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Boostcamp vs phase.fitness
Boostcamp gives you somebody else's program and logs it beautifully, for free. phase.fitness writes yours and rewrites it every four weeks. The choice is between a library and a plan.
Updated
The short answer
Boostcamp is a free workout tracker with a large library of ready-made lifting programs — 11,000 of them, including coach-designed ones — on iOS and Android, with auto-progression and analytics and no paywall on the programs. phase.fitness does not hand you a program to pick: it writes one from your goal, equipment and constraints, across strength, cardio and calisthenics, and reads each finished phase to build the next. If a known template fits your goal, Boostcamp costs nothing and does it well. If your week needs ordering across modalities, that is what phase.fitness is for.
What Boostcamp is
A free workout tracker built around a large library of ready-made programs, many of them well-known community and coach-designed templates, with auto-progression and analytics built in.
Everything below comes from their own site, read on . Where a page did not say something, the row says so rather than guessing — “not stated” means we could not find it, not that the product cannot do it.
Side by side
Where the program comes from
Picking a template and having one written are different products, whatever the marketing says.
Price
One of these is free, and that matters more than any feature row.
What it plans
Whether the endurance side of your week is in the plan or beside it.
Where you train
A tracker is where you log; a planner has to send the session somewhere.
Progression between blocks
Auto-progression inside a program is not the same as writing the next block.
When Boostcamp is the better choice
- You want a known template — 5/3/1, GZCLP, nSuns, PPL — and you want to run it as written.
- You do not want to pay anything, which is a completely legitimate answer.
- You mainly want a tracker with good analytics, and the program is secondary.
- You train only in the gym and nothing in your week needs ordering against a long run.
When phase.fitness is
- No template fits, because your week has lifting, endurance and a skill in it.
- You want the next block written from the one that just ended rather than chosen again.
- You already log in Hevy or Liftosaur, or on a Garmin, and want the plan to arrive there.
- You want calisthenics skills on a progression rather than in a note.
Where to start in phase.fitness
- Push / pull / legs program, six days — phase.fitness writes push/pull/legs as a six-day hypertrophy block: each muscle twice a week, volume climbing toward the adaptive range, and a deload that halves the sets at the same loads before a heavier week shows what the block bought.
- Upper / lower split, four days — phase.fitness writes upper/lower as the four-day split the frequency document recommends for intermediates: every muscle twice a week, a strength day and a hypertrophy day for each half, and two blocks — volume, then intensity — with a deload between them.
- Full body, three days a week — Three full-body days a week is what the frequency document recommends for the first years of lifting, and phase.fitness writes it the way it should be written: two sessions that alternate, the big patterns every time, and progression that starts session to session.
- phase.fitness for beginners
- phase.fitness for Hevy users
- phase.fitness for bodybuilders and physique athletes
Questions
Is phase.fitness free like Boostcamp?
No. Boostcamp is free and says its programs are not paywalled; phase.fitness is $34.90 every three months or $104.70 a year. What you buy is a program written and rewritten for you rather than a library to choose from.
Does Boostcamp plan cardio?
The pages we read describe lifting: programs labelled by strength and muscle goals, and gym tools like a plate calculator and a rest timer. phase.fitness plans cardio and calisthenics in the same program as the lifting.
Can I keep using Boostcamp's templates with phase.fitness?
Not directly, but phase.fitness's own library holds importable templates, and a program you import can then be adapted phase by phase. phase.fitness also pushes sessions to Hevy and Liftosaur if that is where you prefer to log.