Incredible vs Hevy: Free Gym Tracking With Recovery Intelligence

Incredible is a free health intelligence app combining strength training, readiness scoring, and vitals tracking on Apple Watch. Hevy is a social gym logging app with a generous free tier, 1,000+ exercises, and the best community features in the category. Both track your lifts. Incredible also tracks whether your body is ready for them.

At a Glance

Feature	Incredible	Hevy
Price	Free	Free tier (unlimited workouts), Pro $8.99/month or $59.99/year
Strength training logging	Yes	Yes
Exercise library	Yes	Yes (1,000+ with video demos)
1RM estimator	No	Yes
Apple Watch app	Yes	Yes
Workout templates	Yes	Yes (4 free, unlimited with Pro)
Social/community features	No	Yes (leaderboards, activity feed, likes/comments)
Workout sharing	No	Yes
Readiness score	Yes	No
HRV tracking	Yes	No
Sleep analysis	Yes	No
Fitness score (CTL/ATL)	Yes	No
Muscle group recovery	Yes	No
Body temperature	Yes	No
SpO2 tracking	Yes	No
Respiratory rate	Yes	No
Platforms	iOS/watchOS	iOS, Android, Web
Cloud sync	No (on-device)	Yes
Account required	No	Yes

The Core Difference

Hevy has built one of the best social gym logging experiences available. The exercise library has over 1,000 exercises with video demonstrations. The free tier is genuinely generous -- unlimited workout logging, up to 4 saved routines, and full access to the social features. Pro unlocks unlimited routines, advanced analytics, interval timers, and removes ads. The social layer is the standout: you can follow friends, share workouts, compare stats on leaderboards, and interact with an active fitness community through likes and comments on an activity feed.

What Hevy does not do is connect your gym performance to your body's recovery state. It cannot tell you that your HRV dropped overnight, that you slept poorly, or that the muscle groups you want to train today have not recovered from Tuesday's session. Your workout log and your biological readiness exist in completely separate systems.

Incredible takes a different approach. Rather than building a social platform around gym logging, it builds a health intelligence layer around your training. Your strength workouts feed into a readiness score that also accounts for HRV, sleep, resting heart rate, and five other vitals. The result is a single app that answers both "what did I do?" and "what should I do next?" -- two questions that most lifters ask every day but currently need multiple apps to answer.

Strength Training

Both apps cover gym logging fundamentals well.

Hevy has an extensive exercise library with over 1,000 exercises and video demonstrations for each. The logging interface is clean, with routine templates, progression tracking, body measurements, and a 1RM (one-rep max) estimator. The social layer is its standout feature -- you can follow other lifters, see their workouts in an activity feed, share routines, compare personal records on leaderboards, and leave likes and comments. For many lifters, the social accountability is what keeps them consistent. The free tier allows unlimited workout logging with up to 4 saved routines, which is more generous than most competitors.

Incredible handles core logging -- exercises, sets, reps, weight, templates, and Apple Watch control for hands-free tracking. Its exercise library is more focused than Hevy's, and there are no social features. Where Incredible diverges is what it does with your training data: every session feeds into a muscle group recovery model and a long-term fitness score.

If community and social accountability drive your training, Hevy has a clear advantage and is genuinely the best in the category at this. If you want your training data to inform your recovery and fitness trajectory, Incredible has the edge. The question is whether your gym app should be a social network or a health intelligence tool -- both are valid, but they lead to very different products.

Readiness and Recovery

Hevy does not include any recovery or readiness features. It does not read HRV, sleep, or biometric data from Apple Watch or HealthKit. Users who want recovery insights typically pair Hevy with a separate recovery app and mentally combine the two. The problem with this approach is that the recovery app cannot see what you did in the gym, so it makes recovery estimates based on heart rate alone -- missing the actual mechanical stress of your lifts.

Incredible generates a daily readiness score (0-100) from HRV, resting heart rate, sleep quality, and recent training load -- including the specific muscle groups you worked and how much volume you moved. This means if you logged a heavy push session on Monday, by Wednesday the app can tell you whether your chest and shoulders have recovered enough for another session, independent of what your HRV says.

This closed-loop approach -- where training data feeds recovery estimates, and recovery estimates inform future training -- is something you cannot replicate by running two separate apps side by side. The gap between your gym log and your recovery data is exactly where the most actionable information lives.

Fitness Level Tracking

Incredible uses CTL/ATL modeling to track your long-term fitness level, incorporating both cardio and strength data. This shows whether your training load is building fitness, maintaining, or pushing into overtraining territory -- a signal that pure logging apps cannot provide. The acute-to-chronic load ratio is one of the most validated predictors of injury risk in sports science, and having it displayed alongside your daily training log changes how you think about programming.

Hevy tracks workout-level statistics like total volume, exercise PRs, and session frequency. Pro unlocks more detailed analytics including muscle group volume breakdowns. But there is no aggregated fitness model or periodization-aware analysis that accounts for cumulative load over time. You can see that you did more volume this week than last week, but you cannot see whether that increase is within a productive range or represents an injury risk.

Vitals

Incredible tracks six vitals with historical trends: HRV, Sleep Score, Resting Heart Rate, Body Temperature, SpO2, and Respiratory Rate. These come from Apple Watch and HealthKit, and they directly influence your daily readiness score. Having vitals and training data in the same app means you can see the relationship between a poor night's sleep, a depressed HRV reading, and the heavy session you did the day before -- all in one place.

Hevy does not track any vitals. It is a workout logger with social features, not a health monitor. Your Apple Watch collects biometric data around the clock, but Hevy makes no use of it. To see how your training affects your HRV or sleep quality, you would need a separate app entirely.

Pricing

Incredible is completely free. All features -- strength training, readiness, fitness score, six vitals -- are available with no subscription, no account, no ads. A voluntary tip jar exists for those who want to support development.

Hevy has a genuinely generous free tier: unlimited workout logging, up to 4 saved routines, full social features, and the complete exercise library. Pro costs $8.99/month or $59.99/year, which unlocks unlimited saved routines, advanced analytics, interval timers, custom exercises, and removes ads. The free tier is usable enough that casual lifters may never need to upgrade, which is to Hevy's credit.

For pure gym logging, Hevy's free tier competes well -- arguably better than any other logging app's free offering. But if you add in the cost of a separate recovery app to get the readiness data Incredible includes for free, the total cost of a Hevy-based setup adds up. And if you want unlimited routines and analytics without ads, that is $60/year on top.

Privacy

Incredible processes everything on-device and requires no account. No health data leaves your phone. There is no sign-up flow, no email address required, no profile to create. You install the app and start using it immediately.

Hevy requires account creation and syncs workout data to their cloud. The social features inherently involve sharing data with other users -- your workout history, exercises, weights, and personal records can appear in other people's feeds depending on your privacy settings. This is the expected trade-off for a social platform, and Hevy gives you controls over visibility, but it means your training data exists on external servers and is potentially visible to others by default.

For people who view their training data as personal health information rather than social content, this distinction matters. Hevy is cross-platform (iOS, Android, and web) precisely because of cloud sync, which is a genuine advantage if you switch between devices. Incredible's on-device approach means your data stays private but does not follow you across platforms.

Who Should Choose What

Choose Incredible if you want your gym training and recovery intelligence in one private, free app. If what matters to you is understanding how your training affects your body -- not just recording it -- Incredible is the more complete solution. You trade social features for privacy and recovery intelligence.

Choose Hevy if the social dimension of training is important to you. Following friends, sharing workouts, comparing progress on leaderboards, and being part of a lifting community keeps many people consistent, and Hevy does this better than any other gym app. The free tier is the most generous in the category. If you train on Android or use the web app, Hevy is also the choice since Incredible is Apple-only. If you train primarily for the community experience and already have a separate recovery solution, Hevy is excellent at what it does.