Push Two Minute Review
After a whole year as my fitness partner, PUSH Workout & Gym Tracker has become an indispensable part of my training regimen. PUSH is the brainchild of fitness influencer and YouTuber Joe Delaneyand it is designed to do one thing extremely well. It's an app created to help you build muscle as quickly as possible, using AI-powered workout routines, strict exercise tracking, and measured progressive overload.
The first thing that catches your attention about PUSH is its elegant and well-built interface. Training and fitness apps can often be a cacophony of bright colors, images, text and numbers everywhere, but not so with PUSH. It shows that a lot of effort has been put into the user interface and the experience of using the application. The fonts, menus and icons are well thought out, spacious but complete. There are only a few colors on the white background, a traffic light system helps point out progress, PBs and plateaus at a glance.
When you use PUSH for the first time, you will be asked to generate a training plan. Plans are flexible, but range from three to six sessions per week. You can also choose your preferred split (gym lingo for your sequence of training sessions), choosing between “full body” or “leg push and pull” sessions. The latter is more familiar to most gym-goers, but the former is the more optimal split, with muscles grouped to minimize cross-fatigue.
You'll also be asked about your sleep and stress levels, your training experience, and which muscles you should focus on, before finally determining the level of equipment available to you. You can even substitute certain exercises in your plan before you start, and over time the app will make recommendations if you generate new plans, to increase or decrease your training frequency. The plan generation software is really simple and easy to use, so you will always feel like you have the right program for you.
Once you have your program, it's time to get started. You can see upcoming workouts and scroll between days to see what's on the agenda, giving you a good overview of how the week is going. You'll probably be surprised to find a fairly diverse mix of exercises throughout the week. You'll often find yourself training legs, back, shoulders, chest, arms, core and more on the same day or together in ways you may not have expected, but it's all part of the optimization process at the heart of PUSH. A little unfamiliar at first, but I definitely felt the benefits of changing my training routine and distributing the load more evenly between different muscle groups.
The workouts are divided into phases, so you will start with a strength phase with a lot of weight, few repetitions and three or more minutes of rest. You then move on to stabilized compounds such as lat pulldowns, before finishing with a pump phase of lower weight, higher reps and reduced rest. For each exercise, you'll get clearly marked target weights and reps, and simply check the box by tapping it with your thumb to mark a set and start the rep timer. You can manually adjust inputs if you don't hit your target reps or if you lift more weight than listed in the app.
Over time, the AI will track your progress and eventually suggest a new weight or higher rep count. This will become clearer over time as you use the app, but it's very motivating and gives you an incredible sense of progress. If you stop, he or she will recommend an exercise to “break the plateau,” or you can try again. You can also change exercises on the fly during workouts.
The app presents progress over the past seven days, highlighting muscles that are likely growing or stagnant, which can help you refocus your efforts while you exercise. Each exercise is accompanied by a helpful animated video guide, although beginners may find the lack of instructions a little discouraging.
There are a couple of quirks when using PUSH. I don't love that there is no volume control for the sleep timer. It's tied to the volume of your music (at least on iPhone), so the louder your music or podcast is, the louder the beep will be at the end of your rest period. AI is not infallible either; I recently stalled on a 100kg bench press, and the AI suggested I try a 1002.5kg plate breaker, instead of 102.5kg.
Overall though, the app has been a pleasure to use over the 12 months I've been a customer and is well worth the financial investment. And there's more to come Creator Delaney has teased changes to the app on his Instagram.So there has never been a better time to embark on what is undoubtedly one of the best fitness apps on the market.
Push: Price and availability
Push: Specifications
| Platforms: | iOS (tested), Android |
| Price: | $89.99/£89.99/AU$144.99 per year or $15.49/£14.99/AU$23.49 per month |
| Pairs with device: | iPhone or Android smartphone |
| Guided content: | AI-powered strength and muscle workouts |
| Video content: | Exercise guide |
Push: scorecard
| Category | Comment | Score |
| Worth | It's definitely expensive when it comes to fitness apps, but I find it invaluable. | 4/5 |
| Design | The design of this app is possibly its biggest feature, the interface is a pleasure to use and makes tracking workouts a pleasure. | 5/5 |
| Characteristics | Very powerful AI-powered program generation, training and rest tracking, and a collection of peer-reviewed literature. | 5/5 |
| Performance | Strong overall, but the AI progressive overload can sometimes be quirky and there's no volume control for the rest timer. | 4.5/5 |
| Total | A brilliantly designed app with very few bugs. | 4.5/5 |
Push: Should I Buy?
Buy if…
Don't buy it if…
Also consider
| Row 0 – Cell 0 | Push | Apple Fitness Plus | fitbod |
| Platforms: | iOS, Android (tested) | iPhone, iPad, Apple TV | iOS and Android |
| Price: | $89.99/£89.99/$AU$144.99 per year or $15.49/£14.99/$23.49 per month | $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$14.99 per month | $12.99 / approximately £10 / AU$20 per month |
| Pairs with device: | iPhone or Android smartphone | apple watch | Phone, companion app available for Apple Watch. |
| Guided content: | AI-powered strength and muscle workouts | Wide range of exercises and disciplines. | Multitude of exercises |
| Video: | Exercise guide | Extensive library of exercise classes | Guided demonstration video of each exercise. |
how i tried it
I paid to use PUSH for a year and have used it six times a week, every week, for the last 12 months. I have generated several new plans to follow and have used its functions for a whole year by doing a daily workout with the help of the application. All my testing was done on an iPhone 15 Pro Max or iPhone 16 Pro Max.