Stopa vs doing it by hand
Apple's Workout app builds custom intervals for free. For one repeated session it beats every paid app. For a sixteen-week plan it is an evening of typing that has to be redone whenever the plan changes.
The real competitor is not another subscription. It is the spreadsheet open on your laptop and Apple's Workout app open on your wrist, and you typing one into the other.
That workflow is free, private and completely under your control. For a single session you repeat every week, it beats everything on this site — including us — and the rest of this page will not pretend otherwise. It stops working for a reason that has nothing to do with quality: a training plan is not one workout, it is roughly a hundred of them, and it changes.
Side by side
| STOPA | BY HAND | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $5.99/mo, or $49.99/yr with 7 days free | Free |
| Account needed | Apple Sign-In | None |
| Does your plan leave the phone | Yes — the plan text is parsed on our server | No, never |
| Getting one interval session onto the watch | Import or type it | Type it, about two minutes |
| Getting a 16-week plan onto the watch | One import, about a minute | ~112 workouts entered by hand |
| Every workout dated on a calendar | Yes | No — the Workout app has no calendar; you pick the right one from a list each day |
| Plan changes mid-block | Edit and re-sync | Re-enter every affected session |
| Named paces and %FTP resolved to numbers | Yes, from your thresholds | You do the arithmetic |
| Same plan on a second brand of watch | Yes — Garmin, Suunto, COROS, Wahoo and Zwift via a connected intervals.icu account | Re-enter it in that brand's app |
| What you actually ran, matched to what was planned | Yes, from Apple Health | No |
| Works without an iPhone app at all | — | Yes |
The differences, in full
It is a scale problem, not a capability problem
Apple's Workout app is genuinely good. Custom workouts support warmups, repeating blocks, work and recovery intervals, pace and heart-rate targets and a cooldown. Anything a normal running plan asks for, you can build.
The cost is per workout, and it is paid every time. A sixteen-week marathon block is around a hundred sessions, most of them different from each other. Entering them is an evening. Then week three arrives, you lose four days to a cold, the plan shifts, and a chunk of that evening is spent again.
Stopa's entire reason to exist is that one number: the plan you already have, read once, all of it.
The calendar is the missing half
Even after you have built the workouts, the Workout app does not know which one is today. It is a list. You scroll, you remember, you pick — and the day you misremember, you run the wrong session.
A plan has dates. Stopa keeps them: today's workout is on the phone and on the watch, the week is laid out, and what you actually ran comes back from Apple Health and gets matched against what was planned.
The arithmetic
Plans are written in intent — 6x800m @ 5k pace, 20 min @ 88% FTP, easy Z2. A watch needs numbers. By hand, you convert every one of those yourself and type in the band. Stopa resolves them from the thresholds in your profile, so 5k pace arrives on the wrist as an actual pace range.
What doing it by hand does better
Genuinely, not as a formality.
It is free. No subscription, ever. If money is the deciding factor, this wins and nothing here changes that.
Nothing leaves your phone. Stopa parses your plan text on a server. Typing it into Apple's Workout app keeps it on your devices, full stop. If that matters to you, it is a real and legitimate reason to choose it.
Nothing can misread it. A parser can misunderstand a strange abbreviation and you will need to correct it in review. Your own typing cannot.
For one repeated session it is faster than any app. Interval Tuesdays and nothing else? Build it once, use it forever, install nothing.
It works on a watch with no phone app. No dependency on us or anyone still being in business next year.
Which to pick
Do it by hand if
Your training is one or two repeated sessions, you would rather not pay for anything, or you do not want your plan text sent to a server.
Use Stopa if
You have a whole block written down somewhere — a coach's spreadsheet, a book, an LLM chat — and the thing standing between it and your wrist is an evening of typing you will have to partly redo whenever the plan moves.
Longer read
How to build a custom interval workout on Apple Watch, step by step, and exactly where it stops scaling: Building an Apple Watch workout from your plan, by hand →
And the case for why a coach's spreadsheet is the wrong place for a plan to live: Why your coach's Excel doesn't belong in a spreadsheet →
Get your own plan on your watch
See week 1 of your plan in your paces before you pay. Import one plan and see how long it takes.
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