Grow with Jo Review

Free on YouTube, with an optional growwithjo app at $39.99/month or $198.99/year and a 7-day trial · a fast-growing channel of fun, low-impact home cardio from Johanna “Jo” Devries, a certified personal trainer · indoor walking, dance cardio, standing Pilates, Tabata, beginner strength and multi-week strength plans · sessions from about 5 to 60 minutes, easy on the joints and doable in a small space · A mat, and optional light dumbbells or a band.

What this review is. This is a sample-tested review: I spent time in the app, explored the library and the menopause and nutrition sections and followed along with workouts, rather than running a full multi-week plan, so the score is a hands-on look with a longer test still to come. This is education, not medical advice; speak to your clinician, especially about HRT or existing conditions.

Is Grow with Jo right for you?

What Grow with Jo Actually Is

Grow with Jo is, at heart, a free YouTube channel of fun, low-impact home cardio, built by Johanna “Jo” Devries, a certified personal trainer. It grew out of her “Walk the Weight Off” indoor walking workouts, designed during the pandemic to be done in a small apartment without bothering the neighbours, and that idea is still the core: cheerful, follow-along movement you can do in a few square feet, with just a few steps to the left, right, forward and back. Alongside the walking there is dance cardio, standing Pilates, Tabata and low-impact HIIT, and beginner-friendly strength with light weights. Sessions run from about 5 minutes to an hour, the playlists are grouped into beginner, intermediate and advanced, and the tone is warm, upbeat and encouraging rather than drill-sergeant.

Around the free channel sits a paid growwithjo app, which I spent time in for this review. It adds a monthly workout calendar programmed by Jo, more than 800 on-demand workouts, live workouts, challenges, streak tracking and a members community she calls the “Homies,” and it is better organised than I expected: you can browse by workout type or, usefully, by time, so if you only have 20 minutes you can find and stack sessions to suit your day. It also carries structure that a purely cardio channel would not, including multi-week plans like an 8 Week Strength & Sculpt programme and a 12 Week Strength & Conditioning programme, a 51-video Menopause & Beyond category, and a Done with Diets nutrition course. For this audience it still helps to be precise about what Grow with Jo is and is not. It is a genuinely good, gentle, low-impact cardio brand with a happy, motivating energy, and its accessibility suits many women over 40. What it is not is a structured strength or menopause system: the strength it offers has no progressive overload, and the menopause category, while real and sizeable, is a library of low-impact workouts labelled menopause rather than a guided programme with hormone, symptom or education content. Read it as a fun, low-impact cardio habit with useful extras, to pair with dedicated strength work.

 

Who Is Behind Grow with Jo? Credibility

Grow with Jo is Johanna Devries, a Canadian trainer who posts as growwithjo. Her fitness credentials are real and better than the influencer norm: she holds a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, she has worked as a personal trainer and coach since 2013, and she was a team lead in strength and conditioning for her university’s athletics department. She also speaks openly about her own story, gaining about 50 pounds during a pregnancy with a traumatic birth in 2020 and rebuilding from what felt like the beginning again, which is why the brand leans so hard into beginners and gentleness. On the app side, the business is run under Dasilva Digital Empire, reflecting her married name. Her on-screen energy is a genuine part of the draw, and using the app it comes across as a happy, encouraging place to move.

What she is not is a clinician, physician, physiotherapist, registered dietitian or menopause specialist, and there is no medical or menopause advisory board behind the content, and no hormone-health expertise informing it. Her programming also carries a clear weight-loss framing (“Walk the Weight Off,” “weight-loss expert”) and a personal faith element that runs through the community, both of which are worth knowing before you commit. For a midlife audience that means solid trust and safety for general low-impact cardio from a properly qualified trainer, but low authority on menopause-specific medical or training questions. Read her as a credible, well-liked fitness coach for accessible cardio, rather than a source of menopause or clinical guidance.

Content and Features

What Equipment Do You Need for Grow with Jo?

Very little, which is a big part of the appeal. Jo’s own guidance is simple: a workout mat and a water bottle, in a small space. Optional but nice to have are a pair of light dumbbells, a set of 2 to 3 pound ankle weights and a resistance band, which she uses to add a little load in the beginner-strength and toning sessions and the multi-week strength plans. Nothing about the core cardio requires equipment, and the walking and dance workouts need only a few square feet. If you want to add the progressive muscle and bone work this cardio-led brand does not really provide, the most useful midlife purchase is a set of adjustable dumbbells for a separate progressive-strength habit, because loading you can build over time is the one thing a low-impact channel cannot do for you.

Recommended spec examples. These picks are curated by specification and feature fit, not personally lab-tested for long-term durability. Prices are examples; verify before buying.

How We Scored Grow with Jo: the 6.3 / 10 Breakdown

Hands-on scores on our 9 weighted criteria. Women Over 40 is our most heavily weighted menopause criterion, and its full 12-capability breakdown follows in the next section.

Is Grow with Jo Good for Women Over 40?

For gentle, low-impact cardio, yes, and it is one of the more welcoming places to start. Grow with Jo is joint-friendly and unintimidating, it can be done in a small space with no equipment, and it is genuinely free, which removes almost every barrier to beginning. For a woman in her 40s or 50s who is deconditioned, carrying a bit of joint pain, or simply nervous about exercise, a fun indoor walking session or a standing Pilates routine is a kind, doable first step, and the upbeat coaching and community help the habit stick. It is also a real trainer’s work, not a random trend, which is reassuring.

Who it suits, and what is missing. The gaps are specific and important for this site. First, training. Midlife guidance prioritises progressive resistance to protect muscle and bone, and Grow with Jo, while it has more strength content than I expected, offers no progressive overload, so it does little for the strength and bone density that matter most after 40. Second, the menopause claim. The Menopause & Beyond category is genuinely large and includes some pelvic-floor and joint-gentle work, but it is a labelled library rather than a menopause programme, with no hormone, symptom, cycle or structured education content, so it does not guide you through the transition. Third, the framing. This is a weight-loss-oriented brand, not a weight-neutral one, and it comes with a heavy marketing style and a faith element that will suit some women and not others. It suits a beginner who wants fun, gentle movement and is happy to assemble her own week; it is a weak single choice for someone whose priority is progressive strength or a guided menopause plan.

This is the perimenopause and menopause assessment, and it is separate from the overall score. Twelve things a programme either does for a midlife body or does not, each scored out of 10 with my reasoning next to it. Together they produce a single menopause fit score, and that becomes one of the nine categories in the overall scoring below.

These are evidence-informed suitability ratings, not clinical measurements. They combine exercise science with hands-on and feature analysis, and are approximate. Individual response varies. A starting point, not medical advice. How we score menopause fit.

What the Research Says: Grow with Jo’s Approach Checked

Grow with Jo’s low-impact cardio is well matched to some real midlife needs, with clear limits. Walking and aerobic movement genuinely help the midlife body: a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found aerobic exercise improved cardiometabolic health in postmenopausal women, including blood pressure and fitness markers, which is exactly the territory of indoor walking and dance cardio.^[1] The dose does not need to be heroic, either. A large meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts found that taking more steps a day was linked to progressively lower risk of death, with benefits accruing well before the mythical 10,000, so a daily indoor walk is a legitimately worthwhile habit.^[2] Just as important for a brand built on consistency, research on midlife women points to enjoyment, routine and accountability as the things that actually keep women exercising, and a fun, low-barrier, community-backed format like this plays directly to those levers.^[3]

The caveat that matters most for our audience is strength and bone. Exercise clearly improves body composition in postmenopausal women, but the muscle gains come specifically from resistance training, which cardio does not supply.^[4] For bone, the protective stimulus is progressive, higher-intensity loading: in the LIFTMOR trial, heavy resistance and impact training improved bone density and function in postmenopausal women, whereas light exercise did not, and reviews confirm bone responds to high-magnitude loads.^[5][6] Grow with Jo has more strength content than a walking-only channel, but without progressive overload it does not deliver that loading. And because it carries a weight-loss framing, one more finding is worth flagging: when women lose weight, adding resistance training preserves the muscle that dieting alone strips away, so cardio-plus-deficit without strength risks losing the very muscle a midlife woman most needs to keep.^[7] The sensible way to use Grow with Jo is as the enjoyable, low-impact cardio side of a midlife routine, paired with a dedicated progressive-strength habit for the muscle and bone it cannot build.

What Users Report: Verified Sentiment

Rating snapshot: the strongest signal here is a big, warm, mostly female following. On the free side, the growwithjo YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers and a wider following of several million across social platforms, and independent press reviews from Today, Yahoo and Bustle are consistently positive about the walking workouts. On the paid side, the growwithjo app rates about 4.9 stars on the Apple App Store from roughly 516 ratings, and about 4.9 on Google Play from around 270 reviews on more than 100,000 installs. There is no genuine Trustpilot profile, so we do not publish one. The store ratings are high but come from a committed, self-selected member base, so we read the large free following as the more trustworthy signal and treat the app ratings as a members’ view. My own time in the app matched the positive picture on energy and accessibility, with the no-voiceover format the main thing I would flag.

Devices, Platforms and App

Grow with Jo is easy to reach. The free channel is on YouTube, so it plays on any phone, tablet, computer or smart TV and casts easily to a screen, which suits a woman who wants to follow a walking workout on the television in her living room. The paid growwithjo app, which is built on a third-party streaming platform, runs on iOS and Android, streams to phone, tablet and TV, and supports Apple TV and Apple Watch, adding the monthly calendar, live workouts, challenges, streak tracking and community on top of the videos. Two things stood out in use. First, the browsing is genuinely handy: you can filter by workout type or by time, so finding a 20-minute session to slot into a busy day is quick. Second, and less ideal, many of the videos are follow-along visuals with no spoken coaching, so you copy Jo on screen rather than being talked through the moves, which is fine if you know the exercises but harder for a true beginner who wants posture reminders. The remaining frictions are commercial rather than technical: the app is priced well above a typical follow-along service, sign-up funnels you into a heavy stream of marketing emails, and some users report the website cancellation is fiddlier than it should be. For a woman over 40 who mostly wants to press play on a free class, the experience could hardly be simpler; the paid app is a nice-to-have rather than a necessity.

Grow with Jo specifications

Grow with Jo Price 2026: What You Actually Pay

Will You Actually Stick With It?

Grow with Jo Pros and Cons

How Grow with Jo Compares to Similar Platforms

If you are deciding between gentle, at-home options, this is how Grow with Jo sits against the alternatives. Scores come from our independent reviews and update automatically as each is scored; Pvolve is included as the menopause-built contrast, and Yoga With Adriene and FitOn as free options.

Competitor prices are approximate; verify on each platform’s website. Scores reflect our independent reviews. See each full review for methodology.

Grow with Jo vs Yoga With Adriene: Which Is Better for Women Over 40?

This is the closest pairing for a woman who mainly wants free, gentle movement she can trust, and they pull in different directions. Yoga With Adriene is a huge free yoga channel built on calm, mindfulness and a warm teacher, best-in-class for stress, flexibility and back care, and it is yoga only, with no cardio and no weights. Grow with Jo is the cardio counterpart: fun, upbeat, low-impact walking and dance that gets your heart rate up and your steps in, with a little beginner strength and multi-week plans on top. Both are genuinely free at their core, both are joint-friendly, and both are led by a qualified but non-clinical creator.

Which is better depends on what your midlife body needs most. If you want to move your heart and legs, lift your mood with something energetic, and build a daily cardio habit, Grow with Jo is the better fit. If you want to calm your nervous system, ease stiffness and stretch, Yoga With Adriene is lovelier. Neither builds meaningful progressive strength or bone, and neither is a guided menopause programme, so whichever you pick, pair it with dedicated progressive-strength work. For genuine menopause programming, pelvic-floor content and the low-impact strength a midlife body needs, a purpose-built option such as Pvolve goes further than either.

If Grow with Jo Is Not Right for You: Best Alternatives

Grow with Jo’s gaps for our audience are progressive strength and bone loading, and a structured, guided menopause approach. If those matter, these published options map to the gaps.

Grow with Jo FAQ

Final Verdict

Hands-on Score: 6.3 / 10 · Sample-tested

Grow with Jo is one of the more welcoming low-impact cardio brands online, and a hands-on look confirmed it: fun, gentle, joint-friendly movement in a happy, positive app, best-in-class for beginner accessibility, free at its core, small-space friendly, and led by a properly qualified trainer with a warm community around her. It also carries more than I expected, a real 51-video menopause category, multi-week strength plans, easy browse-by-time and a nutrition course. The moderating factors for our audience are clear: it is cardio-led with no progressive overload, so it does little for the strength and bone loading that protect a midlife body, its menopause category is an unstructured library rather than a guided programme, many videos have no voiceover, and it comes with a weight-loss framing and a heavy marketing style.

Grow with Jo is for beginners and returning exercisers who want fun, free, low-impact cardio they can do at home, and who are happy to assemble their own week. Grow with Jo is not for women whose priority is building muscle and bone or following a guided menopause plan, who should pair it with a dedicated progressive-strength habit and, for menopause, a purpose-built option such as Pvolve.

Testing Status

Sources and Further Reading

1. Huynh, E. et al. (2024). The effects of aerobic exercise on cardiometabolic health in postmenopausal females: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Women’s Health. Available at: journals.sagepub.com. Aerobic exercise improved cardiometabolic health, including cardiometabolic markers, in postmenopausal women.
2. Paluch, A.E. et al. (2022). Daily steps and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts. The Lancet Public Health. Available at: thelancet.com. More daily steps were associated with progressively lower mortality, with benefits well below 10,000 steps.
3. McArthur, D. et al. (2014). Factors influencing adherence to regular exercise in middle-aged women: a qualitative study to inform clinical practice. BMC Women’s Health. Available at: bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com. Routine, intrinsic motivation and accountability to others were key enablers of exercise adherence in women aged 40 to 62.
4. Khalafi, M. et al. (2023). The effects of exercise training on body composition in postmenopausal women: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Endocrinology. Available at: frontiersin.org. Exercise reduced fat and visceral fat and increased muscle, with resistance training best for muscle gain.
5. Watson, S.L. et al. (2018). High-intensity resistance and impact training improves bone mineral density and physical function in postmenopausal women: the LIFTMOR randomized controlled trial. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. Available at: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Heavier, high-intensity loading improved bone density; light exercise did not.
6. Kumar, S. et al. (2025). Exercise for postmenopausal bone health: can we raise the bar? Current Osteoporosis Reports. Available at: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Bone responds to high-magnitude loading; low-load movement is not a bone-loading intervention.
7. Sardeli, A.V. et al. (2018). Resistance training prevents muscle loss induced by caloric restriction in obese elderly individuals: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nutrients. Available at: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Adding resistance training to a calorie deficit prevented almost all of the lean-mass loss that dieting alone caused.

This is a sample-tested review based on a hands-on session, not a full multi-week test. Pricing and features were verified August 2026 and may have changed. Some affiliate links may be present. This site does not accept payment from platforms reviewed. Education, not medical advice; speak to your clinician, especially about HRT or existing conditions.

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