The Fitness Frenzy Story

Hi Dear Readers! My name is Christian, I’m the ham that made Fitness Frenzy. My official title is Mr. Cheerleader Computer Engineer Personal Trainer EMT Man - MCCEPTEMTM for short. Now that we’ve gotten to know each other - here is a little secret: I’ve always struggled with managing my weight. I was a plump little kid and in college, I finally decided to take matters into my own hands. I tried a lot: Atkins, Keto Paleo, Carnivore, Long-Term Fasting, Intermittent Fasting, and some other assorted dumpster fire diets. And guess what, they all worked! Hooray? I mean why try all of them if they all worked? Because, for me, none of them were sustainable. That was until I went back to basics with my bodybuilding cousin. He set my macros each week and I could eat in IIFYM style. Calories and Macros?! Those don’t matter! That’s what everyone else said with the diets above! Right? Well, with him, and this methodology I looked the best I ever had. Eventually, I even started to see my abs, which I was convinced did not exist! But there was a problem, he had me screenshot my logs in My Fitness Pal (MFP), average my weight, and send a progress pic every week. Which was a pain but it didn’t stop me. There was another problem, I didn't particularly appreciate using MFP. I found I was most successful when I meal prepped, and although MFP allows you to save meals, it’s workflow is not favorable. The example I like to give is when I wanted to prepare chicken breast, I’d have to search for it on MFP and I’d get 1000 hits. Some of the breasts were cooked, some not, all from different brands and I had no idea what to choose!

I wanted to prep will all raw single ingredient foods so I knew exactly what was going in my body. So like any nerd, I made a sweet spreadsheet that broke everything down into their smallest building blocks and went from there. After a while of doing that I thought to myself - “Hey Christian, you good-looking guy, why don’t you just make an app - one that fixes all of these problems?”. Good Question. So at that time, I gave myself 3 days to make a mockup, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t continue. Well, I haven’t stopped yet.

So my new direction was set! In this time of programming, I left my full-time engineering job, started EMT school, and continued to teach group fitness classes. Progress was being made on my meal planner app and at a point, I thought I was done. That is until I went on a car ride with a friend and we got to talking. We were talking about the app and he suggested putting in workouts. My knee-jerk reaction was ‘no’, I didn’t want to complicate my food-focused app which was named Food Frenzy at the time. Also feature creep. But we kept talking, and I had expressed that I have not found a workout app that I had liked but I knew what it would look like if I made it. During that conversation, I changed my mind, and Fitness Frenzy was born. Why did I change my mind? I remember my football coach from high school was a huge weightlifting proponent. He made us log every exercise, rep, and weight. This is so next time we used that program, we would be able to see what we did last time and we had a chance to beat it. Turns out this idea is called Progressive Overload. This methodology ensures you are always progressing in the gym, and my football coach knew that. The simple concept of being able to see your last record without having to look for it makes Progressive Overload easy and I wanted it in my app. So I went out and made it. Exercise is vitally important to health and fitness and it FITS right in.

The last thing I wanted to do with the app was add in a social component. The entire reason I made the app was so that I didn’t have to take a screenshot of my logs, calculate my weekly average weight, and send a progress pic to my cousin. All of that functionality was baked in, but how was he going to see it? ACCOUNTABILIBUDDIES! Yes, really, that’s the name and I’m sticking to it. Basically now all I have to do is have my cousin scan my QR code or enter in my ID then he would have access to all of my logs and data. Plus now he could build workouts and meals for me right in-app and send them my way! But what I found most amusing was having my entire family on the app. Now we could all see easily each other progress and could send little reminders and congratulations in our family group chat!

So with that last feature set, the app was done. At the time of writing this, I am actually preparing for launch. It turns out this is the hardest part and I have no idea what I’m doing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So Dear Readers, thank you for listening to my little story. I hope you had fun, I know I did.