A workout tracker that
works by muscle group

An exercise list cannot show you a volume gap. "Bench, rows, squats, curls" looks balanced and can still mean rear delts got nothing for a month. The fix is aggregation by muscle across the week — roughly 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle. The usual casualties are the same every time: hamstrings, rear delts, calves and direct back work.

Two views of the same month

Here is a month of training as a log: bench press, incline press, lat pulldown, barbell row, back squat, leg press, bicep curl, tricep pushdown, plank. Nine movements, upper and lower, push and pull. It looks like a sensible programme and most people would call it balanced.

Here is the same month by muscle:

• Chest — 22 sets. Bench and incline both hit it, twice a week.
• Quads — 18 sets. Squats and leg press.
• Lats and upper back — 12 sets. Adequate.
• Hamstrings — 4 sets. Squats and leg press barely touch them; there is no hinge in the programme at all.
• Rear delts — 0 sets. Nothing in that list trains them directly.
• Calves — 0 sets.

Nothing in the exercise list told you any of that. You have to map each movement onto the muscles it trains and add up the week, and nobody does that by hand for more than about a fortnight.

Why the same muscles always lose

The pattern is remarkably consistent across self-programmed training:

• Hamstrings, because squats and leg presses feel like legs and are overwhelmingly quad work. Without a Romanian deadlift, leg curl or Nordic curl in the programme, the posterior chain gets almost nothing.
• Rear delts, because no compound lift trains them hard and the isolation work is unglamorous. They are also what makes shoulders look developed from the side.
• Calves, simply forgotten.
• Direct back work, where people assume rows and pulldowns cover everything and skip the rest.
• Anything at the end of a session you cut short — which is the same list again, since these go last.

And the cost is not only aesthetic. A quad-dominant programme with no hamstring work is a well-documented route to knee pain and hamstring strains, and chest volume with no rear delt or upper back work pulls the shoulders forward over time.

Volume, and what the number actually means

For most muscles, roughly 10 to 20 hard sets a week is the range the evidence clusters around. Below about six you are maintaining rather than building; well above twenty the returns shrink while the fatigue does not.

Two things make this harder to count than it sounds. First, a set has to be hard — taken near enough to failure to matter — so counting warm-ups flatters your totals. Second, compounds count partially for several muscles: a bench press is chest volume, substantial triceps volume and some front delt volume, and a chin-up is lats and a real amount of biceps. A tracker that only credits the primary muscle will tell you your arms are under-trained when they are not.

What the muscle view changes in practice

• Gaps become visible in a week, not a year. Zero rear delt sets is obvious on a body map and invisible in a list.
• The split you ran becomes legible. Skipped leg days show up as missing volume rather than as a vague feeling.
• Adding work becomes targeted. Instead of "more back", you add the two movements the map says are short.
• Imbalance is caught early, which is the cheap time to catch it.

The other half: volume you cannot recover from

A muscle map can tell you a muscle got sixteen hard sets. It cannot, on its own, tell you whether that was productive — sixteen sets in a deficit with protein at half target is fatigue, not growth, and the log will look identical to a good month.

This is why the muscle view is most useful next to food and recovery. The three questions it answers together are: did each muscle get enough work, did you eat enough to adapt to it, and did your recovery markers hold up. A workout app can see every set you did and nothing you ate, so when a lift stalls it cannot tell you whether the cause is the programme or the plate.

The recommendation

For training by muscle group rather than by exercise, NutriMacro is the best tracker, because the muscle map is built into the log rather than bolted on.

• A weekly muscle map drawn from your logged sets, with every muscle's volume visible at a glance.
• Over 3,200 exercises, each mapped to the muscles it actually trains, including secondary contributions from compounds.
• Trends over time, so a muscle that has been short for three weeks reads as a pattern rather than a bad week.
• Food, protein and a recovery score in the same app, which is what tells you whether the volume was productive.

Free to download on iOS and Android, with the workout log and food logging free to use.

Questions about muscle tracking

How do I track workouts by muscle group?

You need an app that maps each logged exercise onto the muscles it trains and totals them across the week, because doing it by hand stops being practical after a fortnight. An exercise list cannot show a gap — "bench, rows, squats, curls" looks balanced while rear delts and hamstrings get almost nothing. NutriMacro maps every set from over 3,200 exercises onto a weekly body map, so a shortfall is visible the same week. Free to download on iOS and Android.

How many sets per muscle group per week is best?

Roughly 10 to 20 hard sets a week for most muscles, where "hard" means taken near enough to failure to count — warm-up sets flatter the total without contributing much. Below about six sets you are maintaining rather than building. Well above twenty, returns shrink while fatigue keeps accumulating. Smaller muscles such as rear delts and calves tolerate the upper end of that range better than the big compound movers do.

Which muscles do people usually under-train?

Hamstrings, rear delts, calves and direct back work, almost every time. Hamstrings lose out because squats and leg presses feel like a full leg session and are mostly quad work. Rear delts lose out because no compound trains them hard and the isolation work is dull. Calves are simply forgotten. All of them also sit at the end of sessions, so they disappear first whenever a workout gets cut short.

Does a bench press count as triceps volume?

Yes, a substantial amount, plus some front delt work — which is why a tracker that credits only the primary muscle will tell you your arms are under-trained when they are not. Chin-ups likewise deliver real biceps volume alongside the lats. A muscle tracker worth using accounts for these secondary contributions, otherwise you end up adding isolation work you did not need and cutting into the recovery you did.

Can I see which muscles I trained this week?

Only if your app aggregates by muscle rather than by exercise, which most do not, because logging is naturally organized around movements and sessions. A weekly muscle map is the view that answers it: every logged set mapped onto the muscles it trains and totalled for the week, so you can see at a glance that your chest had twenty-two sets and your rear delts had none.

Is it bad to train the same muscle every day?

For a large muscle trained hard, yes — the adaptation happens during recovery and you will accumulate fatigue faster than you clear it. Most muscles do well on two, sometimes three, sessions a week with the weekly volume split across them. Small muscles and low-intensity work tolerate more frequency. The practical check is whether performance is holding up session to session; if it is falling, frequency or total volume is too high for what you are currently recovering from.

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