This June I walked into the gym at 34 years old, after 20 years of lifting weights, and lifted my heaviest deadlift ever. This was a most glorious day. It was a day, just a couple years before I never would have thought would come. Over those two years I started working on a fitness startup app. The app was focused on providing feedback to lifters and doing all sorts of normal workout journal things. The process of product managing and building this app was fun, challenging, and ended up making me stronger in the gym.
I thought I knew a lot about training and lifting weights. I have been doing this seriously since 14 years old or somewhere around there. The plan was to take everything I knew and distill it into an app. I did do this, but I had to do so much more to get to where I felt the product was of actual quality. I had to move from lifting to understanding lifting. The journey resulted in a pretty cool app, me understanding lifting better, and being the strongest I had ever been.
To build a product that was useful to other lifters, I had to move from being just a lifter, to being someone that understood lifting at a higher level. I spent so much time on YouTube and reading to learn more about the programming side of lifting and look for commonalities. These commonalities would become features in the product I was building. A side benefit to this was that I was absorbing large amounts of information about all sorts of lifting things. I also spent countless hours in deep thought about working out and lifting. This was a level of thinking about lifting that I had never engaged in before. I thought I was reading a lot and thinking about lifting a lot until this process started. One of the easiest ways to lift heavier weights is to become a smarter lifter. Before I was long into this process I was starting to get stronger and my body was feeling better than it had in years.
This process was all a search for features to put into the app I was building. All the features were to track variables in a lifter’s training that lead to increased performance. I was looking for common variables that lots of lifters would want to track. I settled on a handful of variables that I knew were important to most lifters. I started tracking these few variables in my training and I got stronger. It was only a few variables. I focused on getting enough repetitions of key exercises in during a week, and I focused on breaking records on a regular basis. Those were the main two things I worried about. I manipulated my workouts around those principles and I kept getting stronger. Before I had started in on this I would have told you that countless variables make a difference, and they do. I also learned for me at that time if all I thought about was those key variables, then the results got better. I think that is probably true about all sorts of things in life.
While researching to build this product, I was starting to look at all sorts of training theories and methodologies I had ignored in the past. For most of my lifting life I have done the exercises, methods, and routines that I liked. I got results from this approach and did not worry much about things outside my interests. This is ok, but new results usually mean doing things we have not done before. My research was exposing me to all sorts of new ideas and I started to implement some of them. These new methods helped me do some cool things. I was able to rehab a pec tear while only missing a couple workouts, in the past that would have sidelined me for a long time. I would not have been able to pull that off before my research. This is just one of the ways this process was serving as a catalyst for strength.
Any good app or software requires testing, and I became the tester for everything I built. Having to put my workouts into an app and see how hard I was or not working was a great nudge in the right direction. It was my job to be better and stronger, so I was better and better. I think this nudge is all most of us need to be better at something we are passionate about. Building this app poured gas on my already existing passion.
I am through the whole process of building this lifting app. I built it to learn technology, to make some money, to build up my resume, I didn’t think it would result in lifetime best lifts. In retrospect I think building software or products around a hobby is a great way to get better at your hobby and get a deeper appreciation for it. I am deeper into lifting weights now more than ever. If you want to get better at something, I can now recommend building products around it. It will force you to learn, it will force you to understand more, and it will force you to grow. These products could be software, physical, informational, podcasts…. I don’t think it matters, it only matters that you are forced to grow and think.