Your Workout App Fails When It Matters Most

The gym doesn’t care about your plan

I wrote about how workout apps fail to understand lifters. But the real damage happens mid-workout.

What if the squat rack is taken again by a powerlifter who doesn’t give it up for 60 minutes? What if I didn’t eat before the gym and get a queasy stomach while doing pull-ups? What if my kid kept me up all night and I’m feeling physically exhausted? What if work was frustrating and I feel mentally exhausted, but physically fine?

Of course, when I’m an experienced lifter who already went through all this a bunch of times, I know what to do. I know I can swap my flat bench for the incline, but that I have to keep in mind that my OHP right after will suffer from the swap. Yet the app still makes me feel like I failed my OHP block right after because it keeps giving me the same prescription, no matter what actually happened.

They call it “smart” suggestions, but where is the smartness? Where’s the actual sophistication? The learning along the way?

Each body is different, yet they stop at “MALE, 30 y/o.” Real coaching is built on relationship-building as you work together. Where’s all that? The tools are available, the information is all there, but either never picked up or discarded before being used to improve the experience. Imagine a coach that doesn’t tell you that your OHP is gonna suffer a little from the incline bench you just did before. Or a coach that 20 workouts in still doesn’t see that your performance drops rapidly after the 40m mark on push days.

The most important screen is the worst one

And don’t even get me started on the tracking. You’d think an app that doesn’t provide anything except tracking would, you know, actually be good at tracking? They provide a spreadsheet table to fill out:

SET |      Target       |  kg  | Reps + RIR
F   | 7 - 9 Reps, 0 RIR |  ... | ...

OK? Do I put the weight I wanna do first, then go do it, then hit the checkmark? Do I update the values before or after? How do I “plan” my RIR?

So now I add my personal realistic target - because obviously the app does not take into account the performance of my previous set, so I have to do mental math - and then I come back, and edit it again with my actual RIR? For what? So that they don’t update anything in the to-do list at all? It feels like Product Design was an afterthought. All the energy went into the progress page with fancy chart types. But what about the middle of the workout?

7 Reps, RIR 1 - I’m weaker than planned - do I force out the 7th rep at RIR 0 or do I stop at 6 with RIR 1? And when they adjust, why do they do it silently? Just swapping the value while I’m not looking. Where’s the interaction? Where’s the coaching? Who are you targeting with this? The silent auto-adjustment screams “beginners!”, the unexplained RIR input screams “Jeff Nippard subscribers!”, the “Low Incline Chest-Supported Elbows-In Dumbbell Row” screams “min/max optimizers!”, then the non-removable ever-present form instruction GIF for a cable curl that is there EVERY SINGLE WORKOUT screams not even “beginners!” but “first day at the gym, forever!”

You built it for yourself

I don’t even wanna say “you try to target everyone and end up not targeting anyone” because that’s a lie. You try to target YOURSELF. You put the equivalent of your inner voice into a bit of code and then add some half-hearted crutches for people less experienced than you into the UI.

You think in RIRs, so of course they’re there, unexplained. You don’t suggest stuff to yourself. You know what to do. RIR was up, strip 2.5kg off the bar. So no reason to surface transparent suggestions to the user, right? But hey, let’s not forget about the beginners, we wanna get good acquisition - so let’s add an essay to the exercise instructions. Because of course, what would I rather do in the middle of my workout, all sweaty, recovering from RIR 0, than yeah, read a book about how to do an Overhead Press.

Then you present the muscles they just trained as if it makes a difference. The experienced lifter knows what they’re hitting. The beginner can’t take action based on what they see. Is it good, is it bad? Should I have done more? What does it matter anyway, I already finished the workout and I’m heading to my locker. The ones who need the muscle breakdown the most - the beginners - only see it after they have wrapped up the workout already. And don’t get me started on the smart muscle recovery tracking. “Oh, your brachioradialis is recovered, time to hit the gym!” How do you even know? Did you run a full medical on me this morning while I was asleep? Professionals can’t tell people’s body fat percentage reliably when they’re standing right in front of them without putting them into an MRT, but you can tell exactly how long each and every muscle in my body takes to recover based on one single logged workout?

It’s time we put a higher bar on workout apps and expect more for our money. Figma charges less than most fitness apps for an amazing product. Notion does too. All that while maintaining heavy infrastructure. Where’s the bar? Where’s the desire to do better, rather than make another copycat app that does the exact same mistakes as the others?

In 12 years as an engineer, I’ve never seen a product landscape as unambitious and uninspired as the mobile workout app landscape.