Moving to Badger from Strong

Strong is a good app, and if it suits you there is no reason to move. People usually land here for one of two reasons: they would rather not rent their own training log, or they want it to live on the phone rather than in an account. This page covers what survives the move and what you trade.

What the CSV carries across

Strong exports a CSV. Badger reads it on your phone, with nothing uploaded, and it takes more of it than most importers bother with.

Every set, with its date, exercise, weight, reps, distance, and time.
Your RPE. If you logged effort, it comes across on the set rather than being dropped, so a decade of "how hard was that" is still there.
Per-set notes, kept on their set. The note you left on one heavy triple stays attached to that triple. Workout notes and the workout's name become notes on the session.
Real session times. Strong's date column is a full timestamp, so imported workouts show when they started and how long they ran instead of showing nothing.
Kilograms or pounds, read from the file's own header rather than guessed, and stored in the unit you logged in. Nothing is converted or rounded on the way in.
The European export. Strong writes a semicolon-separated file in some locales. Badger sniffs the delimiter from the header line, so that file works without you doing anything to it.
PRs, recalculated from the imported history, so your records and graphs start out full.

What does not, so nothing surprises you later:

Warmups, as warmups. The Strong export does not mark them, so every logged set arrives as a working set. Nothing can tell retroactively which ones were ramp-up.
Your routines. The export is history, not programs. Badger ships seven program templates and you can build your own, but the routines themselves are set up again.
Your exercise categories. A CSV carries none, so new exercises land in an "Imported" category for you to re-sort. Anything already in your Badger library is matched by name rather than duplicated.

Doing it

In Strong, go to Profile → Settings → Export Data to produce a strong.csv.
Get the file onto the phone you train with, however you normally move a file: email it to yourself, drop it in cloud storage, use a cable.
In Badger, go to Settings → Your data → Import from Strong and pick the file.
Check the preview: exercises, workout days, sets, and the detected weight unit.
Import.

It runs more than once safely. Sets landing on a date you already have merge into that session, and nothing already logged is overwritten. Full detail in importing from Strong.

What you get, and what you give up

Worth being straight about both, because the honest version is more useful than a feature list.

What you get:

No account and no sync. Your log is on your phone. Nothing to sign into, nothing to be locked out of, no server that can change the deal later. The promise is that written down.
Nothing behind a paywall. No cap on routines, on history, or on graphs, and exporting your own numbers is not a paid feature. The no-subscription guide goes through what free actually means across the trackers people weigh up.
Gym and machine tracking, with PRs scoped to the machine, because the leg press at one gym is not the leg press at another. How it works.
A plate calculator and warmup generator that work from the plates your gym actually owns, and graphs with estimated 1RM, muscle balance and plateau detection.

What you give up:

Cloud sync between devices. Badger is local-first by design. Moving to a new phone is a backup file you carry over, which is a documented path, not a background service.
A social feed. There is nobody to follow and nothing to post. If that was part of what kept you training, it is a real loss and worth weighing.

Getting back out again

The reason to trust an import is knowing you can leave. Badger exports every set to CSV and backs the whole database up to a documented file format that is ordinary readable text. Neither needs an account, and neither is a paid feature.

About the name

Strong is a trademark of its owner, and Badger is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to it in any way. This page describes compatibility and nothing else: Badger reads the CSV file that their app exports.