Can I track hybrid training in a spreadsheet?

Yes, and every calculation in a hybrid training app is doable in one — adaptive maintenance, trend weight, e1RM, acute-to-chronic ratios and volume counts are all a few formulas. What a spreadsheet cannot do is capture the data at the moment it happens, which is where they actually fail.

Why do training spreadsheets stop working?

Not because the maths breaks. Because the reconciliation between sources requires a weekly act of will, and around week six the answers stop being surprising while the copying still takes twenty minutes. It gets skipped once, then again, and the gap is invisible until months later when you cannot reconstruct what happened.

What is the best spreadsheet for tracking lifting and running?

The one you will actually update between sets. In practice that means a phone-friendly sheet with a tiny number of columns, and the honest answer is that this constraint is exactly what makes spreadsheets bad at the capture half of the job.

Should I switch from a spreadsheet to an app?

Switch if your problem is capture — gaps in the log, or data spread across three apps that you copy by hand. Do not switch if your problem is that you want a specific calculation nobody offers, because a spreadsheet will always beat an app on flexibility.

Can I export my data from Base?

Yes. The whole database exports as a single file, plus a CSV bundle. There is no lock-in to defend, and if a spreadsheet is where you want to do your analysis, the export is what gets you there.

Base vs a Spreadsheet: Why the Spreadsheet Stops

What a spreadsheet is genuinely better at

Flexibility. You can compute anything. If you want fractional set volume weighted by exercise-specific stimulus-to-fatigue ratios, no app offers it and a spreadsheet does not care.

Ownership. It is a file. It will open in twenty years. No subscription, no shutdown, no data export to negotiate.

Visibility. Every formula is inspectable by definition, which is a virtue this app tries hard to replicate deliberately and gets for free in a sheet.

No opinions. An app encodes decisions about what matters. A spreadsheet encodes only yours.

If any of those is the reason you keep a sheet, nothing here should change your mind.

Where they actually fail

Capture

You do not have a spreadsheet open between sets with a bar loaded in front of you. So sets get written on paper and typed in later, or typed into a lifting app and copied over on Sunday, or remembered.

Each of those has a specific loss:

Later means never, some of the time. The gaps are not random — they cluster on the days that were unusual, which are the days worth having.
Copying introduces errors and, more importantly, introduces friction at a moment when there is no reward for it.
Remembering is not a data source. RIR in particular does not survive four hours.

That last one matters more than it sounds. RIR at a fixed load is the clearest fatigue signal available, and it is only meaningful if it was recorded at the moment the set ended.

The weekly act of will

This is the real failure, and it has a predictable timeline.

Weeks one to six: interesting. You are learning things about your own numbers, and the twenty minutes on Sunday pays for itself in insight.

Around week six: the answers stop being surprising. Maintenance is where it was. The trend is doing what it did. The twenty minutes still costs twenty minutes and now returns confirmation.

Week seven: skipped once. There is no immediate consequence, which is the problem.

Week nine: skipped again, and now catching up is a bigger job than doing it weekly was.

Month four: the sheet has a two-month hole in it, and the hole covers exactly the period you now want to understand.

The failure mode is not that the athlete stops caring. It is that the reconciliation is the least rewarding part of the process and the one with the longest feedback delay. You do not find out you skipped it until months later, when the scale has gone somewhere unexpected and the evidence is missing.

What automation actually buys

Not the arithmetic. Three specific things:

Capture at the moment. Last session's numbers already in the fields; one tap to confirm. RIR recorded while the set is still in your hands.

Nothing to reconcile. Food, lifting, endurance and health data land in the same place, so there is no Sunday copying step to skip.

Failure that is visible. A spreadsheet with a hole in it looks like a spreadsheet. An adaptive maintenance figure with insufficient data says "estimated" and refuses to compute the measurement — ten logged days and eight weigh-ins minimum, or it does not run.

The comparison

	Spreadsheet	Base
Arithmetic flexibility	Unlimited	Fixed set, documented
Capture between sets	Poor	The primary design constraint
Reconciliation across sources	Manual, weekly	None required
RIR captured at the moment	Rarely	Always
Health data — HRV, sleep, sessions	Manual entry	Read automatically
Gaps visible	No	Explicit refusal to compute
Longevity	Forever	Depends on the app existing
Ownership	Total	Full export, single file plus CSV
Cost	Free	Beta

The hybrid case specifically

The three questions that need more than one source are the ones a spreadsheet exists to answer, and the ones the copying step is for:

Is my surplus real? Intake, weight trend and endurance volume.
Should I deload? Lifting fatigue, endurance load and recovery markers.
Were my easy sessions easy? Threshold and the last four sessions.

Every one requires data from at least two apps. Every one is trivial arithmetic. Every one stops getting computed in week seven.

When the spreadsheet is right

You want a calculation nobody offers. Genuine, and no app will ever win this argument.
You have kept one for years without gaps. Then the failure mode described here is not yours, and you should not change a working system.
You are a coach managing several athletes with different models.
Software longevity worries you. A file outlives a company.

When to switch

Your sheet has gaps, and the gaps are on the interesting weeks.
You have not updated it in three weeks and you know it.
You are copying numbers between three apps on a Sunday.
You cannot recall RIR by the time you type it in.

What to do next

If you keep a sheet, the export exists precisely so this is not a one-way door — the whole database comes out as one file plus a CSV bundle, and you can do your own analysis on top of automated capture. That combination is strictly better than either alone, and it is what most people who have kept a spreadsheet for years actually want.