Apple / health_and_fitness / STRONGLIFTS 5X5 WORKOUT
REVIEW
Stronglifts 5x5 is the novice barbell program with the chrome stripped off.
Mehdi Hadim took the most-recommended beginner lifting routine on the internet and built the simplest possible app around it. The discipline is in what he refuses to add.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
There is a specific kind of app that does one thing, refuses to do anything else, and gets quietly more useful the longer you use it. Stronglifts 5x5 has been that app for barbell beginners for over ten years. Mehdi Hadim wrote the routine on his blog in 2007, built the iPhone app a few years later, and has been resisting the urge to add a social feed ever since.
The bet was that the program — five sets of five reps, three alternating compound lifts a session, five pounds added every workout — was good enough that the app didn’t need to be clever. That bet was correct. The 5x5 protocol is a well-respected linear-progression routine for untrained lifters; the disagreement among coaches is about how long it works for, not whether it works at all.
What Hadim’s app does is remove every reason not to run it correctly. You don’t pick the lifts, you don’t pick the weight, you don’t pick the rest period. You walk into the gym, you load the bar to the number on the screen, and you do the work. That’s the whole product, and after a decade of feature creep in every other fitness app, it’s a more radical position than it used to be.
The app does exactly one thing: it tells you what to lift, counts your rest, and adds weight next time.
FEATURES
The free tier is the program in its purest form. Two alternating workouts — A: squat, bench, barbell row; B: squat, overhead press, deadlift — 5 sets of 5 reps at the same weight, three days a week, with a rest timer between sets and an automatic 5-pound jump on every successful session. You enter today's lifts, the next session is already programmed.
Pro unlocks the parts that turn a routine into a system: a plate calculator that shows the exact 45/25/10/5/2.5 stack to load on the bar, deload logic when you fail a lift three times, accessory work (curls, dips, chin-ups, ab wheel), warm-up sets calculated from your working weight, and a graph of every lift over time. Apple Watch support keeps the rest timer on your wrist between sets, which is the one place a phone is genuinely in the way.
Audio cues call out the next set, the workout history is exportable, and the whole thing runs offline. There is no social feed, no coaching DMs, no AI form check.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The program itself is the wins. Stronglifts 5x5 is a slight variation on Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength and shares its central claim — that an untrained lifter can add weight to a barbell linearly for months — and that claim has held up across more than a decade of public results threads on Reddit, lifting forums, and YouTube.
The app's job is to stay out of the way of that, and Hadim does. The home screen shows today's lifts and nothing else. Linear progression is automatic. The plate calculator alone is worth Pro — eyeballing 87.5kg at 6 a.m. is how new lifters develop a quiet hatred of math.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Pro subscription has crept up over the years and now sits in the same price bracket as full-coaching apps like Future or Caliber, which is a hard sell when the underlying program is free on a one-page PDF anywhere on the internet. The plate calculator and deload logic are real, but they're not $80-a-year real for someone who can already do arithmetic.
And the program is genuinely a novice program. Past your first six to nine months — when squats stall in the high-200s and bench stalls in the 200s for most lifters — you need a different periodisation scheme, and the app does not have one. It will keep telling you to add 5 pounds long after your body has stopped cooperating, and Hadim's answer ("deload 10%, try again") is the right textbook answer but a frustrating one to hear on attempt four.
CONCLUSION
Install the free version on day one of your first barbell program — the whole point of 5x5 is that you don't pick anything, you just lift what the app says. Upgrade to Pro after a month if the plate calculator and progress graph are worth the subscription to you; many people will be fine without it. When the linear gains stop, move on to a real intermediate program — 5/3/1, Greyskull LP, or a written coach — and don't blame the app for not following you there.