AI Coach vs Hevy: Logging, Programs, and What Each Costs

Hevy is the best pure lifting log on either app store, and by its own count more than 16 million athletes agree. The free tier is generous enough that most of them never pay a cent. What Hevy will not do is tell you what to lift on Thursday after you slept five hours and ran intervals the night before. That gap, between recording training and deciding it, is the whole comparison.

What Hevy does well

Any honest version of this starts here. Hevy does one job better than almost anyone.

Set entry that stays out of the way. Last week's numbers arrive prefilled, the rest timer starts on its own, and supersets and drop sets have their own set types.
A watch app that runs without your phone. Apple Watch and Wear OS, offline, routine already loaded. Phone stays in the locker.
A social layer with people in it. Follow other lifters, comment on their sessions, save a routine you like into your own folder.
Price. Hevy Pro runs $2.99 a month, $23.99 a year or $74.99 once, per the US App Store listing. The free tier caps routines and graph history, and plenty of lifters never hit that cap.
Charts that answer lifting questions. Sets per muscle group per week, exercise-by-exercise progress, records over time.

If your training week is a bodybuilding split or a powerlifting block and nothing else, you can stop reading. Hevy is the answer.

The data flows out of Hevy, never in

Hevy connects to Apple Health and to Strava. Both connections carry your workouts outward. Hevy's own help centre states that the Strava link is one way: Hevy sends workouts to Strava, and workouts recorded in Strava do not come back. The Apple Health connection runs the same way for training: your Hevy sessions export into the Health app.

That is the correct architecture for a log. It also sets a hard ceiling on what Hevy can ever tell you, because nothing about your recovery reaches the app. Not last night's sleep, not the 90 minute ride that left your legs flat. When Thursday comes, Hevy shows you what you did last Thursday and waits for you to type.

Movement Rebels reads the other direction. Garmin Connect and Apple Health sync inward, and the coach sees HRV, resting heart rate, sleep and Body Battery alongside your last 14 activities with their real numbers: pace and per-kilometre splits on a run, normalized power and TSS on a ride. It reads the morning check-in you score 1 to 10 for sleep, soreness, mood and energy. It reads your logged lifts and your PRs. Then it writes the week.

Program customization means two different things

In Hevy, customization means you build the routine. Folders, exercise order, set types, an RPE field, and a Routine Library if you would rather start from someone else's work. Hevy Trainer, bundled with Pro, builds a program from your goals and equipment and bumps the weight when your logged sets earn it, and the finish screen can hand a workout off to ChatGPT or Claude. What Hevy does not do is read your sleep or yesterday's ride and decide from them that this week should be lighter.

Without Trainer, progression is your job. You look at last week, you add 2.5 kg or a rep, you type it in. With it, the app does that step for you, from what you logged in Hevy and nothing else. Either way it works for years, right up until the week your life stops cooperating.

In Movement Rebels, customization means the coach writes the week and rewrites it when you ask. Tell it a goal with a date, "squat 150 by September" or "Hyrox on 15 July, want sub-60", and it locks that goal with a target date and builds a periodized arc backward from it. The Sunday plan then knows where you sit in that arc: which phase, which week of the phase, how many weeks out, whether this one is a deload. In chat you can move a session, add one, or have the whole week rebuilt.

Credit where due: Hevy will out-log us set by set. The entry is faster and the lifting charts go deeper. If per-rep logging speed is what you are optimizing, that is a real point against us.

The strength numbers your app should be enforcing

Neither app changes the physiology. Read the table as bands rather than targets: the left column is what you control, the middle is the range the research supports, the right is what goes wrong outside it. A training volume calculator totals up your real week, and a 1RM calculator turns a recent set into the working percentages below.

Training variable	Range the evidence supports	What goes wrong outside it
Weekly sets per muscle group	10 or more for most lifters; 4 or fewer still buys substantial gains	Fewer sets still build, only slower; far past 20 the returns flatten while the fatigue does not
Load, main strength lifts	80-90% of 1RM for 3-6 reps	Too light and the nervous system never gets the signal it needs
Load, hypertrophy work	Loads at or below 60% of 1RM still build size when the set ends near failure	Light sets stopped well short of failure give up most of the stimulus
Proximity to failure	At or close to failure on the last working set	Stopping 5 reps short leaves size on the table; grinding every set to failure costs more recovery than it buys
Frequency per muscle	1-3 sessions a week, with weekly volume matched	Frequency by itself changes little, so chasing it instead of volume is wasted effort
Rest between heavy sets	2-3 minutes	Short rest turns a strength set into a conditioning set
Velocity loss inside a set	Stop around 25% bar-speed loss for strength, push past it for size	Right sets, wrong goal
Weekly progression	One rep, or roughly 2.5% on the top set	Bigger jumps outrun tendon adaptation and the joints complain first
After a short night	Lower-body strength down about 3%, upper body close to unchanged	Chasing last week's number on 5 hours of sleep is how top sets get missed
Evening versus morning after poor sleep	Evening performance down about 8%, morning about 5%	An evening PR attempt after a bad night is the worst slot on the calendar

movementrebels.com

The volume row, the hypertrophy load row and the frequency row come from an umbrella review of hypertrophy meta-analyses: at least 10 weekly sets per muscle group as the target, 4 or fewer still producing substantial gains, and frequency ceasing to matter once weekly volume is equal. The velocity-loss row comes from a meta-analysis of load and volume autoregulation. The two sleep rows come from a meta-analysis of acute sleep loss and physical performance, where lower-body strength fell 3.42% while upper body stayed statistically unchanged, and evening testing fell 8.31% against 5.42% in the morning. Rest, weekly progression and the strength-load band are coaching convention rather than pooled data, so treat those three rows as a starting point.

Athlete checking his training plan on his phone by the dumbbell rack in the Movement Rebels coaching app

What recovery data changes, and what it does not

The loudest version of the AI-coach pitch is that an algorithm picks a better working weight than your program would. The evidence does not support it. That same autoregulation meta-analysis compared autoregulated load prescription, set by reps in reserve or bar speed, against fixed percentage-based prescription and found similar strength gains, a mean difference of about 2 kg that never reached significance. None of the included studies set the weight from a wrist score. If methods that read the lifter directly cannot beat plain percentages, expect even less from a readiness number picking today's squat weight.

The value sits a level higher. How heavy today is the easy question. Whether today should be heavy at all is the one a lifting log cannot answer, because that call depends on everything else in your week, and a lifting log has no idea what else is in your week.

Here is the shape of it. You ran 5x1000 on Wednesday evening. Thursday morning your sleep came in at 5 hours 10 minutes and your HRV sits under baseline. Per the numbers above, your squat is down a few percent, and further because the session is in the evening. Hevy shows you 140 kg for 5 and an empty checkbox. A coach that read Wednesday's intervals and this morning's check-in moves the heavy day to Friday. Same weekly volume, better placement. Deload timing works the same way, and it is the decision most self-programmed lifters get wrong.

Which one fits which athlete

Hevy fits you if:

Lifting is the entire training week. A split you already trust, a block you know how to run.
You enjoy programming your own progression. Some people do, and they are usually good at it.
Your gym friends are on Hevy. Once your training partners live in a feed, that feed beats any feature list.
Three dollars against twenty decides it. Legitimate reason.

Movement Rebels fits you if:

You lift and you also run, ride or row, and the two keep colliding. Hybrid athlete training covers what that costs when nothing is coordinating it.
There is a date on your calendar and you want the weeks between here and there planned backward from it.
Your week falls apart often enough that a fixed routine is fiction by Wednesday.
You want to ask a question about your own training and get an answer from something that has read your data.

Running both, and where the data stops

You can run both. Hevy for the gym log, Movement Rebels for the plan and everything outside the gym.

Know the cost first. Movement Rebels has no lifting-app integration and no CSV import. The integrations are Garmin Connect, Apple Health through the native iOS app, and Concept2 for erg sessions. Lifts you record in Hevy stay invisible to the coach, so they never count toward your training load. Log a hard leg day in Hevy and the Movement Rebels coach will cheerfully hand you another one.

If you want strength work weighed against your run volume, it has to live in the Movement Rebels calendar, where logged sessions do count toward load. Pick one home for lifting and commit to it. A split log is worse than either option alone.

FAQ

Is Hevy good enough on its own?

For a lot of lifters, yes. If your training is a split you trust and the only open question each session is what you lifted last time, Hevy answers that better than anything else on the market, and the free tier probably covers you. It stops being enough when your week has running or riding in it, or when you need something to decide the plan rather than record it.

Can Movement Rebels import my Hevy workout history?

No. There is no lifting-app integration and no CSV import. The integrations are Garmin Connect, Apple Health through the iOS app, and Concept2 for erg sessions. If you switch, your Hevy history stays in Hevy, and the coach builds its picture of you from the lifts, PRs and activities it sees starting the day you begin.

Does the AI coach pick my weights for me?

It programs the session with targets, and you log what you lifted against them. Do not expect an algorithm to read a number off your wrist and hand you a better working weight than your own program would, because the research on autoregulated load prescription shows similar strength gains to plain percentages. The coach earns its keep at the week level, deciding which day is heavy and when to back off.

Is $20 a month worth it when Hevy Pro is $3?

Only if you are buying different things. Hevy Pro buys unlimited routines and deeper charts on a log you drive yourself. The Movement Rebels subscription buys a coach that reads your Garmin or Apple Health data and writes the training week, plus the endurance, recovery and nutrition side of the app. If a log is all you want, $3 is the better deal, and we would tell you so.

Do I need a Garmin for the coach to work?

No. An iPhone with Apple Health is enough, since the native iOS app reads what is already in there. With no wearable at all the coach still works from your morning check-ins, your logged sessions and the goal you set. It has less signal to work with, and the day-to-day adjustments get blunter.

Will an AI coach write a proper hypertrophy split?

It programs strength sessions with sets, reps, tempo and rest written out, and it periodizes that work against everything else in your week. If what you want is a pure bodybuilding split with 20 sets of chest and no cardio anywhere, a dedicated program plus a logger is the cleaner fit. The coach is at its best when strength is one of several things competing for the same recovery.

How Movement Rebels fits

Hevy answers what you lifted. The harder question is what you should lift tomorrow, given everything else you put your body through this week.

That is the question Movement Rebels answers. Say you ran 5x1000 on Wednesday evening and your Garmin syncs the session overnight. Thursday morning you log the check-in: sleep 4, energy 3, legs sore. HRV is under baseline, Body Battery started at 31, and the calendar has a heavy squat day on it. The morning brief reads all of it: the interval session in your last 14 activities, this morning's check-in, the 145 kg triple you logged two weeks ago. One line in chat moves the squat to Friday and puts single-leg work and hinges on Thursday at a load you can hold clean. The week keeps its volume. The heavy day lands on legs that can do something with it.

Free for 7 days, then $20 a month or $200 a year. Keep Hevy for the log if you like it there. Let something else own the plan.

AI Coach vs Hevy: Strength Training, Logging, and Program Customization