Fitbod State of Strength Report: 10 Data-Backed Insights On How Millions of Lifters Are Training in 2025

The data tells a clear story: 2025 was a heavy year. Millions of new lifters entered the weight room, existing users trained more consistently, and strength gains followed. For Fitbod users, lifting wasn’t a hobby, strength training became a structured lifestyle habit. Over the course of the year, almost 2.2 million new Fitbod accounts were created, representing a 41% increase from 2024. Notably, 60% of these users were new to strength training, signaling resistance training as a possible entry point into fitness, not a secondary pursuit. Additionally, more than 511,000 women joined the Fitbod family in 2025, the equivalent of nearly 7 sold-out mega stadiums of women on a new path to strength this year, now that’s inspiring.

For younger lifters, fitness is about more than staying active. In 2025, Gen Z and Gen Alpha Fitbod users trained primarily to build muscle, with 70% reporting ‘muscle hypertrophy’ as their main training objective.

A. Training Continuity Is Not Tied To One Location

In 2025, Fitbod users logged workouts across 1.6 million unique workout locations, with the average user training at 2.5 different gyms throughout the year. This pattern reflects a shift toward consistency, suggesting that progress follows commitment, not equipment availability. This flexibility allows lifters to maintain momentum through travel, schedule changes, and everyday life disruptions.

B. “Snack” Workouts Delivered Meaningful Progress

Progress persisted even when time was limited. In 2025, a subset of Fitbod users consistently trained in sessions of 10 minutes or less, often referred to as snack workout. Even with these abbreviated sessions, users still averaged 32 PRs over the year. These “minimum effective training” workouts helped to preserve momentum and consistency for users when full sessions weren’t feasible. Snack workouts appeared across all experience levels, reinforcing a key insight: When time is limited, adherence – not duration – determines progress.

Workout timing revealed a simple truth: people train around life, not in lieu of it. Users primarily trained before and after obligations, with weekday peaks coming in at 6 AM and 5 PM and weekend peaks at 10 AM. Strength training in 2025 didn’t demand perfect schedules, it adapted to real routines.

2025 Fitbod user data suggests consistency increases with experience – but it starts early.

• Advanced lifters: 65% consistency rate (2+ workouts/week)
• Intermediate lifters: 58%
• Beginner lifters: 52%

Fitbod data shows that training consistency rises with experience level. However, the strongest predictor of long-term progress is not experience – it’s early adoption. Users who trained consistently during their first three months achieved 3.6× more personal records (PRs) than those who did not. These findings suggest that consistency is not simply a trait developed over time; it is a habit established early on that compounds across the training lifecycle.

Fitbod’s AI-driven training system demonstrated high predictive accuracy in 2025. That means Fitbod’s reps, sets, weights recommendations and estimated 1 Rep Max (1RM) values come in with extremely high accuracy, landing within an unprecedented margin at 2.8%. In other words, if your true 1RM is 100 lb, Fitbod’s estimate is within ± 2.8 lb.

In addition to accuracy, users who adhered to Fitbod’s AI recommendations achieved 24% more PRs in 2025. These results indicate reliable performance modeling and effective adaptive load progression across large-scale, real-world training data. Accurate, AI-enabled workouts precise enough to guide users and drive progress means confidence-based training without the guesswork.

Training logs from 2025 reveal a familiar pattern: despite access to thousands of exercises, Fitbod users concentrated much of their training volume around upper-body movements. The most logged exercises of the year, in order, were:

1. Dumbbell Bicep Curl
2. Lat Pulldown
3. Dumbbell Bench Press
4. Hammer Curl
5. Dumbbell Row

Yet the outcomes tell a more complete story. The top muscle groups of 2025 by strength gain were:

1. Back
2. Abs
3. Quadriceps

These findings indicate that even with upper-body-skewed exercise selection, strength gains extended beyond the muscles trained most frequently. This reinforces the systemic nature of strength adaptation, where consistent training, progressive overload, and compound movements drive full-body improvements.

Training patterns showed that lifters took different paths toward the same goal: getting stronger. 2025 Fitbod data revealed that women trained glutes 56% more than men, while men logged 73% more “bro-splits” (1 workout = 1 muscle group), reflecting differing exercise preferences and program structures. Women also logged 23% more mobility exercises, suggesting a greater emphasis on movement quality and possibly joint health alongside strength work. Despite these differences in approach, the outcome was consistent across the board Fitbod users built serious strength.

• Women trained glutes 56% more than men
• Men logged 73% more bro-split workouts
• Women logged 23% more mobility exercises
• +10.8 lb average lean muscle gain for men in 2025
• +5.6 lb average lean muscle gain for women in 2025

9. Smarter Training Is Driving Historic Strength Gains