Happy new year everyone
Some good stuff in 25 for me
- went to Yellowstone
- dislocated my shoulder for the first time, went to pt and feel better than ever
- switched jobs for higher pay and better wlb
- started getting into game dev with the goal of releasing in summer 26!
Here’s to a great 2026 everyone!!
Just solo, trying to keep my scope small and since I’m making a “casino rougelite” type of game the main focus will be on the depth of the systems and upgrades.
This is cool, as someone whose been lifting for ~5 years its nice to see a fleshed out opensource tool for weightlifting.
The main problem with any app I've tried is that after enough experience the bells and whistles of the app don't really matter and mostly what you care about is consistent tracking for progressive overload.
I think this is a good app for people who want to get started weightlifting I would say the two main things needed for wider adoption would be
1. A mobile app ( or pwa, I've made and used my own personal workout app for a while as a PWA and its been just as good as any native app I've tried)
2. A way to save specific workouts as routines and track those for long periods of time
Hesitating to write this because I don't want to push back at all on OP but I'm not sure I agree that something like this is a good option for people wanting to get started in weightlifting. I'm not sure it's a good option for anyone really. I applaud OP for the effort but this is recommending some pretty awful workouts. For example if I select back and bi, it's giving me nine different exercises with complete disregard for the order they are in or what other exercises are in the workout.
Why are compound lifts in the middle of the workout and why am I doing three different types of chin ups? There are also no reps / sets calculated nor are there 1RM percentages for weight.
Bro splits are some of the lowest quality routines you can use and this somehow makes them worse. You could replace all of this, remove the bells and whistles, and create a bare bones PPL app that determines exercises based on equipment available and it would be light years better than this.
I'm not sure a beginner would know what order to place them in nor would they recognize the potential injury risk associated with stacking some of these exercises.
Beginners should be focusing on form and simple compound lifts. Throwing them into things like heavy accessory lifts with no regard for exercise choice or format is a quick way to get hurt. Again, I want to applaud OP for doing this. The fitness industry is in a terrible place and tools like this have a great place. I just think it needs a ton of work to make it useful. Maybe if I find some time, I'll try and contribute but in it's current state I would never recommend something like this to anyone.
Agree. IMO a simple 5x5 is going to be the better option for someone just starting out. Stronglifts is one flavor with a great app that just works and tracks all the little stuff (progression, giving you a specific rest time) and, once you plateau, you can start digging in to other options.
I also wanted to say that for people starting out keep it super simple. I wouldn't even use an app. At most a notebook or spreadsheet. Do "Starting Strength" (squats, bench, deadlift. 3 sets of 5). Start with a weight you can handle with good form, even if it's just the empty bar. When you can do that add 5 pounds at the next workout. Increasing the load is important but don't let your form break down. An app is not going to help you with form, and proper form is critical to avoiding injury, especially if you are at all older.
I'll second that, no app needed. A small notebook with a "table" per planned exercise and a ball pen are always in my sports bag, so its ready to go when its training time.
The phone appears to be a distraction for many people I watch at the gym, over-extending the rest between sets while watching social media. The minimalism provided by the paper notebook is what I prefer instead.
Honestly for beginners just building a habit of regular lifting is by far the most important thing. Progressive overload, going to failure, periodization etc won’t do much if you don’t have consistency. My advice to beginners would be to go to the gym 3 times a week and do whatever interests you for about 45 minutes. Once you have that habit nailed down for 6 months then we can talk about more advanced stuff.
Couldn't agree more about form and keeping it simple. I would note, though, that an app can help with that, e.g. the one I mentioned has videos demonstrating proper form, and what I would do when starting out is video myself from the side and compare. An app will also track progression more easily on something you naturally carry around (your phone), versus needing to remember a notebook.
5x5 and 3x5 are out of vogue for lots of reasons but it largely boils down to:
* Not enough volume
* Non-periodized
That first bit means different things at different phases of a lifting "career". But generally speaking "time under tension" and research into effective rep ranges has changed modern thinking on set sizes and volume.
These days people, including World's Strongest Men, tend to recommend higher rep ranges for beginners and those coming back to the gym to build work capacity and reduce risk of injury.
If you are just starting out all that matters is going in to the gym regularly and lifting some weight. 3x5, 5x5, or some complicated periodized program with a lot of accessories are all going to work.
That's why I recommend keeping it simple. Build the habit and build some strength. Once you've done that, you can get fancy if you find that you're really into it.
A better training plan gives you a chance of winning competition. Most of us wouldn't win no matter what plan we follow (at my age only drugs could make me a winner and those have side effects I don't want), we just want enough strength for general life and health. With those more modest goals 3x5, 5x5, or since something not as good still will get us there.
Weird. I've lifted on and off for 25 years. For most of that time I did the stereotypical 3x8-12 and saw much slower progression. During the past couple years I switched to a 5x5 plan and saw massive gains in strength, even while I was cutting weight via a caloric deficit (was eating 1500-1600 calories a day, but had lots of protein and adequate carbs).
For reference, I went from a dumbbell bench press of 45lb to 75lb in 4.5 months (5x5). Previously my progress was much slower.
I'll caveat that I've obviously not closely controlled for all factors and I'm an n of 1. Additionally my interest is in having a great strength to weight ratio, rather than being a body builder. I'm a climber and that's an important consideration.
Out of vogue for beginners according to what/who? This is the first I'm hearing of a falloff of 3x5/5x5 for beginners, so I'm confused where this is coming from.
You have been lifting weights somewhat regularly for 25 years, majority 3x8-12, and the switch to 5x5 increased your dumb bell bench press from ~20kg to ~35kg?
There is just no way. That is extremely light weight. Like, most beginners who follow any sort of progressive overloading system will be at that level in 4 weeks starting from essentially 0
after 15 years of lifting, I'm currently pushing 4x10 with 50kg dumbbells on the bench.
So yeah, 35kg after 25 years seems odd unless those 25 years weren't exactly "serious" or "consistent" let's say.
3x5 like done by Starting Strength continues to work well for beginners looking for strength. After you tapped out the easy gains, you can use a periodized program for body building described by "the science" if you wish, but can do more useful weights because you are stronger.
Community-made working plans would be a killer feature.
But I do agree with your assessment. Each exercise needs a categorization (compound, isolation), compliments (if an exercise is a push, then what are some pulls), companions (if you're working arms at the cable stack, might as well do a bunch of arm/shoulder/back cable exercises), and a est. time to perform (including warmup, setup). This will allow plans to be generated in a way that makes sense.
Though, I think community made exercise plans are a better solution than trying to devise algorithms to generate good plans. Though, an LLM integration might work well for beginners, send a prompt with a list of exercises and goals (i.e., beginner looking for a 3 day a week strength plan, build one using these 20 exercises).
My next question would be why are we trying to use algorithms to generate good plans? Good and simple plans have been around for decades that are easy to find.
Thanks a lot means a lot coming from a gym bro hehe
Btw I totally agree: once you’ve been training a while, the only thing that really matters is tracking your progress and showing up consistently (or "mental" side in my case, i do not train anymore for performances).
Good news : saving + tracking routines over time is in the roadmap.
That's why the architecture of the "workout session" is the part that is the most different from the old app.
I want users to create, reuse, share, analyse and evolve their own training blocks with minimal friction.
Would love to hear how you handled that in your own PWA sounds like we've walked similar paths :)
>> but all of these issues seem to be solvable with current tech by applying additional training and/or "agentic" direction.
Can you explain why you think this. From what I gather from other comments it seems like if we continue on current trajectory at best you'd still need a dev who understands the projects context to work in tandem w/ the agent so the code doesn't devolve into slop.
As I see it, this is pretty much a given across all codebases, with a natural tendency of all projects to become balls of mud if the developer(s) don't actively strive to address technical debt and continuously refactor to address the new needs. But having said that, my experience is that for a given task in an unfamiliar codebase, an AI agent is already better at maintaining consistency than a typical junior developer, or even a mid-level developer who recently joined the team. And when explicitly given the task of refactoring the codebase while keeping the tests passing, the AI agents are already very capable.
The biggest issue, which is what you may be alluding to, is that AI agents are currently very bad at recognizing the limits of their capabilities and continue trying an approach when a human dev would have long since given up and went to their lead to ask for help or for the task specification to be redefined. That's definitely an issue, but I don't see any fundamental technological limitation here, but rather something addressable via an engineering effort.
In general, I've seen so many benchmarks fall to AI in the recent decade (including SWE-BENCH), that now I'm quite confident that if a task being performed by humans can be defined with clear numerical goals, then it's achievable by AI.
And another way I'm looking at it is that for any specific knowledge work competency, it seems to already be much easier and time effective to train an AI to do well on it than to create a curriculum for humans to learn it and then to have every single human to go through it.
reply