Tool
A three-year Strong export holds every set, rep, and date you logged. Here is what transfers into Platepusher, what the CSV can't carry, and why day one starts with the data you already earned.
The new tracker opens to an empty week. Monday, blank. Every set logged over three years sits in a strong.csv on the phone, and the reflex is to treat that file the way most people treat any export: a safety copy, filed and forgotten. That file is not a backup. It is the record of an experiment the lifter already ran on themselves, thousands of working sets under progressive load, and it has more to say about the next block than any fresh install ever could.
Call it load-bearing history: the logged past is structural, not archival. A tracker that treats an import as file recovery discards the one thing that makes three years of data valuable, which is continuity. The same bar path, the same lift names, the same slow drift in a top set across dozens of sessions. That continuity is what plateau detection reads. Hand it a clean slate and it starts guessing from week one. Hand it the real history and the math has something to stall against on day one.
Most tracker marketing frames data portability as insurance. Export your history so you never lose it. That framing quietly assumes the history is dead weight, a thing to preserve in case of disaster, valuable only if something breaks. It sells the export as an exit and the import as a chore. The serious lifter reads it differently. A three-year log is a dataset with a training age attached to every row, and the real question for a new app is what it does with that history once the file is in. Getting data out is table stakes. Using it is the point.
A Strong export is a flat CSV: one row per set, with the session stitched together by date and workout name. The columns are predictable. Strong CSV export columns are: Date; Workout Name; Exercise Name; Set Order; Weight; Weight Unit; Reps; RPE; Distance; Distance Unit; Seconds; Notes; Workout Notes; Workout. ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/strongapp/comments/mww3xm/exported_data_help/)). Platepusher reads that shape directly, since its own export writes the same column layout. On import, each row becomes a native set: the weight, the rep count, and the date land as first-class fields, not notes glued to a comment. Exercise names match against Platepusher's library so a 'Barbell Bench Press' from Strong lines up with the same movement instead of spawning a duplicate. The mapping below is the part most switchers skim past and then regret skimming.
| Strong CSV field | Where it lands in Platepusher | Preserved on import |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Workout date | Yes |
| Workout Name | Session label | When you import workout history from a CSV file (Strong, FitNotes, and other supported formats), Platepusher preserves the session name exactly as it appears in the export, the workout title column is read and stored as the session title in your history. |
| Exercise Name | Matched to exercise library | Yes, with variant matching Platepusher normalizes exercise names by lowercasing and collapsing whitespace before any comparison, so variations in capitalization or spacing are always treated as the same lift. For catalog exercises, the app also supports a curated alias system so common alternate names (e.g. different shorthand spellings) resolve to the same movement, and custom or renamed exercises are tracked by that same normalized display name, keeping your history and progression data unified even if you log the name slightly differently over time. |
| Set Order | Set sequence within the exercise | Yes |
| Weight | Set weight | Yes |
| Reps | Set reps | Yes |
| RPE | Per-set RPE | Check your exported CSV before committing to any migration, since RPE field support varies between apps and import tools, and it is worth confirming that the data you care about survives the transfer intact. |
| Notes / Workout Notes | Set and session notes | When you import workout history via CSV, Platepusher carries per-set notes (mapped from columns like 'Notes', 'Set Notes', 'Comment', or 'Exercise Notes' depending on the source app) and attaches them to the individual set on each exercise, while workout-level notes (from columns like 'Workout Notes' or 'Description') attach to the overall session record. |
| Distance / Seconds | Cardio / timed fields | Platepusher is strength-first: each set captures weight and reps as the primary fields. For timed movements like planks, carries, or cardio intervals, any set can be switched to a timed mode that records duration in seconds instead of a weight, reps remains editable for counts like rounds or breaths. Distance is not a tracked field; the app treats it as a unit preference setting rather than a per-set data point. |
Here is the sequence in practice. The lifter exports from Strong, which drops a .csv into the phone's files. In Platepusher, the import picks up that file, reads the row-per-set shape, and previews the match: how many sessions, how many sets, which exercise names resolved cleanly and which need a one-time manual match. Confirm, and three years of sessions populate the history as native data, every top set sitting in the chart the moment it finishes.
Honesty about the gaps matters as much as the mapping. A CSV is a flat table, so anything Strong stored outside those columns does not travel. Strong's CSV export covers only completed workout history, sets, weights, reps, per-set notes, and timestamps. It leaves out rest-timer preferences per exercise, plate-calculator equipment configuration, routine and program templates, bodyweight and body-composition measurement logs, and per-set RPE values. Personal-record flags are also absent; Platepusher re-derives them automatically from the imported history using its own performance-analysis engine.. Those are app state, not set data, and no import can conjure them from a file that never held them. The set-by-set record, the part that actually feeds progression, comes across whole. The scaffolding around it gets rebuilt once, in the new app.
What a CSV can't carry
A flat export holds sets, not app state. When importing a Strong CSV export, Platepusher silently drops any rows where weight, reps, and duration are all zero, these are planned-but-not-performed sets that Strong includes in its export as empty placeholders, which would otherwise appear as ghost 0×0 entries in your history. Rows with unparseable dates are also skipped. do not transfer, because they were never in the file. Rebuild that scaffolding once; the training record itself imports intact.
When the history lands as native data, the instrument has something to read on day one. Plateau detection is not a fresh guess; it runs against real top-set drift going back three years. A deload flag has a fatigue baseline to compare against. The first chart is not an empty axis waiting for week one, it is the actual shape of a training career. That is the difference between a tracker that starts you over and one that picks up mid-sentence. The lifter did the work. The right import hands that work back, already loaded, and gets out of the way.
The lifter ran the experiment. The import hands back the results.
None of this asks the lifter to trust a black box. The import is deterministic: the same file produces the same native history every time, and Platepusher's own export writes that history back out in Strong's exact column shape, free at every tier, designed for the day the lifter leaves. Pricing follows the same posture. Monthly at $4.99, yearly at $29.99, or lifetime at $99.99, the same feature set on each, so the shape fits the training career rather than the billing calendar. Platepusher offers three paid tiers, Pro Monthly at $4.99, Pro Yearly at $29.99 (with a 7-day free trial), and a one-time Lifetime purchase at $99.99, all confirmed in the shipped app's paywall code. Core features including workout logging, history, and full CSV export of all data are available to free users with no paywall.. The history was always the lifter's. The import just makes it usable again.
Platepusher reads Strong's export in its native column shape and writes the same shape back out, free at every tier. A switcher does not gamble a three-year log on a one-way door: the data comes in as native sets and leaves the same way, whenever the lifter wants. CSV export of your full workout history is available to all users at no cost, there is no paywall on the export feature, giving every user complete, unconditional access to their own data..