First, welcome to my series of “My Roadmap For Making a Popular Workout App”. I will share with you my trip to make my workout app into a popular mobile app.

With that said let’s start with this.

A little about me

Me and my son

My name is Alexis Djamgossian, alias “Yango’’ for my close friends, I am 33 years old at the time of writing this. I graduated in 2003 as a Software Engineer and I have been working in the IT industry since I was 17, so I have the expertise (I hope to have it 😊) as you can imagine.

I am from Argentina. Maybe you know us because of Maradona or Messi, the most popular football players in the world.

I am a tech geek, nerd and sports lover that enjoys working out at the gym.

Why a workout app?

Now that you know me let me explain why I decided to create another workout app (because we do not have enough of these apps).

As I told you I studied Software Engineering, this can be a very stressful career but for me the first years were very hard and a pain in the ass because I had a full-time job at the same time, I was building my professional career, so I felt a lot of pressure because I had to work to keep paying my studies.

Because of this pressure, I got sick very often and my body wasn’t able to manage all of this stress. I was very worried about graduating from college and giving my best at work at the same time.

In my second year at college, one of my friends asked me if I was practicing any sport and I told him that I never was very good at this. Besides this, I wasn’t in good shape, or have any resistance or enough strength to lift weight (I was the common nerd that you see on a movie).

This is how I looked before I started working out. You can see how I use a fanny pack (super nerd right hahaha)

My friend asked me to join him at the gym. I doubt a lot about that because I never tried before, I was worried that wasn’t for me and would turn into just more stress, but for some reason I decided to try it.

At the beginning it was terrible, for example to do a bench press I only could lift the bar without any weight. I saw an old lady lifting more than me without any issue and I felt terrible, so I set my goals to focus on gaining some strength.

The days were passing by and I noticed that I started to enjoy it. Going every day and on occasions without my friend. I started to feel motivated.

Besides feeling good and doing a good thing for my body, I found that it was a way to open my mind, relax and stop being stressed out. I also noticed that I wasn’t getting sick anymore. I left my stress on every bench press, on every curl bicep.

This wasn’t only a mind changer, I could manage my studies and work in a more efficient way, being easier to concentrate and faster to complete my tasks.

Also noticed that I not only gained strength and body shape, but also gained health. When I studied, I could concentrate more and my time during the university started to become easier.

During this journey, a great help to reach my goals was meeting a lot of people that shared their fitness knowledge with me.

This is a more recent picture.

I tried a lot of apps along these years and I saw that all were lacking something, because they do not have all the exercises I was looking for, or find them too complex, don’t track all the metrics or are not designed for creating supersets exercises. Because of this I decided to stop trying more apps and create my own (that is why I decided to become an engineer, to fix issues and make things happen).

So, let’s set hands on the keyboard and start the coding.

The beginning

At first, I created a simple mockup of what it should look like and created the first MVP and shared it with some friends that workout at the gym with me.

They started using this MVP and gave me some feedback on what they liked or not.

The first MVP only let you create a workout and has a simple workout player, but nothing fancy, it was super simple. You can check the screens and notice how it looked.

Workout Screen

Workout player

After a lot of iterations and back and forth on what I should change, remove or add I finally arrived (after several month of work) with a final product.

The final product

Let me introduce “X-ercise” the definite gym tracker, for beginners to advanced users.

X-ercise

Workout Screen

Workout exercise selection

Workout player

Workout log tracker

With the help of personal trainers, we created workout plans so you can achieve the goals you are looking for.

Let me show you some highlights of this app:

► Hundreds of exercises with animated preview

► Default workouts for men and women

► Remember what was the last day you trained

► Workout exercise player

► Improve your rest , set, exercise and routine times

► Resting timer

► Simple and intuitive design

► Special routines for specific goals

► Record your workouts automatically

► Graphs of weight improvement and training time

► Detailed exercises by muscle group

► Build exercises in superset (compound)

► Create your own exercises and routines

► Access free and premium training plans

► Multiple active workouts

► Monitor your training

► Calendar with detailed record of your workouts by exercise, repetitions, weight lifted and set times, exercise and routine.

► Personalized exercises and routines with your own images

► Multiple days of training per routine

► We continually add exercises and routines without the need to update the application

► Determine rest times between sets and exercises

Right now, it is only available for Android but don’t stress out I am working on the IOS version too. It is coming soon.

Summing up

That is how I ended up creating my own workout app, I hope you all enjoy it as this first series post.

Let me know in the comments section what do you want me to talk about in the second series of this roadmap to make a popular workout mobile app:

1- How did I achieve my first 50 subscribers?

2- About what tech stack I decided to use it

3- Any other thing that you want to know

I hope to see you soon on my next post.

If you want to try the app, here is our landing page:

https://www.x-erciseapp.com