Strong App Note vs Sticky Note: What Is the Difference?

Quick answer: Strong has three note types. A workout note attaches to one session and shows in your history. An exercise note attaches to one exercise within one session and also shows in history. A pinned note, the sticky, belongs to the exercise itself and reappears in yellow every time you perform it, but never appears in your history.

You wrote something useful in Strong. A cue, a machine setting, a reminder about which pin holds the bench at the right angle.

Next session it was gone. Or it was there but you cannot find it in your history. Or it keeps showing up when you wanted it once.

That is the three note types quietly disagreeing with what you assumed.

What are the three note types in Strong?

Strong's own help documentation lays out three, and the distinction that matters is what each one is attached to.

Workout notes

Attached to the session. You add one by tapping the field at the top of the Log Workout screen.

This is where session context goes: how you slept, whether you were rushed, that you trained fasted, that the gym was heaving and you cut rest short. It appears when you review that workout on the history screen.

If a workout came from a template, the note is duplicated each time you run that template.

Exercise notes

Attached to one exercise, within one workout. Add one by hitting the three-dot button in the top right of an exercise and selecting Add a Note.

This is for things that were true today: "left shoulder felt off", "form broke down on the last two reps". It shows on the history screen alongside that session's entry for that exercise.

Pinned notes, the sticky notes

Attached to the exercise itself, permanently. You create one by hitting the pin button on the right side of an existing exercise note, which converts it.

A pinned note displays in yellow on the workout screen every single time you perform that exercise. Strong's docs describe them as stickies or reminders, with the example being setup instructions like using a 45 degree incline on the bench.

The catch, and this is the part that confuses people: a pinned note does not appear on the history screen. It belongs to the exercise, not to any particular workout, so there is no session for it to show up in.

When should you use each one?

The simple test: is this true today, or true forever?

Today goes in a workout or exercise note. Forever goes in a pin.

Get this the wrong way round and you either lose useful setup information every session, or you clutter every future workout with a note about a shoulder that stopped hurting in March.

Why do people find this confusing?

Three reasons, and none of them are really the user's fault.

The naming does not signal the difference. "Note" and "pinned note" sound like the same thing with a formatting option. They are structurally different objects with different lifespans.

Converting is one-directional in practice. You make a pin by pinning an existing exercise note, which means the mental model has to shift after you have already written the thing.

The history behaviour is counterintuitive. Most people expect anything they typed to appear in their history. A pinned note being invisible there feels like a bug the first time you go looking.

None of this is a criticism of Strong specifically. It is a well-built app, and our Hevy vs Strong comparison gives it a fair hearing against its closest rival. This is just a genuinely non-obvious piece of its data model.

What can you not do with Strong's notes?

Notes are annotations, not data. Strong charts your weight and reps. It does not chart anything you write. A note recording that you switched to a wider grip is invisible to every graph in the app.

There is no cross-workout note search worth the name. If you wrote something useful eight weeks ago and cannot remember which session, finding it means scrolling.

Pins do not carry history. A pinned note is a single current value. Change it and the previous version is gone, with no record of what the setting used to be.

Notes cannot create structure. If your gym has a machine Strong does not know, you can note the substitution but the exercise still has to be forced into an existing entry or a custom one you create manually.

That last constraint is the one that sends people back to their notes app. When the app's structure does not match your training, notes are the only escape hatch, and they are a read-only one.

Is there an alternative to noting things in Strong?

There is a different premise available, and it is worth understanding rather than being sold.

Strong's model is that your workout is structured data with notes attached. You pick exercises from a list, fill in sets, and any freeform text sits alongside as commentary.

The other model is the one most people already use before they download an app: your workout is text, and the structure is derived from it. You write what you did, in your own words, and something else works out what that means.

That is what Gym Note Plus does:

• Type Incline bench 45 deg 60x8 and the weight, reps and your setup note all live in one line
• Sets, reps and weights are parsed into per-exercise charts automatically
• Nothing gets forced into someone else's exercise list, so odd machines and substitutions just work
• Everything you write stays searchable, including the setup details a pin would otherwise flatten
• Personal records are detected as you hit them
• Existing notes from Apple Notes or elsewhere import, so you keep the history you already wrote

If you are already looking around, our Strong app alternatives guide covers the wider field honestly, including cases where staying with Strong is the right answer.

A simple starting plan for Strong's notes

If you are staying with Strong, and plenty of people should, here is how to stop fighting the note types.

1. Audit your pins this week. Open your five most-used exercises and read the yellow notes. Delete anything that stopped being true.
2. Pin only setup information. Seat height, pin position, bench angle, bar type. Things a stranger would need to reproduce your setup.
3. Keep workout notes to one line. Sleep, energy, anything unusual. Long notes never get re-read.
4. Use exercise notes for problems, not cues. Cues belong in pins. Problems belong to the day they happened.
5. Write down anything you need to search later somewhere else. Strong's notes are for reminders, not retrieval.

Strong's pinned notes are for what is always true, and its workout notes are for what was true today. The app will not stop you mixing them up, and mixing them up is why your notes feel unreliable.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a note and a sticky note in Strong?

A regular workout or exercise note in Strong attaches to a specific session and appears when you review that workout in your history. A sticky note, called a pinned note in Strong, attaches to the exercise itself and displays in yellow every time you perform that exercise, but never appears on the history screen.

How do you create a pinned note in Strong?

You cannot create a pinned note directly. First add an exercise note by tapping the three-dot button in the top right of the exercise and selecting Add a Note. Then tap the pin button on the right side of that note to convert it into a pinned note, which will then display every time you perform that exercise.

Why does my pinned note not show in Strong's history?

Pinned notes belong to the exercise rather than to any individual workout, so there is no session for them to appear under. This is intended behaviour rather than a bug. If you want a note to appear in your history, use a workout note or an exercise note instead, both of which are tied to a specific session.

What should you write in a Strong workout note?

Use Strong workout notes for context about the session as a whole: sleep quality, energy levels, illness, time pressure, or unusual gym conditions. These notes appear in your history when reviewing that workout, which makes them useful later for explaining why a session went unusually well or badly.

Are Strong app notes searchable?

Strong notes are not meaningfully searchable across your training history. They are designed as annotations attached to workouts, exercises or reminders, rather than as retrievable records. If you need to find written information from past sessions, keeping it in a searchable notes app or a text-based tracker is more reliable.

Final Takeaways

• Three note types, three lifespans. Workout note for the session, exercise note for one day, pinned note forever.
• The test is today versus forever. Anything permanent belongs in a pin; anything temporary does not.
• Pinned notes never show in history. That is by design, and it surprises almost everyone once.
• Notes are annotations, not data. Nothing you write appears in a chart or a search result.
• Audit your pins occasionally. Stale yellow reminders are worse than no reminders.