The spreadsheet deserves respect before the criticism, because it has earned its place. Coaches deliver whole coaching businesses through shared Sheets. The classic strength programmes circulate as templates with a decade of revision behind them. And unlike the Notion tracker, which makes you write every formula yourself, Sheets actually does the maths: tonnage sums itself, the e1RM column updates, a chart tab shows the trend without any third-party tools.
Free, portable, yours forever, and backed by formulas. If training were planned and reviewed only, the spreadsheet would have won and this article would end here.
The cell is the problem
Training also has to be recorded, and it has to be recorded in the worst conditions your phone ever sees: one thumb, elevated heart rate, ninety seconds on the clock, chalk on your hands.
Now walk through what a single set costs in the Sheets mobile app. Open the file, wait for it to load, find the right tab for the week, pinch-zoom until the cells are tappable, tap the weight cell, pull up the keyboard, type 62.5, confirm, hunt for the reps cell one column over, type 8, confirm, and check you did not just overwrite the formula row underneath. That is one set of perhaps twenty-five in the session. The interface was designed for a mouse and a monitor, and every workaround (bigger rows, a mobile-entry tab, data validation) is sandbagging against that fact.
So lifters adapt in a predictable sequence. First they log after the session from memory, which blurs the numbers. Then they log the top sets only. Then the week's cells stay empty and the plan tab becomes the only one that gets opened. The charts keep rendering, drawn from data that stopped being true in March.
Links are where videos go to die
If your programme leans on video (a follow-along for conditioning days, a form breakdown for every new lift), the spreadsheet offers you a cell with a blue underlined URL in it. Tapping it mid-session throws you out to YouTube or Instagram, where the feed is waiting with other plans for your attention, and coming back means reloading the Sheet and re-finding your row.
The quieter failure takes months to show: a URL points at someone else's post, and creators delete, privatise and rebrand all the time. The template you built in January has dead links by summer, and you find out standing at the rack. A spreadsheet can reference a video; it cannot hold one, play one, or notice one has gone.
The file becomes a second hobby
Every long-running training Sheet drifts the same way. A tab per block, then a tab per week, then an archive file, then PPL_v4 because v3's formulas broke when a row got inserted. Formulas need guarding from stray taps. The shared coach template updates and your local edits need re-applying. None of this is hard; all of it is upkeep, and the upkeep competes with the thing the file was for. Somewhere around week six the maintenance quietly outweighs the logging, which is the point at which most templates die.
What the spreadsheet is still the best tool for
Keep Sheets for the jobs where a big screen and formulas shine. Designing a block before you commit to it. Comparing this mesocycle's plan against the last one. A coach's programme, kept as the source of truth the coach reviews. Sunday analysis with the chart tab open and coffee in hand. These jobs have no rest timer running, and Sheets handles all of them better than any phone app, ours included.
The working split: the plan lives in the spreadsheet, the sessions run from something built for logging, and only headline numbers travel back.
Where an app picks up the session
For the logging half, the choice tracks how you track progress and where your training comes from. Barbell-only lifters are well served by a tap-to-log app like Strong or Hevy, and if that is you, those are the quicker tools.
Fitness Vault covers the video-shaped version of the problem. The demonstrations your plan references come into one library, imported from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or your own camera roll, tagged by muscle group and equipment, so the lift and its video stay together instead of connected by a URL in a cell. During the session, recording a set is a couple of taps beside the playing video, and volume, PRs and streaks come out computed, no formula row to protect. The free tier (20 videos, one programme, manual tagging, the full stats dashboard) covers a complete training block; AI auto-tagging, the Premium part, reads each video's title and details and is strongest on YouTube. The honest limit: for planning and block design, the app gives you nothing close to a spreadsheet's flexibility. That half still belongs to Sheets.
The bottom line
The Google Sheets tracker fails at exactly one thing, and unfortunately it is the thing that happens three times a week: getting numbers into cells on a phone under a rest timer. Everything else it does well enough to keep. Let the spreadsheet stay the drawing board, hand the sessions to a tool with thumb-sized logging and the video where you can see it, and the file in your Drive goes back to being what it was always best at: the plan.