The gym app you can log by speaking Spanish

The short answer

• You can speak Spanish into it. Say the whole session out loud in Spanish and SayLift fills in the exercises, sets, reps and weights for you.
• You cannot read Spanish in it. Every screen, button, setting and exercise name is English. Spanish is input only.
• No language picker. You never tell it which language you are about to use, so a sentence that runs from Spanish into English stays in one piece.
• Exercises are saved under their English names, with your Spanish phrase kept beside them, so your history stays consistent and the app still knows what press banca means.
• Spanglish is normal here. "Hice cuatro sets de bench con ochenta" logs the same as a fully Spanish sentence.
• Nothing saves until you look at it. Every voice log opens a review screen first, and anything you did not say is left blank instead of guessed.
• Price and limits. $4.17 a month (billed $49.99 a year) after a 3-day trial, iPhone only, and voice logging needs a connection.

Spanish goes in, English comes out

This deserves saying plainly, because it decides whether the app suits you. SayLift's interface is English only. The buttons, the settings, the workout labels and the 873 bundled exercise guides are all in English. There is no Spanish version of the app and this page is not going to imply there is.

Two things accept Spanish. What you say, when you log a session by voice or dictate a routine out loud. And what you paste, when you import a plan a coach or a friend sent you, bullets and emojis and day headers included. Both of those can arrive in any language. Both end up as English exercise names in your log.

For a lot of Spanish-speaking lifters that trade is fine, because gym English is already half-learned: bench, press, curl, squat, sets. Reading six buttons in English is easy. Typing twenty numbers into a picker between sets with chalk on your hands is the slow part, and that is the part this removes.

The general comparison of voice-logging apps lives on the best app for logging a workout by voice, and the step-by-step walkthrough is how to log a workout by voice. Neither is repeated here. This page is only about the Spanish half.

Four Spanish lines, and what SayLift writes down

"Press banca, tres series de doce con sesenta kilos." Bench press, three sets of twelve at sixty kilos. You get Bench Press in your log with three identical sets, twelve reps at 60 kg each. The exercise is filed under its English name and your own words, press banca, are kept in a field next to it.

"En sentadilla subí: ochenta por diez, noventa por ocho y cien por cinco." On squat I went up: eighty for ten, ninety for eight, a hundred for five. That saves as Squat with three different sets, 80 by 10, 90 by 8, 100 by 5. You never said the word kilos, so it uses whichever unit you picked in settings and leaves the numbers exactly as you spoke them. It does not convert anything.

"Jalón al pecho agarre ancho: una de calentamiento con cuarenta, después cuatro por diez con sesenta." Wide-grip lat pulldown, one warm-up at forty, then four by ten at sixty. The result is a Wide-Grip Lat Pulldown with one set badged W at 40 kg and four working sets of ten at 60 kg. Agarre ancho has to survive the trip into English as wide-grip, and the model is told it may never drop a qualifier you spoke or swap one for its opposite. A wide pulldown cannot come back as a close-grip one.

"Hice cuatro sets de diez de curl de bíceps con mancuernas de catorce, y en la última bajé a diez y saqué ocho más." Four sets of ten dumbbell curls with the fourteens, and on the last one I dropped to ten and got eight more. You get Dumbbell Bicep Curl with four sets of ten at 14 kg, plus a fifth set badged D at 10 kg for eight reps. Sets and curl are English words sitting in the middle of a Spanish sentence, and that changes nothing about the result.

How Spanish-speaking lifters actually say it

Sets and reps have several spoken shapes. "Tres series de doce" and "cuatro por diez" describe the same kind of thing and sound nothing alike. Written 4x10 gets read out as "cuatro por diez". Plenty of people shorten repeticiones to repes, so "doce repes" is ordinary speech, not slang. And while series is the textbook word, a lot of lifters just say sets. SayLift pulls the numbers out of any of these and writes one set per set.

Weights are in kilos, and the unit often goes unsaid. Spain and nearly all of Latin America train in kilos, so "sesenta kilos" and a bare "sesenta" mean the same loaded bar. In most gyms the plates get called by their weight rather than their colour, so you hear "dos de veinte por lado" instead of a colour. Leave the unit off and the app applies your kg or lbs setting to the number you said.

The exercise names split by country, and that is the real problem. Bench press is press banca in Spain, press plano or press de banca across much of Latin America. Squat is sentadilla and deadlift is peso muerto almost everywhere. Pull-ups are dominadas, dips are fondos. A lat pulldown is jalón al pecho in one gym and polea al pecho in the next one down the road. Curl de bíceps keeps the English word inside it, because nobody translates curl.

Spanglish is not sloppiness, it is how gyms talk. In Mexico, in Miami, in a lot of Latin America you will hear "hoy toca push" and "hice cuatro sets de bench" from people whose Spanish is otherwise perfect. Machine names arrive in English and stay in English. Programme names too.

This is exactly what a language picker gets wrong. An app that asks you to select Spanish before you record has already decided that push, bench, sets and your gym's brand names are Spanish words, and it will try to spell them out phonetically. SayLift never asks. The model behind it is told the speech can be in any language, that gym and machine names are often said in English inside a sentence in another language, and that numbers may be spoken in any language at all.

What it does instead of choosing. Every exercise is stored and matched under its English name, which is why your history, your personal records and your coach targets all read in English no matter which word you used on the day. Your spoken phrase is kept separately, word for word, in the language you said it. So the log stays tidy and the app still recognises jalón al pecho next Tuesday.

It learns your words. Confirm a phrase on the review screen and SayLift saves it, then feeds up to thirty of your confirmed phrases back into the model on later recordings. Correct polea al pecho once and you stop correcting it.

Talking about yesterday does not log yesterday. Say "ayer hice pierna" while describing today's session and that counts as a mention, not as work. Nothing gets written for it. Same with a plan: sets you say you are going to do are not recorded as done. For a sibling page in another language, see Arabic or Portuguese.

Which gym apps let you speak a set at all

The honest column here is the third one. None of the trackers below documents a path for logging a set by speaking it, in Spanish or in any other language, so the cell says what can be supported and nothing more.

How to log a workout in Spanish with SayLift

What to know before you pay. Voice logging needs a connection, because the recording goes to a model, and it is capped at 10 recordings an hour and 20 a day. The interface stays English. SayLift is iPhone only, on iOS 17 and up, and it is $4.17 a month after a 3-day trial. Manual logging, your full history, the coach's targets and all 873 exercise guides keep working with no signal, so a basement gym costs you the microphone and nothing else. If you want to keep your hands off the phone for the rest of the session too, see the best hands-free gym app.

1. 1Install SayLift on your iPhone and start the 3-day trial. Set your unit to kg in settings, since kilos are what you will be saying.
2. 2Train. Leave the phone in your bag.
3. 3When you are done, open the voice log and hold the button. Say the whole session in Spanish, one exercise after the next: "Press banca cuatro por ocho con ochenta, luego jalón al pecho agarre ancho tres por doce con sesenta."
4. 4Say the qualifiers out loud. Agarre ancho, inclinado, sentado, a una mano, con cuerda. Each of those changes which exercise gets matched, and the model is told to keep every one it hears.
5. 5Say calentamiento or de calentamiento for a warm-up, and describe a drop the way you would to a training partner: "bajé a diez y saqué ocho más." Set types get tagged only when you say them, so a light first set on its own is treated as a normal working set.
6. 6Read the review screen. Exercise names come back in English, your spoken phrase sits with them, and any number you did not say is blank rather than invented. Fix a name once and your wording is remembered.
7. 7Save it. The coach reads the session and has your next working weight waiting for each exercise.

Who SayLift is for

• You train in Spanish and read English without thinking about it. This is the fit the page is written for.
• Your gym vocabulary is mixed. Press banca one day, bench the next, polea al pecho when you are tired. You should not have to be consistent for an app's benefit.
• The picker is the part you hate. Ten sets is ten trips through a form. Saying the session takes about twenty seconds.
• You want the next weight decided for you. The coach returns one action per exercise, worked out on the phone from your own logged sets.
• Not for you if you need Spanish on screen. There is no Spanish interface, and the app will not feel localised, because it is not.
• Not for you on Android, iPad or Apple Watch. iPhone only.
• Not for you if your gym has no signal and you log on the spot. Type the session instead, or speak it once you are back on data.