Five/Three/One - 531 Workouts

I like the approach taken here vs other lifting or program specific apps, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make this worth the cost of its add-ons. Here are some initial bugs/suggestions. 1. A bit pedantic, but “dumbbell” is spelled wrong everywhere it is mentioned. 2. Why, no matter what variation of 5/3/1 I choose, can I only adjust the timer of the Boring But Big sets? If I’m doing FSL, that setting should be for FSL sets. 3. Need to be able to choose to complete exercises out of order. Let’s say it’s bench day and two of my accessories are the fly machine and dips, and in the app the are entered in that order. If the fly machine is taken and I have to do dips first, there is no way for me to log dips as I go. This same scenario also applies to warm up exercises. I like to do hip abductors and adductors before squatting, but have no way of logging those as I do them since the only way to get to them is to skip all the squat sets. 4. Should be able to set a timer per accessory exercise, instead of a one size fits all timer. Edit: have to take another star off after experiencing another bad design flaw that made me stop giving this app a chance. If you miss a workout you could only reschedule that missed workout, and none of the other upcoming workouts, without resetting the entire cycle. So let’s say you have Workout A scheduled on Saturday and then Workout B scheduled for Sunday. If you miss Workout A then you could reschedule it for Sunday. But there is no way to reschedule Workout B too until that workout is also considered missed. The result is that the app tells you that you have to complete 2 workouts each day, unless you reset your whole cycle. You should be able to just push all workouts ahead by however many calendar days or workout days were missed.

This app is worth it if you are looking for something to quickly generate modifications to workout routines. Its free to start. It costs about 10$ to get the needed add ons for the assistance workouts (which id recommend). The app’s strength is its ability to quickly generate sets and reps based on basic 531 patterns. The interface is easy to use and the timer works well. The only quirk is that you have to do the sets in order. This makes sense for the program…bit if you are in a crowded gym sometimes its hard to do all in order. All that said this gets 5 stars because it is a major time saver. Great job by developers. Fwiw I like this app in combination w strong. Strong allows for more customization but takes a bit longer to program. Admittedly though 531 is stil great here for those workouts as it moves you out of doing the same set/rep range

There are a lot of spreadsheets and apps floating around for tracking a 5/3/1 workout plan, but this one is by far the best. Easy to use, not confusing like many other apps. Be aware that in order to select custom accessory work (which is basically a must in my opinion) you need to pay a small fee, but that’s a totally fair price to pay on my opinion. All that said, there’s one feature I’d love to see. I’d love to see a way to track weight in the accessory work so I can easily see how much I lifted last time and track how my accessory lifts progress over time. Right now I just write the weight in the notes, but I’d love a dedicated way to input it, and I’d love a display on the accessory lifts that states how much weight you used last time you did that lift,