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PUSH review: The AI app of choice for strength-based athletes
11:03 am | October 24, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Fitness Apps Gadgets Health & Fitness | Comments: Off

Push Two minute review

After an entire year as my fitness companion, PUSH Workout & Gym Tracker has become an indispensable part of my training regime. PUSH is the brainchild of fitness influencer and YouTuber Joe Delaney, and is designed to do one thing extremely well. It’s an app made to help you build muscle as quickly as possible, using AI-powered workout routines, strict exercise tracking, and measured progressive overload.

The first thing you notice about PUSH is its sleek and well-built interface. Workout and fitness apps can often be a cacophony of bright colors, images, text, and numbers everywhere, but not so with PUSH. You can tell that real effort has gone into the user interface and the experience of using the app. The fonts, menus, and icons are all well-thought-out, spacious yet comprehensive. There are just a few colors set against the white background, a traffic-light system helps signal progress, PBs, and plateaus at just a glance.

When using PUSH for the first time, you’ll be asked to generate a workout plan. Plans are flexible, but range between three and six sessions a week. You also get to pick your preferred split (gym lingo for your sequence of training sessions), choosing between either "full-body" sessions or "push-pull-legs". The latter is more familiar to most gymgoers, but the former is the most optimal split, with muscles grouped together to minimize crossover fatigue.

You’ll also be asked about your sleep and stress levels, training experience, and muscles to focus, before finally the level of equipment available to you. You can even substitute certain exercises from your plan before you start, and over time the app will make recommendations if you generate new plans, so as increasing or decreasing your workout frequency. The plan generation software is really simple and easy to use, so you always feel like you get the right program for you.

Once you’ve got your program, it’s time to get started. You can view upcoming workouts and scroll between days to see what’s on the agenda, giving you a nice overview of how the week is panning out. You’ll probably be surprised to find a pretty diverse mix of exercises over the course of your week. You’ll often find yourself training legs, back, shoulders, chest, arms, core, and more on the same day or together in ways you might not expect, but it’s all part of the optimization process at the heart of PUSH. A bit unfamiliar at first, I’ve definitely felt the benefits of switching up my training routine and spreading the load more evenly across different muscle groups.

Push workout app on iPhone

(Image credit: Future / PUSH )

Workouts are broken down into phases, so you’ll start with a strength phase of high-weight, low-reps, with three or more minutes of rest. Then you move on to stabilized compounds like lateral pulldowns, before ending with a pump phase of lower weight, higher reps, and reduced rest. For each exercise, you’ll get very clearly marked target weights and reps, and you simply tick the box by tapping on it with your thumb to mark off a set and start your rep timer. You can manually adjust the entries if you fall short of your target reps, or you lift more weight than listed in the app.

Over time, the AI will track your progress, and it'll eventually suggest a new weight or an increased number of reps. This will become clearer over time as you use the app, but it’s highly motivating and gives you an amazing sense of progress. If you stall, it’ll recommend a "plateau breaker" exercise, or you can attempt the exercise again. You can also switch out exercises on the fly during workouts, too.

The app presents progress over your last seven days, highlighting muscles that are likely growing or stalling, which can help you refocus your efforts as you exercise. Each exercise is accompanied by a helpful animated guide video, although beginners might find the lack of instructions a bit daunting.

There are a couple of quirks to using PUSH. I don’t love that there’s no volume control for the rest timer. It’s tied to the volume of your music (at least on iPhone), so the louder your music or podcast, the louder the beep at the end of your rest period. The AI also isn’t infallible; recently I plateaued at a 100kg bench press, and the AI suggested I try a plateau breaker of 1002.5 kg, instead of 102.5kg.

It feels unfair to mark the app down for only serving one purpose, however, prospective users should be aware that PUSH is only tailored towards building muscle mass in the gym. You won’t find any Pilates, mobility, cardio, or any other discipline here: this is purely strength-based. The only other possible drawback is the price: at $89.99 / £89.99 / AU$144.99 , the yearly subscription is a big commitment, and some people might find the monthly cost too much to stomach compared to the price of, say, Apple Fitness Plus or Fitbod.

Generally, however, the app has been a joy to use in the 12 months that I’ve been a customer and is well worth the financial investment. And there’s more to come, creator Delaney has teased changes coming to the app on his Instagram, so there’s never been a better time to get on board with what is undoubtedly one of the best fitness apps on the market.

Push: Price and availability

Push workout app tracker

(Image credit: Future)

The Push app is available globally on Apple’s App Store for iPhone and the Google Play Store for Android. There’s a brief free trial available, after which you’ll pay $89.99/£89.99/$AU$144.99 a year or $15.49/£14.99/AU$23.49 a month to use it.

Push: Specifications

Push app reps and weight screen

(Image credit: Future / PUSH)

Push: Scorecard

Push: Should I buy?

Push app daily workout viewer

(Image credit: Future)

Buy if it...

You want to build muscle in the gym

This is one of the purest fitness apps on the market for building muscle mass.

You want a structured workout tracker with progressive overload

PUSH excels at tracking your workout progress and keeping you focused during sessions.

Don't buy it if...

You want a free or cheap workout app

PUSH is more expensive than other options on the market.

You want a fitness app for anything other than muscle-building

PUSH does not include any other type of exercise or nutrition guidance.

Also consider

Fitbod

A pocket personal trainer with huge range of exercises that caters to all skill levels.

Read our full Fitbod review

Apple Fitness Plus

Slightly cheaper, Apple Fitness Plus features a more diverse array of content with a focus on guided video classes, with disciplines including Pilates, Kickboxing, Yoga, and more.

How I tested

I’ve paid to use PUSH for one year, and have used it six times a week every week for the last 12 months. I’ve generated multiple fresh plans to follow, and have used its features over the course of an entire year by performing a daily workout with the help of the app. All of my testing was done on an iPhone 15 Pro Max or iPhone 16 Pro Max.

First reviewed: OCtober 2024

AllTrails review: an essential app for hobbyist hikers and walkers
7:20 pm | June 11, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Fitness Apps Gadgets Health & Fitness | Comments: Off

AllTrails: Two minute review

AllTrails is a hiking app that allows you to search for local hikes and trails, plan your routes ahead of time, and follow your progress along the route to ensure you don’t get lost. You can also rate the trail for other users, upload photos, follow other hikers and keep a virtual diary of your trail experiences. 

It was named Apple’s “iPhone app of the year” in 2023 – and for good reason: it’s a great community app, and one of the best fitness apps around, especially for hikers and nature lovers. It’s essentially Strava for hikers, rather than runners and cyclists, and the two share many similar features. These include showing your followers GPS maps of the trails you’ve walked; the ability to upload and share media; estimated stats such as calorie counts; and more accurate GPS-generated information such as distance, elevation and moving time. 

It’s missing some of Strava’s reliance on competition with aspects such as segments, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Hiking isn’t trail-running or particularly competitive, and an AllTrails representative told me this was a deliberate choice. Features such as segments and leaderboards are unlikely to arrive on this particular community-based app. Competition can breed elitism, and AllTrails is designed to democratize hiking. 

In this, the app certainly succeeds. The average person who’s never hiked before can filter by length, difficulty or style of walk (such as “nearby”, “circular” or “pub walk”), pick a trail, read the reviews, and follow a GPS map all the way round. I’ve used the free version on For AllTrails+ members, where helpful haptic feedback hints alert the user when they stray too far from the trail, reducing the chance of the user even taking a wrong turn. 

Once the user has completed their walk, they can share their media, review by stars and add comments (such as “very muddy in winter, bring walking boots”). AllTrails then takes all this community information and uses it in its calculations to serve others the same trail. It’s a simple concept, and one that’s very well-executed; it’s well worth a free download for even the most occasional hiker. 

AllTrails app used on a hike

(Image credit: Future / Matt Evans)

Regular walkers and serious multi-day hikers will get more out of AllTrails+, which is competitively priced at $34.99 / £35.99 / AU$35.99. For the extras, you get more sophisticated filtering of local trails, those wrong-turn alerts, the option of 3D maps, the ability to download trails and save them for offline use (indispensable on more remote walks), and a Live Share tool. Live Share works like the LiveTrack feature on the best Garmin watches, broadcasting your location to anyone with the Live Share URL in case something goes wrong on the trail.

There’s very little to dislike about AllTrails: it’s a great community tool; the Plus version is reasonably priced, and every trail is vetted by a human before being shared with the community. Unfortunately, being largely user-driven, I did find some complaints online. These were mainly about the fact that the trails can be outdated or feature incomplete information, such as taking you across land that has been privatized.

I experienced one such issue during testing in the Lake District, with a small part of an AllTrails route attempting to lead me across a short stretch of private land. As previously mentioned, it’s worth checking the reviews and route before you go to see if the community has picked up on anything.

Smartwatch integration is a little underwhelming: maps are only shared to the watchOS or Wear OS via the premium version; otherwise, it’s a simple start/stop button and a few basic metrics. Another hiccup is that when using the free version, navigation is dependent on cell service, so more remote hikes require the premium version to follow the map as you go.

AllTrails: Specifications

AllTrails: Scorecard

AllTrails: Should I buy?

AllTrails app used on a hike

(Image credit: Future / Matt Evans)

Buy if it...

Don't buy it if...

Also consider

How I tested

I used the free version of AllTrails on several hikes around the UK – in Wales, Cornwall and the Chilterns – and tested AllTrails+ on three hikes in the UK’s Lake District National Park. I examined the different kinds of filters on offer for searching out new hikes, tried both 3D and 2D map data on each of the AllTrails+ hikes I went on, and tested the map route and GPS accuracy against data from my Garmin Epix Pro.