Five iPhone fitness apps that earn their place on a serious training week.

Peloton's iPhone app has spent the last three years quietly turning into a credible standalone studio. You don't need the bike, the tread, or the row. You need a yoga mat, a pair of dumbbells, and a willingness to take a class from an instructor who is going to use your first name.

The catalogue is the reason to be here. Cycling and running classes obviously, but the strength library is now larger than the cardio library, and Peloton's outdoor running and walking classes (audio-only, GPS-tracked, instructor-led) are the best in the category. A May 2026 feature called Note to Self lets you attach private notes to any class — instructor cues, the weight you used, what to remember next time — and the iOS-only Strength+ companion app turns gym sessions into a separate, weight-aware logger that syncs back to your main Peloton history.

The catch is the price and the lock-in. The Peloton App One tier is $12.99 a month for unlimited cardio, the App+ tier $24 for the full library, and once you're in the system you've effectively married a particular bench of instructors. That's fine if you like them. It's a problem if you don't.

Nike Training Club is the rare big-brand app that gave away the paywall and stayed there. Every workout, every program, every Master Trainer-led session is free. No subscription, no upsell to a hardware product, no nudge to buy shoes. Nike treats the app as brand marketing and the user as the beneficiary.

The library spans 185+ workouts ranging from fifteen-minute bodyweight sessions to full equipment-based strength programs, with dedicated streams for yoga, mobility, and HIIT. Apple Watch integration is tight — heart rate on the wrist, skip-and-pause from the Watch, calories synced back to the Health app — and Nike Run Club activity logs show up in the same history view if you're using both.

A March 2026 redesign reorganised the workout browser in a way that's drawn legitimate complaints in App Store reviews: choosing a category like yoga or strength now requires more scrolling through the unified feed than it used to. The content is undiminished. The shortest path to it is a tap or two longer than it should be.

MyFitnessPal exists because someone had to build the food database, and once they had, no competitor could catch up. Fifteen years of user-contributed entries plus a verified branded-food layer means almost anything you eat is already in there with a barcode that scans on the first try. That database is the moat, and it's why nutritionists and trainers default to MyFitnessPal even when they prefer the UI of something else.

The Winter 2026 release brought Meal Scan Photo Upload, an AI-powered logger that lets you snap a picture of your plate and log it later — useful when you're at a restaurant and don't want to fiddle with a phone. Premium+ subscribers also get an improved Meal Planner with a Recipes tab, the Blue Check Collection of dietitian-reviewed recipes, and (in the US) ten dollars off the first three Instacart orders over fifty dollars through August 2026.

The free tier is genuinely usable for calorie counting, but barcode scanning, voice logging, and macro breakdowns now sit behind Premium ($79.99/year) and the meal-planning features behind Premium+ ($99.99/year). That's a steep climb for what used to be a free app, and it's the most legitimate complaint against MyFitnessPal in 2026.

Stronglifts 5x5 is the linear-progression barbell program that taught a generation of beginners to squat, bench, deadlift, and press without thinking too hard about programming. The app is a direct expression of that philosophy — open it before a session, it tells you the three lifts and the weights, you log each set with a tap, it adds five pounds for next time. There is almost nothing else in the interface, and that's the point.

The 2026 update consolidated the previous tiered subscriptions into a single Pro plan, putting all program variations, plate calculator, warmup sets, and full history behind one price. The core 5x5 program remains free and complete enough that a beginner lifter can run a full sixteen-week newbie cycle without ever paying. Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and Mac Catalyst builds are all shipped from the same codebase.

It is unapologetically narrow. If you want supersets, drop sets, conjugate periodisation, or anything that isn't barbell-driven linear progression, this is the wrong app. Pair it with Strong below if you outgrow the program.

Where Stronglifts hands you the program, Strong hands you the blank logbook and trusts you to design the workout. It's the reference workout tracker for anyone past their first year of lifting — custom routines, exercise variants, plate math, one-rep-max trends, body-measurement charts, and a graph view that has aged better than any of its competitors.

A 2026 release fully rebuilt the Apple Watch app on a new sync engine, with keyboard entry, music controls, and a streamlined interface that makes between-set logging quick enough not to derail the rest you're supposed to be taking. Inline rest timers now run by default and can be customised per-exercise, the exercise list got fuzzy search and visual highlighting, and the app added Google login plus iOS Keychain and third-party password manager support.

Strong is free for up to three custom routines; Strong Pro at around $5/month or $30/year unlocks unlimited routines, the analytics views, and Apple Health writing. For a self-coached lifter, it is the cheapest and least-distracting place to keep a serious training history.

Pick two of these, not five. The honest pairings break down by what kind of training week you actually run.

If you lift, pair Stronglifts 5x5 (or Strong, if you've outgrown linear progression) with MyFitnessPal. The barbell side gets a program plus a logger; the food side gets the database that makes bulking and cutting numerically real instead of vibes-based. Cardio-led trainees — runners, cyclists, group-fitness people — should pair Nike Training Club with MyFitnessPal: free, deep, and honest about calories without needing a subscription on either side.

Peloton is the answer for one specific buyer: someone who wants the studio experience, likes being instructor-led, and doesn't mind paying $13–24 a month to be inside that ecosystem. If that's you, Peloton plus MyFitnessPal is a complete fitness stack with no other apps required. If it isn't you, save the subscription and let Nike Training Club do the same job for free.