How to track exercises that aren't reps and weight

Every mainstream workout app assumes two things: that your exercise is on their list, and that a set is made of reps and weight. For athletes, both assumptions are usually wrong.

If you train stickhandling, ankle mobility, shooting accuracy, sprint times or agility work, you've hit this. A sprint set is reps and time. A shooting set is makes and misses. A mobility test is centimetres. None of those fit a reps-and-weight form, and no amount of workarounds makes "45 reps at 0 lbs" mean anything.

Here's an honest comparison of the real options, including the ones that aren't apps.

What you actually need from a tracking method

Four requirements. Most tools fail at least one:

1. Your own exercise names. Not a picker list. If you can't type "knee-to-wall left" or "toe drags," the tool can't hold your training.
2. Your own input fields. The statistics you record have to change by exercise type — time, accuracy, makes, misses, distance, centimetres, touches.
3. Derived numbers. Raw logs aren't progress. Progress is reps × weight, or makes ÷ misses, or touches ÷ time — a single number you can put on an axis.
4. Trend over time, per exercise. Not a workout history. A line, for one exercise, over months, with sensible time buckets — because a month of individual sessions is too noisy to read.

The options, honestly

A spreadsheet — genuinely works, and I'll say so

Google Sheets or Excel satisfies every requirement above. Any columns you want, any formula, any chart. It is the most flexible option and it costs nothing.

It works. People just stop doing it:

• Typing into a spreadsheet on a phone, on a court or at a rink, between sets, is genuinely unpleasant. Friction at the moment of logging is what kills tracking.
• The chart doesn't build itself. Someone has to write the averaging and bucketing formulas, and then maintain them as exercises get added.
• Most people quit by week three. It never fails, it just keeps asking for a little work, forever.

If you're the sort of person who'll maintain a spreadsheet, use a spreadsheet. It's a completely legitimate answer and it's free.

Notes app — fine for capture, useless for progress

Zero friction to write down "50 shots, 32 makes." No math, no trend, nothing to compare. You end up with a wall of text that technically contains the answer and never gives it to you. Good as a stopgap, not as a system.

Mainstream workout apps — fast entry, wrong fields

Strong, Hevy, FitNotes and the rest are well built for what they're for: barbell and machine work, logged as reps and weight, from a built-in exercise library. If you train bench, squat and rows, they're excellent.

Where they break for athletes:

• The exercise list doesn't contain your drills, and custom exercises usually still inherit the same reps-and-weight input structure.
• You can't define what a set is made of. Accuracy, time and makes have nowhere to go.
• Progress views assume volume and one-rep-max style math, which is meaningless for a mobility test or a shooting session.

The common workaround is stuffing numbers into the wrong fields — logging accuracy as "weight" — which works until you look at a graph six weeks later and can't remember which field meant what.

Sport-specific apps — good depth, narrow scope

There are solid single-purpose tools (shot trackers, sprint timers, mobility apps). If you only need one thing measured, they're often the best version of that one thing. The problem is that a real training week has five or six different kinds of measurement, and you end up with five apps that can't be compared to each other.

Athlete Craft — built specifically for this

Full disclosure: I built it, because I ran into this exact wall as a competitive hockey player and every option above failed me somewhere. Two ideas:

• Custom presets. A preset is a set of input statistics — up to five — that you define. "Shooting" might be makes + misses. "Sprints" might be reps + time. "Mobility" might be a single cm field. Then you type your own exercise name onto it, and everything logged under that name groups together.
• Views. A View defines the Y-axis: pick a preset, multiply or divide its inputs, then choose average, total or highest. "Highest reps × weight," "average makes ÷ misses." X-axis is dates, over 30/90/180/360 days, split into six intervals — so you're comparing periods, not noisy single sessions.

A rough decision guide

Whatever you choose, three things matter more than the tool

1. Standardise the test before you track it. A number recorded under changing conditions isn't data. Fix the surface, the warm-up, the rep count, the time of day — then measure. This is the step people skip, and it wrecks everything downstream.
2. Log everything, including bad days. Selective logging produces a chart of your ceiling rather than your ability, and your ceiling is mostly luck.
3. Compare blocks, not sessions. Four weeks against four weeks. Single sessions bounce around far more than real improvement does, in every skill — see the worked examples in the guides below.