I paused my Trainwell subscription, my exercise app. I didn’t give up my exercise routine if that’s what you’re wondering, though it has suffered in the last couple of weeks. As I explained to my excellent coach on the app, there were two reasons for that.

The more immediate and simple one is everything going around me: I’m moving out, and I am now tasked with working both in my new position and my old position, which I left a few months back since there’s no one else who can do it at this point. These two things with an additional few recent stressful events cause my insomnia to spike, and I often wake up after 4-5 hours of sleep, which messes up my ability to work even further, putting me in a vicious cycle of trying to make up lost for time and energy.

The longer, more complicated reason is the lack of flexibility. Trainwell is an exercise app with a limited number of exercises and a busy coach who can’t remember and adjust everything about you. Things like meditation and even running are not handled well by the app, at least not yet, and I have to look elsewhere for those. Since Trailwell costs $100 a month, I expect more from it, and it can’t deliver.

I have very limited space in the apartment to exercise, so some exercises and stretches don’t work for me. On top of that, the app works by introducing new cycles each couple of weeks, and these come filled with mostly new exercises that I haven’t done in the previous cycle. I tried to navigate away from exercises I didn’t want and keep the ones I did with limited success. New cycles usually mean a period of adjustment and learning, and I realized that this is starting to damage my routine. Instead of improving what I do slowly, I’m starting something new.

Speaking of routine, I’m now at a point where I want to exercise without being forced into it. It’s a good part of my day, with the key (that I keep forgetting) of doing just a little at a time and doing more after I start if I can and have the time. Doing a short 10-minute daily exercise is always better than not doing anything because I’m intimidated by an intense 30 minutes of weight lifting. Yes, I can adjust my exercises on the run and work with my coach, but that in itself is cumbersome, and I don’t always want to explain why I did one thing instead of the other every time. I asked myself: if I’m already adjusting and switching exercises to fit my needs, then what use is the app in guiding me anymore? And the last couple of weeks were based on adjustments to my crazy schedule.

So, I decided to return to my old workout sheet with the addition of a few exercises I’ve learned in the last months. Here’s a portion of it:

Auto-generated description: A workout log features exercises listed with durations and markings indicating which days exercises were performed.

However, I quickly learned that a simple spreadsheet is problematic. I want to measure daily exercises (in the image, you see the page for February. I have a sheet for January and will keep going for a year), so I’m using the Y axis for the exercise names. I wrote the specifications for reps/sets/weights next to the exercise’s name (it will take too much room to specify for each day), but it is an issue if I want to change the number of sets/reps I’m doing on the fly. For example, if I join pull-ups and chair dips, I probably want to lower the number of push-ups I do that day since they overlap the same muscle groups. Another issue is that different exercises may have different data altogether - for example, running records speed and distance, not weight and sets. Yet another problem is that the list of exercises becomes longer, and finding the exercise I want to do on a certain day and joining it with others becomes confusing, so I need to start color-code those, which means I need to be more picky about which colors I use when I go up in sets/reps during the week…

you get the idea. It just doesn’t cut it, and I have issues already.

Meanwhile, I have my Apple Watch, which I’m trying to utilize for all of this. It comes with Workouts, but those are basic pre-determined activities that don’t allow me to add weight or follow sets conveniently if I break for rest in between. There are other apps out there I could use, but then I run into the same problem I have with Trainwell and flexibility: if the app doesn’t have a certain workout, it’s annoying to use it just for some things and not everything.

I don’t like the lack of structure in my exercises, which is why I need the table on one hand, but on the other hand, it’s not flexible enough to do what I need. It’s starting to sound like “I’m holding it wrong”, not an app or a sheet problem, if you get my meaning.

Still, the exercises I end up doing are good and fit my routine better than the ones I followed on the app, as in. At least I’m doing something. I need to figure this out.