FAQ

TestFlight is Apple’s own app for beta testing. Developers use it to hand out apps before they reach the App Store, and Apple reviews every beta build before testers can install it.

Joining takes a minute. Open the link on your iPhone, get TestFlight from the App Store, open it and tap through Apple’s welcome screens, then tap Accept and Install. New builds arrive as updates, the same way. Each build runs for 90 days, and there’s always a newer one before then. You can leave any time by deleting the app.

Found a problem? Take a screenshot in the app and TestFlight offers to send it straight to me.

Ready? Open this link on your iPhone: Join the beta .

An iPhone on iOS 26 or 27. For music, Apple Music gives the best experience. Without it, a few built-in clips let you try the idea, and if you’d rather train in silence with only the voice guidance, that works too. For heart-rate features, you need an Apple Watch or a Bluetooth chest strap. The app checks all of this before your first session and helps with anything missing, including installing Apple’s higher-quality voices, which are otherwise buried six levels deep in Settings.

Not to try it. To get the most from it, honestly, yes.

Gym Jockey plays your clips from Apple Music, and that includes Trending, the clips other lifters share. It’s the one music service an iPhone app can work with closely enough to start a song at an exact moment and loop it cleanly, which is what a clip needs.

Without it, a handful of built-in clips ship with the app, and you can record a cadence in your own voice. That’s enough to kick the tires and feel how a workout runs, but it isn’t your music, and your music is what makes it work. The same tight integration is why there’s no Android version yet; see below.

No. The phone works completely on its own, with headphone controls, the Lock Screen and a Live Activity. The Watch is a remote for people who want to use their wrist.

Not possible for now. Spotify limits apps like this one to a handful of users unless they’re run by a large company. If that changes, it’ll be the first thing looked at. Built-in clips work regardless of where your music lives.

Not for now: Gym Jockey needs an iPhone. The reason is the same one that ties it to Apple Music. The app depends on close integration with the phone’s audio, music library, Watch and Lock Screen, and that doesn’t port. An Android version would be a rebuild, and a gamble.

It’s a gamble, not an impossibility. If you’d use it, say so: support@gymjockey.com. Real interest is what would change the answer.

The Apple Watch is optional. For heart rate without one, a Bluetooth chest strap works.

Ten, spoken and on screen: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Norwegian, and Chinese in both Simplified and Traditional.

Yes, and you can do it sitting down. Practice runs don’t save a workout. The first time you open the app, Quick Start sets up one exercise for you and runs it in Couch Mode, a guided practice run. Close your eyes and see how much you can follow with the voice alone. If you’ve already been through the first launch, Run Onboarding Again in Settings brings Quick Start back without erasing anything. Later, before its first real workout, any new exercise can run as a Dry Run. See Getting Started.

To practice the controls one at a time, open Settings → Playgrounds. There you can try the headphone buttons, Siri and the heart-rate timer until each one is a reflex. Eyes Free teaches you the workout player by touch: the screen goes dark, and you find each button by where it is. It works with VoiceOver or without, and with VoiceOver you can play it with Direct Touch.

The color and the ring’s pattern tell you what’s timing your rest, on the iPhone, the Lock Screen and the Watch alike:

• Teal and solid is a rest on the clock. It ends when the time runs out.
• Orange and dotted is a rest that’s waiting on your heart rate. The timer shows the longest it will wait. Once your pulse is below target, the ring turns solid teal and counts down what’s left. It also turns teal near the end, once a lower pulse could no longer end the rest any sooner. See heart rate.
• Mauve and dashed is a soft timer, the rest between two exercises of a routine. It plays a sound when the time is up, but nothing waits on it: you start the next exercise when you’re ready.

On the Lock Screen, a symbol beside the countdown says the same thing: a timer, a heart or an hourglass.

On a heart-rate rest, the heart next to your pulse is orange while the rest waits on your pulse, green once your pulse is below target, and red if the clock takes over before your pulse gets there.

Gym Jockey uses sound so you don’t have to look at the screen, and the shape of a sound tells you what it means. Beeps get you ready for a set. Rising chimes push you to finish a timed hold. Falling chimes wind you down at the end of a rest, and your music stops just before them, so the next set starts in quiet. Heart-rate rests have their own tones.

To hear them all, go to Settings → Sounds. Play all says each sound’s name and then plays it, so you can learn them before your first workout. That’s also where you change the rest timer: choose a theme, or type a short phrase of your own for the Announcer to read in place of each sound. More sounds will be added there over time.

Yes. Rest can be one duration for the whole exercise or set per set, for example longer after the heavy first set and shorter later. You can also set the countdown before a set (one to ten beeps) and, for timed work, a set’s duration. For the hardest exercises, rest can follow your heart rate instead of the clock: see The workout.

If you want it to. Each exercise has gates, points where the app either waits for you or rolls straight on: one before the exercise starts (Prep), one before each warm-up set and each working set, and one at the end (Wrap-up). Set a gate to Wait and the app holds there. When the rest is over you hear “Recovery over. Holding at the gate. Press play when ready.”, and nothing moves until you press play. Set it to Continue and the next set is called as soon as the rest runs out. You find the gates on each exercise, in its Warmup, Work and Prep & Wrap-up tiles.

The Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island show a Live Activity, and iOS decides how often it may update. A workout sends a lot of updates, and when there are too many in a short time, iOS holds some back. The Live Activity can then fall behind for a while, or show a heart rate that has stopped moving. The app itself, the Watch and the voice stay current, so if they disagree with the Lock Screen, trust them.

No. Siri is occasionally finicky, which is why voice commands are a bonus rather than the main control. The main control is the buttons on your headphones. Siri adds commands such as “Jockey, log 8”, and the Playground lets you practice the controls before a real workout depends on them.

Siri is for when your hands are full. The headphone buttons stay the main control, and everything below works alongside them.

Calling Siri

• On the iPhone, say “Siri” or “Hey Siri”, whichever you’ve turned on, or press and hold the side button. Both are set in the Settings app, under Siri (Apple Intelligence & Siri on some iPhones).
• With AirPods, the same words work through the AirPods. While they’re connected, their own settings appear near the top of the Settings app, and that’s where you choose what a press or a tap does. With other headphones, pressing and holding the middle button often calls Siri.
• On the Apple Watch, say “Siri” or “Hey Siri”, or press and hold the Digital Crown. With Raise to Speak turned on, you raise your wrist and say the command, with no “Siri” at all. These options are in the Watch’s own Settings app, under Siri, or in the Watch app on the iPhone.

Naming the app

Every command includes the app’s name, before or after the command. Siri knows three: Gym Jockey, Jockey and Takima. The lists below use Jockey, and the other two work in its place. Takima is a spare that sounds like nothing else, for when Siri keeps mishearing the other two.

On the Watch, Siri knows Play, Pause, Back, Forward, Time, Heart rate and Log. The other commands go to the iPhone, directly or through your headphones.

The commands

During a workout, largely yes. The voice tells you the exercise, the load, the plates to add or remove on each side, and when your rest is over. You answer with your headphone buttons, and Siri covers most of the rest: play, pause, back, forward, logging a set and more, with commands such as “Jockey, log 8”.

The Watch was designed to be read without glasses. The type is large, color carries meaning, and the main face is laid out like a music player: big back, play and forward buttons in the middle, the set log and the mic in the lower corners. It also reads aloud the values you log.

In the current beta, the main path on the iPhone has had an accessibility pass: first launch, Quick Start and Couch Mode, Exercises, the workout, Reports and Settings. Larger text, contrast, Reduce Motion and cues that don’t rely on color have been checked along that path. Editing exercises and routines in detail hasn’t had the pass yet.

Along that path the controls have VoiceOver labels, and VoiceOver users are testing them in the beta. The app speaks with its own voices, the ones you pick, not with VoiceOver’s. Settings → Voices has Speech Speed, which sets the pace of all of them, and Prefer Synthesized Speech, which has your chosen voices read the app’s recorded lines. With VoiceOver, Direct Touch lets you use the workout player by touch, and Magic Tap puts the button you need most under a two-finger double-tap. Voice Control, Switch Control and braille haven’t been tested.

If you use VoiceOver, Zoom or larger text and would like to help shape this, tell me: support@gymjockey.com.

Yes, with Direct Touch, on the iPhone and on Apple Watch. Turn it on in Settings → Accessibility → Direct Touch. During a workout, the player’s main screen then acts on your touch at once, with no swiping and no double-tap. Touch where a button is and it acts.

The player has three rows of equal height. At the top, the information row: touch it to hear where you are. In the middle, Back, Play or Pause, and Forward. During a rest, Back adds time. At the bottom, Log your sets, Heart rate and Record. Hold Record to record a memo, and lift your finger to stop.

A one-finger swipe left opens the workout menu. Direct Touch is off there, so you swipe and double-tap as usual, and a three-finger swipe right takes you back to the player. The set editor and the other screens work as usual too. If nothing is touched for a minute at the start of a workout, Gym Jockey goes back to the start screen and turns Direct Touch off.

On Apple Watch it works the same way while VoiceOver is on on the watch, which has its own VoiceOver switch. A one-finger swipe left opens the menu, where Player brings you back.

If a touch only reads the screen and nothing happens, check the VoiceOver rotor. Turn it to Direct Touch, then swipe up or down until VoiceOver says it’s on.

To learn the layout before a workout, play Eyes Free in Settings → Playgrounds, with Direct Touch or without. See practice.

With VoiceOver, a two-finger double-tap anywhere on the workout player is Magic Tap. By default it plays or pauses your workout. In Settings → Accessibility → Magic Tap you can give it the job of another button instead, for example moving on to the next step, logging your sets, hearing your heart rate or muting the music.

When you turn Direct Touch on, Magic Tap takes the job of switching Direct Touch off and back on during a workout, unless you give it another one. The setting itself stays on.

On Apple Watch, Magic Tap doesn’t work while Direct Touch is on.

In the app. Four come built in: Beginner Barbell A/B, Bodyweight Basics, Dumbbell Full Body and Push / Pull / Legs, each tagged with its level, goal, days a week and equipment. The first launch offers them, and later you can install one whenever you create a routine: tap Start from a Program. A program installs its routines and exercises ready to play, and you change what you like afterwards. Getting Started has the details.

More programs can be added. If there’s one you’d like to see, ask: support@gymjockey.com.

Yes. A superset is one exercise with several movements. It runs the same cycle of work and recovery as any exercise; the difference is that you log each movement, with one effort rating for the round. The plate math is per movement, and the Watch editor steps through each one too. See Exercises & Routines.

Yes, with a superset. Give the exercise two movements that mirror each other, named “Left” and “Right” for example, and after every set you log each side on its own, with its own numbers. Siri’s Log gives both sides the same number, so if one side came up short, correct it in the log. It works for any one-sided lift: curls, rows, presses, lunges or leg extensions. The exercise library has a left/right curl set up this way, if you’d like a model to copy.

Yes, both for today and for next time.

For today: if the rack you need is taken, open Up Next on the Watch or the iPhone and tap another exercise. Play Now starts it right away, and the one you were on comes back next. Play Next lines it up after the current one. Skip exercise moves on and keeps the sets you’ve already done; with your hands full, say “Jockey, skip exercise.” On the iPhone you can also add an exercise mid-workout. If the bar was heavier or lighter than planned, correct the load when you log the set, and the app adjusts what it asks for next.

For next time: hold the mic, on the phone or the Watch, at any point during an exercise and say what you want to change. The memo waits at the top of the routine, before and after every workout, until you act on it. At the end of the workout, write a Next Session Goal in the wrap-up, and it’s waiting when you next open the routine. Changes to the routine itself, such as sets, ranges or rests, you make afterwards on the exercise.

Yes. A movement is counted in reps or in seconds. A timed set counts down instead of counting reps, chimes each minute, and either ends on its own or waits for you to press forward. The built-in demo DEMO FLOWING PLANK runs from start to finish without you touching anything.

Yes. When a movement uses a barbell, you pick the bar: Olympic Men’s, Olympic Women’s, EZ Curl, Trap, Safety Squat, Swiss, Multi Grip, or Custom, where you enter its weight. The loads you plan and log are totals, bar included. The app takes the bar off and splits the rest, so you hear “Add 5 kg per side.” instead of a total to work out under the bar. See Plate math.

Enter it as the machine’s Starting Resistance, the weight you move before you add any plates. Then choose whether it counts. With Log Starting Resistance, it’s added to every set you log, so your numbers show the full weight moved. With Ignore Starting Resistance, you log the plates alone. Either way you only hear what changes: “Add 10 kg.” on a machine loaded in the middle, or the amount per side on one loaded on each side.

You choose in Settings. Every load keeps the unit you entered it in, so switching later doesn’t rewrite your history.

Yes. Say you started an exercise in kilos when you meant pounds. Open the exercise, go to its Push & Pull tile and open Load; just below the unit you’ll find Relabel Past Sets…. It relabels the exercise’s history with the unit you meant. The numbers stay as you entered them and only the unit changes.

The Push & Pull tile only shows from the Intermediate level up. If you chose Beginner, change Experience Level in Settings → Profile first.

There’s no library of celebrity trainers or synthetic hype-men. The Announcer uses Apple’s text-to-speech. The Coach voice is you, or your actual coach, recorded.

They’re entirely optional, and empty by default. Nothing is pre-written: the notes system contains exactly what you or your coach put into it, and nothing speaks unless you’ve set it to.

You drop to the free tier and keep the core training loop and full export. Your data is in your own iCloud either way, and you never lose access to it.

Yes: see Bring your own data.

There’s no social feed, no likes, no badges and no confetti. The one number the app keeps for motivation is your streak, and at the end of a workout you can leave a session out of it. The roadmap lists what’s deliberately never coming.