The Workout Tracker I Actually Wanted to Use
For a while, my workout tracking was a scrawled note in my own bad handwriting, and it still wasn't enough.
The machines were the worst part. I'd sit down, and I couldn't remember what I'd set the seat height to, or the weight, or the pin position, from the last time. So I'd guess, do a set, feel that it was wrong, adjust, do another set to check — ten minutes gone on one machine, most of it spent rediscovering something I already knew two weeks ago. Multiply that by every machine in the circuit and half my workout was archaeology, not training.
So I tried a spreadsheet. Hunched over my phone between sets, pinching to zoom into cells that were never built for a screen that small, trying to type a weight into a box before my rest period ran out. And some days I'd forget the actual name of the exercise — not the number, the exercise itself — and end up googling it mid-workout, standing there with my phone out like I'd wandered into the gym by accident.
I didn't need an app that wanted to be my whole life. Social feed, meal plan, a coach yelling at me through push notifications — none of that was the problem. I needed to remember the seat height. I needed it to take four seconds, not ten minutes.
That gap — between "I want to track this" and "I don't have the bandwidth to fight an app to do it" — is exactly the kind of gap Lantern exists to close. So when it came time to build the first piece of the constellation, it wasn't a hard call. Training is one of the most physical, most immediate ways your energy shows up. Skip it for a week and you feel it everywhere else. Get it right and it's one less thing pulling on the reserve.
So we built Forge.
What It Does
Forge has two jobs, and it doesn't try to have a third.
The first is helping you actually do the workout. Open the app, and you're logging sets in seconds — exercises, reps, weight, done. If you train the same way most weeks, build a template once and every session after that is pre-filled and ready before you've finished your warmup. The timer runs itself. Your PRs get caught automatically, no spreadsheet required. And your history is just there when you want it — total volume, exercise count, the slow climb of a number that used to feel impossible.
The second job is the library. Over 800 exercises — lifts, stretches, machine and cable work — searchable whenever you need to know what something looks like or find a swap for a movement that's bothering your shoulder that day. No workout has to be in progress for you to use it.
That's it. That's the whole app. On purpose.
No Quizzes. No Profile. No Hype.
I've opened enough fitness apps that want ten minutes of my life before they'll even show me the thing. Quiz after quiz about my goals. A profile to build. A "personalized plan" that's really just a funnel toward a subscription I haven't seen the product yet. And then, once you're in, the hype machine — a workout schedule so aggressive it's basically daring you to fail by week two.
Forge doesn't do any of that. You open it, and it's a workout tracker. That's the whole pitch.
Free Now, and Free Is Staying
Forge is free today, and the free version isn't a trial — it's the product. The 800-exercise library, logging, templates, history, PRs, all of it. That's not changing.
What is coming is workout routines built into the app itself, so walking into a gym stops being the intimidating part. You won't need to already know what to do when you get there. That's staying free too, because it's core to what Forge is for.
Down the line, we'll be adding some more advanced tools — an AI coach, dynamic workout replacement that adapts your plan on the fly — for people who want that layer on top. Those will carry a small fee, mostly to keep the lights on for the team building this. But that's an if you want it, not a you need this to get value out of Forge. If a simple, free, ad-free, uncluttered way to track your training is what you're after, Forge already does that, and it's going to keep doing that.
What's Coming
A few things already in motion:
- Free workout routines, so you've got a plan the moment you walk in, no guesswork required.
- Wearable integration, starting with Fitbit, so your training data and your recovery data stop living in two different apps that don't know about each other.
- Calendar view, so you can see training the way you actually experience it — as part of a week, not a list of isolated sessions.
- An AI coach and dynamic workout replacement, for anyone who wants Forge to actively adapt the plan for them. This is the one piece that'll carry a small fee down the road — everything else on this list stays free.
- And, eventually, the thing this was always building toward: a two-way conversation with the rest of Lantern, where your training doesn't just sit in Forge, it feeds into the bigger picture of where your energy's actually going.
For People Like Me
I built the "log in seconds" part of this for the version of me that has four minutes between a work call and getting the kids from the bus stop, not the version of me with a free Saturday afternoon and nowhere to be. If that's you too, Forge is ready.
— Joe Mastrangelo, founder of Lantern