For one to three fighters, a well-built spreadsheet is genuinely good enough to track a fight camp — it's free, fully customisable, and adds no learning curve for an organised coach. An app earns its place when you need athletes to submit their own daily check-ins, want automatic alerts the moment readiness drops, or have several assistant coaches editing the same data without overwriting each other. The honest answer isn't "apps win" — it's that the right tool depends entirely on your roster size and how much manual work you're willing to keep doing yourself.
We build a fight-camp app, so weigh that bias. But we'd rather tell a coach with three fighters and a tidy Google Sheet to keep it than sell them software they'll abandon. Below is the honest version: where spreadsheets genuinely shine, the four specific points where they break, a side-by-side table, and a verdict that doesn't pretend the answer is the same for everyone.
Where Spreadsheets Genuinely Work
Let's start by giving the spreadsheet its due, because most "you need our app" articles skip this part. A spreadsheet is not a primitive choice — for the right coach it's the correct one.
None of that is a consolation prize. A disciplined coach running three fighters off a clean spreadsheet will out-coach a disorganised one with the best app on the market. The tool is downstream of the discipline. If you've already got columns for date, sleep, soreness, resting heart rate, session load and a readiness formula that rolls them into one number, you've effectively built a small app by hand — and for a handful of athletes that's a perfectly rational thing to have done.
The reason this matters is that "should I use a spreadsheet or an app" is really two different questions wearing one coat. The first is whether you can store and reason about the data — and a spreadsheet does that fine. The second is whether the system can collect the data, watch it, and react without you doing every step manually. That second question is where the honest comparison actually lives, and it's the one most coaches don't ask until a camp has already gone sideways.
Where Spreadsheets Break
The trouble is that the spreadsheet's strengths are tied to a small, single-author, in-person setup. Change any of those conditions and specific, predictable failures appear. Here are the four that bite hardest.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Capability | Spreadsheet | Fight-camp app |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Paid (one-time or subscription) |
| Full customisation | Total | Within the app's model |
| Athletes submit own check-ins | Manual / unreliable | Yes, from their phone |
| Automatic readiness scoring | You build the formula | Built in |
| Alerts on declining readiness | None | Yes |
| One source of truth for many coaches | Version chaos | Shared, live |
| Weight-cut & camp-phase projection | Hand-built | Built in |
| Effort as roster grows | Grows linearly | Roughly flat |
The Honest Verdict
This isn't a case where one tool wins outright. The deciding factors are roster size, whether you need athletes feeding their own data in, and how many coaches share the picture.
The mistake isn't choosing one or the other — it's not noticing when your situation has crossed the line. Coaches outgrow spreadsheets quietly: the roster creeps up, the blanks creep in, the morning review gets skimmed, and one day a fighter goes flat and the warning was sitting in row 14 the whole time. If your spreadsheet still fits the four "keep it" conditions, you're done here. If you read the "move to an app" list and winced, that's your answer.
One last piece of honesty, because it's the question we get asked most: you don't have to migrate years of history to switch. The data that drives day-to-day decisions is the rolling last few weeks of check-ins, not the archive. Keep the old spreadsheet as a record if you like it, and start fresh wherever you land. The point of any of this — sheet or app — is the same: to turn what your fighters are quietly telling you every morning into a decision you actually act on. The tool only matters to the extent it makes that easier to do consistently, across every athlete, on the mornings you're too busy to think clearly. Pick the one that fits your roster today, and be willing to change your mind when your roster changes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a spreadsheet good enough for tracking a fight camp? For one to three fighters, a well-built spreadsheet is genuinely good enough — it's free, fully customisable and adds no learning curve for an organised coach. It stops being good enough once you need athletes to submit their own daily check-ins, want automatic alerts when readiness drops, or have several assistant coaches editing the same file.
When should a coach switch from a spreadsheet to an app? Switch when the manual work starts costing you decisions: your roster has grown past three or four fighters, athletes won't reliably fill in a shared sheet, you're scanning rows by hand instead of getting alerts, or assistant coaches keep overwriting each other's edits. At that point the spreadsheet's free price is being paid in your time and missed signals.
What can an app do that a spreadsheet can't for fight camps? An app can collect athlete check-ins directly from each fighter's phone, score readiness automatically, send alerts when a fighter trends into the red, keep one shared source of truth across multiple coaches, and project weight cuts and camp phases. A spreadsheet can store all the same numbers, but a coach has to do the collecting, scoring and watching by hand.
Do professional coaches still use spreadsheets? Yes, plenty do, and there's no shame in it — a disciplined coach can run an excellent camp on a spreadsheet for a small number of fighters. The pros who move off them usually do so because of roster size and the need for athlete-submitted data and alerts, not because the spreadsheet was doing the maths wrong.