Is Hevy good for hybrid athletes?

It is excellent for the lifting half and has no visibility into the other one. Nothing in Hevy changes because you ran thirty miles this week — not the volume recommendation, not the fatigue read, not any calorie figure. If your endurance work is incidental that is fine; if it is a real training goal, the gap is where your problems will come from.

Does Hevy track cardio?

It can record that a cardio session happened. It does not model endurance load, prescribe sessions from a threshold, or grade whether a session landed in its intended band, because it is a resistance training logger and does not claim otherwise.

What is the best workout log for someone who also runs?

If you want the best set-logging experience specifically, Hevy or Strong. If you want something that reads your lifting and endurance load against one recovery budget and one energy budget, that is a different category of tool and there are far fewer of them.

It supports RPE, which is the inverse of reps in reserve for practical purposes — RPE 8 is roughly 2 RIR. What differs between apps is whether the progression logic actually consumes that number or merely stores it, which is the part that determines whether it changes anything.

Can I use Hevy and a nutrition app instead?

You can, and most people do. What that stack cannot produce is any number requiring both — a calorie target that moves with your endurance volume, or a deload trigger that reads both training loads. You end up computing those yourself, which works until it stops.

Base vs Hevy for Hybrid Athletes

What Hevy does well

Set logging speed. This is the thing a lifting app lives or dies on and Hevy is at the top of the category. Logging a set is fast enough that it does not interrupt the session.

Exercise library and history. Comprehensive, well organised, with good per-exercise history.

Programme structure. Routines, templates, and a clear model of what you are supposed to do today.

Social, if you want it. Followers, shared workouts, a feed. Real value for people who train partly for the community.

None of that is in dispute, and none of it is what this comparison turns on.

The gap

Hevy is a resistance training logger. It does not claim otherwise, and the following are not failures — they are scope.

It does not model endurance load. A week with four hard runs and a week with none produce the same picture.

It has no nutrition layer. Nothing computes your maintenance, your surplus or today's target.

It cannot read fatigue across disciplines. If your bad squat session was caused by Saturday's long run, nothing in the app can suggest that.

For a lifter who does some cardio, none of that matters. For someone where both halves are real training goals, all three matter, and they matter in a specific order.

The three numbers that need both halves

This is the whole argument, so it is worth being concrete.

1. Is your surplus real?

A trained lifter's usable surplus is about 179 kcal a day — a pound of lean tissue costs roughly 2,500 kcal, and 0.5 lb a week is 179 a day. A 40-minute run costs 400 to 500. Add three runs a week to a plan whose maintenance figure was estimated without them and the surplus is not reduced, it is gone.

Diagnosing that requires food data and endurance volume together. Neither is in Hevy.

2. Should you deload?

The signals that work are recovery against your own baseline, RIR drifting up at fixed load, short sleep, and a flat strength trend. Two firing at once is a pattern. A lifting-only view catches RIR drift and the strength trend, and misses entirely the case where a spiked endurance week is the cause — which for a hybrid athlete is frequently the case.

3. Are your easy runs easy?

The most common hybrid failure and the least visible. It requires a threshold and a graded comparison against a prescribed band, and it is what converts a nearly-free aerobic session into a hard session that appears nowhere in your plan. The full diagnosis.

The comparison

	Hevy	Base
Set logging speed	Best in class	Fast: last session's numbers pre-filled
Exercise library	Comprehensive	Comprehensive
RPE / RIR	RPE supported	RIR, and the progression rule consumes it
Progression logic	Templates and history	Autoregulated double progression with an RIR clause
Social feed	Yes	None. Deliberately
Endurance prescription	No	From your own threshold, per discipline
Endurance grading	No	Per rep or time-in-zone against the prescribed band
Nutrition	No	Macros, micros, day templates
Measured maintenance	No	From your own trend weight and intake
Cross-discipline deload trigger	No	Two-signal reactive trigger
Shows its formulas	—	Every derived number

On RIR specifically

Both apps can capture an effort rating. What differs is whether the progression logic consumes it.

Rep-only progression cannot distinguish twelve reps at 0 RIR — a genuine ceiling that earns a load increase — from twelve reps at 4 RIR, where the load was simply too light and should jump immediately. Those are opposite pieces of information and they look identical in a log that records only reps.

Storing RPE and displaying it back is not the same as a rule that says add load now when the number says the load was light. The second is what stops a log from slow-walking you through weights you could already handle.

When Hevy is the better call

Lifting is your training and endurance is incidental. A specialist beats a generalist at the specialist's job.
You want the social layer. Base has none and will not add one.
You want the fastest possible set logging and nothing else. Reasonable, and Hevy is at the top of that list.
You already have a nutrition app you like and a coach who handles the rest.

When the gap starts to matter

Your endurance volume changes across the year and your calorie target does not.
You cannot tell whether a bad lifting week was the lifting or the running.
You have a spreadsheet where you reconcile two apps, and it has gaps in it.
You are trying to gain and the scale has not moved in six weeks.

That last one is the diagnostic. It almost always means the surplus stopped existing when endurance volume rose, and it is not visible from inside a lifting log.

What to do next

If you want to test the gap before changing anything: for two weeks, log your food anywhere and weigh yourself most mornings, then run the maintenance arithmetic by hand. If the number comes out several hundred calories above what you have been eating against, you have found it. The arithmetic.