Questions

Gym Buddy is free to use. Logging every set, the streak, the Watch app, the trophy room and the Rhino chat within its fair-use allowance do not cost anything and are not going to. Finish your first workout and Pro is yours for fourteen days, with nothing to cancel: every trend, every program and your heart-rate strap. When the fortnight ends the app carries on and the parts that are Pro simply stop.

Pro adds unlimited Rhino, the full trends, unlimited saved workouts and every collectable icon, as a yearly plan or a monthly one. The last 28 days of trends stay free for everyone, and the icon pack is also sold on its own as a one-off purchase for anyone who wants the icons without a subscription.

The free plan holds 2 saved workouts. Pro keeps as many as you like.

Tell it the goal, your time and the equipment you have, and it writes the plan and saves it: the exercises, the sets, the reps and a starting weight for each. Rhino has a tab of its own, so you can also ask it about training, form or food there or mid-session, and during a session it already knows which workout you are doing and how far through it you are.

In the editor Rhino can revise a workout you have already saved: make it easier on your knees, harder, shorter, or heavier on back work. You see the proposed changes before anything is saved. Rhino is an AI model, not a coach or a clinician, and its suggestions are general fitness information. Read the disclaimer.

Coming in the next update.

Six come with the app: full-body linear, push pull legs, upper and lower, a three-week wave on percentages, bodyweight ladders for training at home, and a thirty-minute session. Each one says how many days a week it wants and how many weeks it runs for. Start one and its workouts land in your list, scheduled across the week, and Home picks the next one for you.

They are plain workouts once they are there, so you can edit a session, swap an exercise or ask Rhino to change one. A program is also a way to start without spending a Rhino message on your first day.

Coming in the next update.

Yes. Export the CSV from Strong or Hevy, or from Gym Buddy itself, and open it in the app. It reads the layouts both apps export, shows you the exercise names it could not match so you can fix them before anything is written, and skips sessions you already have rather than doubling them.

When it is done you get a receipt saying what came in, and Undo takes the whole import back out if it is not what you wanted. Your history counts from then on: the heatmap, the personal bests card, the trophy room and the standards shelf all read it. Importing is free.

Coming in the next update.

It speaks nine: English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese in both simplified and traditional. There is nothing to switch on: the app follows the language your phone is set to. The Apple Watch app and the Home Screen widget are still English, and they are next.

Exercise names and Rhino’s coaching cues stay in English, because they are the content rather than the chrome. Rhino itself replies in the language you write to it in.

One card per exercise. Swipe a set to the right, or tap the tick, to complete it. Tap a weight or a rep count to nudge it with plus and minus, or type a number, and carry the change down the rest of the sets in one tap. The header counts sets done out of the total, and the numbers are saved back into the workout, so next time starts where this time finished.

Coming in the next update.

Yes. A set can be marked as a warm-up on the card or in the editor, and it is drawn as one everywhere the session appears, including the Lock Screen card and the watch. Warm-up sets are left out of your volume, your PBs and the set counts, so the numbers you are judged on are the working sets only.

Coming in the next update.

A row appears next to the set you have just ticked: five steps from easy to max, or reps left in the tank if you prefer that scale, set in Settings. Nothing waits on it. Answer it or ignore it and the next tick replaces it.

What you do answer is used: it feeds the next weight, it shows up in Trends, and it goes into the brief Rhino reads before it replies. If you never touch the row, the single rating on the session summary still does the same job.

Complete a set and a countdown starts: 60, 90, 120 or 180 seconds, with a buzz when it is time to go. A ring around Rhino drains as you rest and cools as your heart rate comes down. It carries on as a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, so the phone can sit face down between sets. Pair two exercises as a superset and the timer waits until you have done both.

A Live Activity for the session you are in. It shows the rest time left, a progress bar and which set is up next, on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, and it lets you tick the set off without unlocking. You get a notification when rest is over, so the phone can stay face down.

The card itself needs no permission. The first time the end-of-rest notification would appear, iOS may ask whether Gym Buddy can send notifications.

A session is saved to the phone as you train, not at the end. If iOS closes the app while you rest, or you take a call and come back an hour later, the next open asks “Continue Leg Day?” and puts back your ticked sets, your rest timer counting to the same moment, and the clocks. Nothing is uploaded to do it.

An unfinished session is offered for eight hours and then forgotten, because being asked about a workout you finished in your head yesterday is worse than being asked nothing.

A dial on the home screen reads your training load, the days since you last trained and how the last session felt, then says whether today looks fresh, ready, steady or tired. Tap it to see exactly what it was built from. It is a training cue, not medical advice.

Every card shows what you lifted last time. Beat your heaviest set or estimated one-rep max and the phone tells you. The next weight is judged on the work you actually did, so an easy set steps up early and two hard sessions in a row back off.

What counts as the work you did is the reps you finished against the reps that were planned, the weight you ended on rather than the one you were given, and the effort you recorded, per set or for the exercise. A rep range comes from your goal. There is no fixed deload week: it backs off when your own sessions say to, not on a calendar.

Every lift is classed Beginner to Elite for your body weight, your age and, if you give it, your sex, with the kilos it takes to reach the next level. Each PB carries a DOTS score, so lifts at different body weights can be compared. Your sex is used on the phone to pick the standards, and the only time it leaves is inside a workout link you choose to share.

A map of the rhino, front and back, tinted by the sets you gave each muscle this week. Tap a region to see the exercises behind it. Below it sits the heatmap: a calendar of every session, shaded by how much you did that day relative to your usual.

Runs, rows, planks and carries are tracked in their own terms: distance and time, not reps. With Apple Health on, every workout your Watch or another app records comes in as a session too, from walks and rides to swims and tennis, and counts towards your streak. Log your body weight on Progress and watch the trend.

Coming in the next update.

Yes, both live under Body on Progress. The tape covers waist, hips, chest, shoulders, neck, arm, forearm, thigh and calf, with body fat beside them, each with its own line over time and the change since last month. Once a month is plenty, and the app asks about as often as that. On iPhone your waist and body fat can be written to Apple Health, and body fat already read from it is shown as coming from there.

Progress photos are kept on this phone and never uploaded, not even to your cloud backup. They sit in the app's own protected storage rather than the camera roll, and the compare view puts two side by side with the date, the weight and the waist under each.

The watch app is built around the same readiness dial, with the flame and your streak beneath it. Live heart rate, the set count and the rest timer are on the wrist, and the complication keeps your readiness on the watch face and refreshes on its own.

An Apple Watch, AirPods, or any Bluetooth chest strap or armband drives the live heart rate while you train. The zones are anchored to your own threshold, worked out from your last 90 days of cardio, rather than to a guess from your age. Every beat it reads from a strap is written to Apple Health.

Not on Google Play yet. The Android app is built and waiting on the store listing, and the privacy policy already covers it. Gym Buddy today is an iPhone and iPad app on iOS 18 or later, in portrait, with a Watch app beside it.

Train on consecutive days to build a streak. A day you have not trained yet does not break it, and a freeze earned by training covers a slip on its own. Going away? Take a holiday break of up to three weeks: the streak holds, no freezes are spent and reminders stay quiet until you are back.

A room of its own under Progress: personal bests, streak medals, a badge for every month you hit your target, milestone ladders for each lift, and the collectable app icons. Empty slots are on show on purpose, so you can see what is still to win.

Coming in the next update.

A hundred dated days sit on the DAYS shelf in the trophy room, and the rule is the same for all of them: train on the day and the badge is yours. Ninety-three of them bring an app icon with them, free, which turns up in the picker once you have won it and stays there. The shelf shows the next eight days and a link opens the whole year.

Which days you see follows your gym, because the country of the gym you picked is already an answer to where you train. No gym set means the worldwide days on their own, and Settings › Profile › Holidays will take a country of your choosing instead. It is a preference and not a location: nothing is looked up and nothing is sent.

Rhino’s rank comes from showing up, not from tonnage. Every day you train earns XP, and so does every badge. Eight bands to climb, Bronze to Legend, and each one gives him something to wear that he keeps. Nothing is ever taken away.

Workouts and history live on your phone, and go to your account as a backup only if you sign in. There are no ads and no trackers, only anonymous usage counts. What you send Rhino goes to the Gym Buddy server with a short training brief to generate the reply, and gym search text leaves the phone to find a gym. Your sex is never sent to Rhino, and Health summaries only if you allow it, as a few rounded lines inside your chat. The app never reads your location.

Progress photos never leave the phone at all. The privacy policy is the full account.

Everything works without an account. Signing in keeps a backup of your training on the server so you can get it back on a new phone, or after deleting and reinstalling, and lets invites and a Pro bought on the website follow you. Settings › Account offers Sign in with Apple and Google Sign-In, and you never give Gym Buddy a password.

The backup holds your workouts, your session history, your settings, your body-weight log and your measurements, and it runs on its own after you save a workout or finish a session. On a new phone, sign in and tap Restore. It is a backup and not a sync, so two phones on one account do not stay in step minute by minute. Deleting the account removes both sign-ins and every backup from the server straight away, and what is on your phone stays on your phone.