Your workout lives on the lock screen

The phone stays on the bench

A workout has twenty or thirty moments where you want exactly one piece of information: where am I, and how long is left. With most apps, every glance costs you an unlock, a reopen, a screen wake. Every unlock is an invitation to do something else. A notification lingers, a message is waiting, and your 90 seconds of rest quietly become four minutes.

Gymmy attacks the problem from the other side with a full workout Live Activity. Everything you need between sets shows on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island. The phone stays down, locked, face up, and it still tells you everything.

The principle covers the whole workout, not just the timer. Your lock screen knows which exercise you're on, where you are in your sets, how long you've been training and how much rest you have left. Unlocking becomes the exception again, something you do to log a set, not to check on things.

Two Live Activities, one logic

Gymmy displays two states and switches between them on its own:

• The workout Live Activity: workout name, current exercise, "Set 2/4", and the running timer. One glance and you know exactly where you are in your plan without touching the phone.
• The rest Live Activity: the moment you validate a set, the rest timer takes over, with its orange countdown ring and the exercise name. Rest gets priority, because it's the information of the moment.

When the countdown ends, the workout view comes back automatically. You never choose what to display. The lock screen always shows the right thing at the right time.

The countdown you see isn't a generic value either. It's the rest time of the exercise you're on, the one you gave it or the global default. Three minutes on squats, sixty seconds on lateral raises. The lock screen shows the right rest without you asking for anything.

Adjust the timer from the lock screen, without unlocking

Here's the detail that separates this Live Activity from a plain display: the −15 s and +15 s buttons are interactive right from the lock screen. No Face ID, no trip back into the app. One tap on the glass, and your rest gets longer or shorter.

It's the kind of thing you can't see in a screenshot and can't give up once you've used it. The cable station frees up early: −15. Someone asks you to spot them between sets: +15, +15. Your phone never left the bench, your feed never got its chance, and your rest time stayed reliable data. That matters, because consistent rest is what makes your progress comparable week to week.

The same −15 s and +15 s buttons exist inside the app too, with haptic feedback. The lock screen isn't a degraded version of the real control. It's the same control, available on both sides of the glass.

Most lifting apps that put a timer on the lock screen stop at showing it. Here, the lock screen is a control surface.

In the Dynamic Island too, at every size

If your iPhone has a Dynamic Island, Gymmy uses it fully, in all three presentations: expanded when you press it, compact while another app is open, minimal when several activities share the space. You answer a message, you change the song, and the timer stays in your field of view, reduced to the essentials but never gone.

That's the difference between an app that displays a timer and an app designed to coexist with the rest of your phone. A workout lasts an hour, and during that hour you will inevitably answer two messages and change three songs. The Dynamic Island means Gymmy never vanishes while you do.

When you want to get back to logging, one tap on the Live Activity opens your workout directly. Not the app's home screen, but your workout, right where you left it, ready for the next set.

Nothing gets lost between lock screen and app

A two-surface system is only worth having if both surfaces tell the same story. When you bring Gymmy back to the foreground, the app resynchronizes automatically: the ±15 s taps made from the lock screen are picked up, the timer shows the true remaining time, and your workout is in exactly the state you expect.

The typical scenario. You validate a set, lock the phone, add +15 s from the lock screen because the conversation drags on, then unlock to log the next set. At no point do the two surfaces contradict each other. It's one timer, seen from two places.

That comes down to one simple technical choice. Gymmy's timer isn't a fragile counter ticking inside the app, it's a saved end time. The app can go to the background or get killed by the system, and the Live Activity keeps telling the truth. Since everything is local, the whole thing works without a single bar of signal, and the lock screen of an iPhone in airplane mode shows exactly the same thing.

Beyond the lock screen

The same philosophy (information comes to you, not the other way around) extends to two more surfaces:

• The "Your week" widget on your iPhone's home screen: your 7 weekly dots and a counter like "3 workouts this week". Your consistency checks itself at a glance, before you even open the app.
• The floating in-progress bar on Gymmy's home tab: if a workout is running, it shows up with a pulsing green dot, the live timer and "Set 2/4". Minimized your workout to check something? One tap on the bar and you're back.
• Inactivity reminders: workout left open with nothing happening? Gymmy asks "Forgot to finish?" every 10 minutes, for up to an hour. A six-hour workout in your history because the app stayed open is a corrupted stat, so Gymmy would rather ask.

A workout started in Gymmy is never out of sight, not on the lock screen, not in the Dynamic Island, not in the app. And in the other direction, one you forgot to close doesn't linger forever either.

Something to see for real, not in a screenshot

A Live Activity is judged with the phone lying on a bench, not in a paragraph. Start a workout, validate a first set, and watch your lock screen do the work: the timer, the orange ring, the buttons responding under your thumb. Your first 10 workouts are free, no credit card. That's more than enough to confirm your phone can stay locked from the first warm-up to the last set.