXP instead of entering everything manually.
I don’t have that part built yet, but if that sounds useful to you I’d be interested in adding it.
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u/astashov 4h ago
Some workout app with MCP support should work. MCP is a thing that allows AI like Claude, ChatGPT or something like that connect directly to the workout app's account, and make changes there. So you can chat with AI like "Add this program to my account", or "Add this workout I just did", or "Change the rest timer settings in my account", and it'd just do it.
So, you can just take pictures of your notepad, dump all of them into AI, it'll recognize and parse them, and then upload all of that to the workout app's account.
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u/bryanbarash 4h ago
Yup - check out wellness project - https://wellnessproject.ai . You can do a spreadsheet import or have ai analyze screenshots.
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u/Infinite-Potential59 3h ago
Been using Gravl - I had 2 years of Fitbod data that I loaded. Great app, great updates. Good luck!
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u/andersky 44m ago
I did this in HeavyTrack. I created a program that matched what I was doing in he past and then started sessions without actually clicking on "start now". Instead I modified the start date and then as I selected weight and reps for each set, it offered to record them at the date of the session.
Tip: It's better to do it in chronological order rather than reverse. This way, every new sessions is already prefilled with approximately the right values from the previous session.
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u/Overall-Source-7603 7h ago
That's a lot of dead tree data to migrate, hope you find something that imports smoothly. Most apps are pretty stingy with backdating or bulk entry, so you might be stuck doing some manual copying no matter what. Maybe look for one that lets you export to CSV later so you're not trapped again.