Why Most Fitness & Nutrition Apps Fail People Over 40 (And What Actually Works) | Ep 401
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Even if your tracker or workout/nutrition app logs everything, it still can’t tell you WHAT to do when progress stalls.
We dig into the hidden gap sabotaging results... the missing interpretation layer... and show how to turn raw data into smart, timely decisions that finally help you get unstuck.
If you’ve hit a wall with MyFitnessPal, MacroFactor, or your favorite lifting app, this conversation explains why the numbers look fine while your body says otherwise.
You’ll hear how midlife physiology changes the rules over 40, why plateaus are often upstream issues like sleep debt or weekend habits, and how qualitative signals like training effort, hunger, and mood complete the picture missed by most algorithms.
Learn how a coaching-style layer can synthesize your logs, photos, and health data into clear actions: training load, rest and recovery, protein and carbs, or a weekend plan that prevents backslides.
The goal isn’t more tracking. It’s better decisions from the tracking you already do, so you can build muscle, lose fat, and sustain results with less guesswork and more confidence.
Timestamps
0:00 - Why tracking alone isn't enough for building muscle over 40
2:18 - The missing interpretation gap that keeps you stuck
5:30 - What fitness apps actually do well (and their limitations)
9:10 - When tracking algorithms miss the root cause of your plateau
14:06 - Why recovery capacity matters more in your 40s and 50s
18:56 - How identity and behavior change drive sustainable results
22:56 - Sleep and recovery optimization for strength training
25:06 - Making personalized coaching accessible and affordable
28:56 - How adaptive training decisions improve muscle-building progress
32:16 - Analyzing meal patterns beyond calories and macros for better body composition
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Philip Pape: 0:01
If I were to guess, you've probably tried many fitness, nutrition, and workout apps. For a while, you use them and they help you make progress. You might track your food, you follow workouts, and then something happens. The scale stops, your lifts stop, and the app can't really respond to those. What about all the obstacles along the way? What is missing is often that interpretation layer. The coaching that takes your data and tells you what to do next for your specific situation. Today we're gonna break down why most fitness apps today fail in doing the thing you really need, and what actually works without having to hire a coach. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna look at fitness apps in general, how they're designed today, the ones on your phone for nutrition, for workouts, uh maybe even some of the new lifestyle type apps, and why they're not giving you what you need. I talk to people every day, every week, who tell me they're using this app or that app. It might be a food tracker like my FitnessPal chronometer. Of course, I will suggest upgrades like Macro Factor along the way, or some of the strength and workout apps that I like, like Boost Camp. And a lot of folks using these apps, they listen to the show, they understand principles like progressive overload, they know they have to get enough protein, they know they want to track their numbers and kind of see how things change, but they're still stuck in some way. And when I ask them, hey, you said you're using an app, you're following some sort of system. How do you know what to do when this happens? How do you know what to do when you hit a plateau of some kind, whether it is in your body fat or your lifts or food issues like emotional eating, you know, just the holidays coming up? The answer is always the same. The app doesn't really tell me that, right? The app isn't smart enough to do that. Maybe I go ask ChatGPT or something, or maybe I hire a coach or work with a coach or come into the Facebook group, right? In other words, we usually seek out some extra intelligence, human connection, a third person, a third-party perspective, things like that, rather than something generic because this is about us as individuals. And so that's the problem we're gonna solve today. And tomorrow, Tuesday, November 18th, I am launching something that fixes this exact gap. It's the whole reason that I uh designed what's coming out tomorrow. Look, it's an app. It is an app, but it's completely different than everything else in the space. Today I want to show you why the gap exists in the first place. So you understand why I spent all the time and effort over the past several months putting this together for you. Before we get into it, if you want early access to the app that I'm launching tomorrow, join my email list at witsandwaits.com slash email. There's a link in the show notes as well. And if you're already on the list, you're already getting this information. If you're not on the list yet, join, reply, and say, hey, I want the secret link to the app. All right, and I will get it to you. And you can get access to it right now, including the Black Friday pricing before anyone else gets it when it launches tomorrow. All right, let's get into it today and start with what most fitness apps actually do quite well. And the first one is that they're good at tracking data. They're really good at this. Whether it is MyFitnessPal, Chronometer, MacroFactor, Boost Camp, Strong, any of these, they will help you log the data. And in some cases, they will use that with an algorithm or some sort of calculation, right? Like we know MyFitnessPal doesn't really do much of anything other than let you log, but at least it shows you what you ate. My macrofactor will take that data along with your weight and say, okay, here's your expenditure, therefore we can calculate your targets for gaining or losing weight, right? So it takes it to that next level, which is very impressive that they can do that. I really do. You guys know I'm a big fan of MacroFactor for that reason. You take a workout logger like Boostcamp and it will say, hey, here are your PRs, here's what you did last time, and now you can figure out what I need to do this time. And sometimes there's a little bit extra intelligence, like a percent of your max or something like that. And at the end of the day, tracking something that you care about is foundational. It's a first principle. You can't manage what you don't measure. So I'm never gonna say don't track. Absolutely not. Tracking is invaluable. But tracking is only the half the equation, and that's if you even know what to track, right? Because there are a lot of things. The other half, the part that drives the result is how do you interpret that data and take action based on it, right? What does the data mean? What should you do with it? And what's interesting is in physique university, we've covered this multiple times when it comes to your macrofactor data or however you're tracking your data, of as much as as much of that you have in your app or your notebook or whatever, things happen that where the data doesn't seem to make sense, right? Like people say, why is my metabolism dropping? And there's 20 possible reasons. I don't know until I look at it. And then I'm gonna ask you 10 more questions, right? I'm gonna say, okay, are you sleeping enough? How's your stress? What did you do? You know, did you eat a bunch of salt and Chinese food? Right? Like there's a lot of these questions. And as good as some of these apps are, like Macrofactor, it doesn't have that level of intelligence. Maybe it will one day, but it doesn't today. And that's where pretty much every app falls short today. Even the AI apps, like the AI Fitness apps, I'll say that they're very narrow in scope. You know, they're getting better, they they attack like one small problem, but not necessarily the full context. So that's what we're gonna get to today. Just bear with me. So going back to this whole data thing, if again, let's say you're using MacroFactor and it gives you a target, if you hit the target consistently, you are probably going to get the result you want, at least initially, or part of that result. But what's gonna happen is in reality, things change. Maybe you walk less, maybe you get injured, maybe you are stressed out of your mind, and now your expenditure drops. But the app can't predict that. It doesn't have a crystal ball, right? So it's gonna happen, and then all of a sudden you don't quite get the result you thought. And the app's like, well, you didn't get the results, but but here's what's happening, so we're gonna keep adjusting you. So it's it's reactive, and to be fair, it's very quickly reactive, but it's still reactive. What if the problem really isn't your energy balance, though? At the end of the day, it is, but there's a root cause that's upstream. What if your protein's been inconsistent? What if your step count dropped and maybe you're not even aware of it? Maybe you're in a fat loss phase, you're moving a lot less than you thought. What if your sleep's been terrible and you're underrecovered and that's affecting a lot of other things? A tracker as it exists today is not going to tell you that. It's going to show the numbers and try to crunch some algorithms to give you a little more to work from, but not nearly as much as you want, which is why most people need some level of accountability or coaching or partnership or, you know, a Facebook group or a community, somebody else to connect with them to help look at that data, not just that data, but all the data, right? Yeah, it's your weight trend, it's your training feedback, your recovery signals, your biofeedback in general, your body measurements, your nutrition patterns, what does your food look like? What's the quality of food? What's the balance, the meal timing, the supplementation, right? I can go on and on. You guys are like overwhelmed. I know all this. I know it's like a huge list of the fitness pillars that we have to deal with. But at the end of the day, like for me as a coach, when somebody pays me a bunch of money every month to personally look at their data line by line and understand what's going on, that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to figure out, like a detective, here's what's happening, here's what's changing, here's what you have to do to address. Now, many of you have done this on your own and done it fairly successfully. There is a whole spectrum. Some of you do it on your own successfully because maybe there isn't too much happening. Others are just you're stressed out of your mind because you know you're in your 40s, there's perimenopause, the hormones are changing, you've got more belly fat, you're doing what you did before, but it's not working anymore. You're doing everything that the influencers and the podcasters say and it's not working. You're tracking all the apps. Does this sound familiar? Right? Does this sound familiar? And I'm sick of it, frankly. I'm sick of I love helping people. I'm sick of people not succeeding even when they put in the effort and they're smart and they're listening and they're taking action and they're changing their behaviors, right? And so the next thing I want to talk about here is why this does matter even more for those of us that are older, right? As you get into your 40s and 50s, I think that's kind of the sweet spot in someone's life where they're past the point where they can kind of do anything they want and get away with it. And they're right in the point where life gets more stressful. You have more obligations, you have family, you have uh your career, right? Your body is uh starting to degrade a little bit, you're starting to lose that muscle mass, the hormones are starting to decline. There is a reason that this is this midlife transition is so challenging for so many of you, right? I get it. Now, in your 60s and 70s, can it still be challenging? Of course. But I'm I want to hit on when this stuff starts so that we can understand what to do. Now, maybe in your 30s you start to have issues as well. It doesn't matter, it's not so much the number as kind of the general idea here, right? Your body doesn't respond the way it did in your 20s. You had your hormones raging, you had everything going for you, there was no degradation, no aging that had occurred really in your body at that point. Your ability to recover was super high, your hormones were super good, well balanced, your life stress was less, right? All of that. And so if you just take the principles and a plan and then you try to apply it to you, that's a good start. But immediately on day two, the plan starts to fall apart because of these issues. And it might have to do with the training split, the training volume, the way you're trying to progress, your equipment, what you did last night, your joints are achy, you're exhausted every session. What do I do for that? What do I do when I have an energy crash in the afternoon and I can't help but raid the freezer for ice cream, you know, or muffins or whatever your thing is, right? So again, if you're just trying to take a plan and track and then go, you might be frustrated because of these things. You might start strong, make some progress, and then burn out. Now, some of this has to do with misunderstanding of behavior change and habit formation, the idea that we're trying to go all out, or the idea that we're trying to create a so-called quote-unquote habit of working out, when really that's not the habit. The habit is the little automated things that tie to your identity as a person who just, yeah, works out and trains. There's a process to get there, right? So it's not because of a lack of, I'll say willpower or discipline, although discipline depends on how you define discipline, right? There's an element of discipline that actually is uh valid in terms of you've built up habits, you've changed your identity, you just do the thing. There is that element of discipline. But I'm thinking more of like just do it type discipline, right? It's not because you're too old. No, no, no. Okay. I've worked with people in their 70s and 80s who are just killing it, they're crushing it. It's fine. Their body responds, the human body responds pretty much till the day you die to any of this stuff at different levels, okay? It's because the system they're using doesn't account for their physiology and their life circumstances. Now, I've been hammering this message since the beginning on the show, but in the past, I hammered it in the context of hey, maybe you need to work with a coach or be in a community or get a training partner or someone else that can help you with this, or at least really learn these skills and this knowledge, which for a lot of you, it's it's overwhelming. It's like, I don't want to be a nutrition expert, you know, I want to listen to a podcast or work with a coach and kind of be told what to do, or at least learn what to do for me. So it's scoped down, right? So the general principle here is having something that adapts, that evolves, that is dynamic with you, that says, hey, your sleep was terrible last night. Let's think about what that means today for, I don't know, training intensity or capability, what it means for your emotions around food today because you're tired. You know, if your protein has been consistently low for three days, even though you've averaged well for the past two weeks, but all of a sudden it's dropped. What's going on? What strategies do we do to fix that? Is this a deviation from your habits that we want to look at? Right. So it gets kind of nuanced. And that's what coaching does. That's but a lot of people can't hire a coach or afford a coach. You know, this is why over the years I've put together different levels like physique university, which is super affordable, but even some people can't afford that. I get it. It's super affordable, but it's more self-motivated, even though we have education, we have community accountability, right? We do have some of that in there for sure. We have real human coaches like myself and Carol who can you can tag and talk to. And I think that's really, really important. And a lot of people need that and want that. But when we talk about doing it yourself or using an app or trying to scale this so it's super accessible to as many people as possible in the world, yourself included, because you may not want to deal with coaches and paying for coaches and dealing with all that, that is what's missing from fitness apps today. Okay, that is what's missing. And we're gonna talk about that in a second. I did just talk about recovery, though, as a big piece of what is what is critical when you're over 40, right? We have stimulus, which is the activity, the training, the things you're doing, and then we have the recovery, which is kind of everything else. It's super critical. So I just wanna give a shout out to today's sponsor, Cozy Earth, because they have helped me tremendously improve my sleep quality. I'm actually really excited right now because we're at the tail end of our sheets before they have to get washed. And so I know I have a few more days with the cozy earth sheets before we go to the inferior other sheets that feel, you know, harsh and dry and they I sweat in them, but the cozy earth sheets are amazing, guys. They really are. They make cozy earth makes bedding, but specifically sheets, but they make a lot of other things. And it's derived from bamboo. And I'm not exaggerating when I say they are the most comfortable sheets I've ever slept on because of how it regulates temperature. You guys know I'm an engineer. I love it when somebody comes up with a material engineering solution to a problem. And I think they did that. And I I know bamboo-dry fabric can be super luxurious and temperature regulating in other products, like like briefs. I have personal experience. I've joked about that before. But for the sheets, you know, I want to sleep restfully. I want to get that high sleep score. I want to have really good recovery for muscle building. I don't want to wake up too hot or cold or wake up in the middle of the night because of it, right? And these sheets are amazing. They stay soft after many washes. I can attest to that. We bought a second set, so I could almost have uninterrupted use of the sheets, I hope. And at the end of the day, better sleep means better recovery, means better training, means better results. It's just a piece of the overall pie, but it's a very, very important one. If you want to upgrade your sleep quality, and again, if you're over 40, sleep is probably one of the highest leverage, the highest ROI variables that you're not optimizing right now. Check out Cozy Earth, go to wins and weights.com slash cozy earth, use code wits and weights for 20% off. Again, that's wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Use code wits and weights for 20% off. They have a hundred day guarantee where you can return them for no cost. And they have all sorts of warranties and guarantees because the stuff is just that good. So go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth and use code wits and weights for 20% off. All right, let's get back to now what actually works then if we want to fill this gap in the space, get you something that's really affordable as well, because I'm all about that, right? People say, look, I want a coach, I can't afford it. I want to join a group program, I can't afford it. Okay, so what's the solution here? Something you can use on your own, but we can't replicate a coach, can we? Right? Because the obvious answer is hire a coach. And you're gonna hear coaches go on podcasts, and at the end of the day, they want you to hire them. They want you to pay, pay them for their time, right? Which is which can be definitely valuable if it's a good coach. And you get someone who looks at your data, who interprets it, who tells you what to do next. And that works. That's what I do with private clients. And I have clients who they run into financial difficulty and they'll say, Look, can you do something to work with me so I can still have that connection with you? I'm like, Yeah, let's let's reduce the number of calls or let's, you know, let's just scale something down so that it's a win-win for both of us, right? But not everyone can afford one-on-one or group coaching. And honestly, and this is sacrilege, not everyone needs it. What everyone does need is a way to interpret their results. The thing that sits on top of your data and gives you coaching level feedback. Now, that might come from your own brain, that might come from listening to a podcast, or we're all about efficiency here. It might come from an app that can actually do these things, which is what I'm getting to. And I know this sounds like one big sales pitch for the app, and you know what? Frankly, it probably is. But it is because I'm it's a passion project of mine that I created that I'm using myself that I love, and I think you will too. But let me show you what this looks like in practice, okay? The first thing you need from a training perspective, your training has to adapt to what you're doing. Now, if you go back to something like starting starting strength, three sets of five, every session you go up five pounds. Now, they don't really mean five pounds. If you look into the nuance, they'll say, go up the appropriate level for how much you're adapting and getting stronger so that you don't miss any reps. But then people are like, well, how much is that? And if somebody fails the reps, I say, okay, did you go up the right amount? Are you resting long enough? Are you getting enough recovery? It always comes down to that anyway. And so even a baseline new beginner program like Starting Strength, they're not saying just get the three sets of five done, regardless of everything else. They're saying get it done and do the other things to support getting that done. And if not, if you fail reps, there's something else happening, right? So then you're you're like, okay, well, how do I do that? Well, that's where you have to ask questions of yourself or a coach asks you, how did that feel? Was it easier the same or harder? Did it feel like a grind? How are you sleeping? How are you eating, right? Are you taking long enough rest between your sets? I mean, now if a coach is looking at your data, they'll know that, right? And then use that to decide how do what do we do next time? Now, in a beginner program like that, like starting strength, you would then decide, well, we're still probably gonna go up, but maybe we're gonna go up a little bit less, right? As you get more advanced, you're not necessarily going up in weight every session. You might be adding reps, you might be adding sets, you might be, you know, switching the intensities around and rotating through rep ranges, all of those sorts of things, right? We're not gonna get into that today. The point is you have to make an adaptive decision based on your recovery and adaptation. Okay. And so if you think about real life, the best time this works is when you have a trainer and you have a conversation with them, right? Like when I work with trainers, it's either a spreadsheet or a chat or something, and I'm like, this is how it felt, this is what I'm doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And learn from that qualitative feedback instead of just the numbers, because the numbers are only gonna tell you part of the situation. So on the training side, that's what you need. Let's go to the food side, okay? Now, you guys know I'm a big fan of tracking calories and macros. However, this is gonna, this is gonna seem like a paradigm shift, but it's all consistent. What most people need, when I start working with a client and they use macro factor, that's like 1% of the equation. I'd love to have the data for sure, but even if you didn't have the data, what would you have to do? Or I should put it this way, whether you have the data or not, what do you end up doing based on that data? Well, what you end up doing is looking at the quality of your food, right? Are you eating mostly whole foods that are satiating? The micronutrients, the macronutrients, is there sufficient protein? Are your meals balanced to help with appetite, hunger signals, even blood sugar? Do you have enough meals? Is the timing spaced accordingly to work with your life? Is the timing around your workouts for protein and carbs adequate for fueling yourself and feeling your best? So, what it gets down to is really analyzing the patterns of your meals. By patterns, I don't just mean timing. I mean all the information contained in how you eat, which goes far beyond calories and macros. Now, if you only did calories and macros and tried to hit those, we've talked about this before, you could hit them with like Twinkies and pizza and hamburgers and like throw all that together and somehow hit your macros, but it's not gonna be a great diet because you're not gonna be fueled properly, you're not gonna feel great, your digestion's gonna be awful, your energy is not gonna be good, and you're gonna be hungry. And so it isn't just those, it isn't just hitting your macros, is it? Now, we know that hitting your macros and calories will cause you to control your energy balance, but it's only a tiny piece of the equation. So, having said all that, what if a human being, or in this case AI vision, which has come so far and is so impressive and amazing, can look at your food and just look at one typical meal a day. Analyze that food for color, for nutrients, for balance, for macros, even for calories based on the volume on the plate, and ask you some qualitative questions. Oh, does that sound familiar? Yeah, kind of like what we just talked about with training. Ask you a few qualitative questions. And what if those qualitative questions changed based on the situation and how you've been progressing? Like if I were a if I, as a coach, I'm not gonna ask you the same exact question every time. I'm gonna probably ask a different one based on what's going on, based on the context, right? So if your protein's been solid, let's say you upload a meal each day, just one meal, and the app's like, is this a typical meal for you? Sure, yes. And it has a lot of protein. And the app asks you at the end of the night, hey, how many protein servings did you have today, by the way? Oh, you know, I have five. And you say that every day and protein's been good, but then all of a sudden on the weekend, you're eating a lot more or in a different way, or you report less protein. An intelligent analysis can infer from that pretty accurately that something's off on the weekends. And now we need a different strategy, right? That that's the impressive mind-blowing part about this. So, guys, I worked a lot of uh on this in terms of brainstorming and talking with experts and reviewing some of the great information out there from you know, mass and the evidence and behavior change experts, all of that as I developed the app. And so at the end of the day, I said, what is the lowest stress way to actually help you change your behaviors when it comes to eating to build up your micronutrients and your macronutrients, and then ultimately your energy without having to track calories and macros. I know it sounds sacrilegious. We're not talking about intuitive eating, we're still talking about tracking and analysis. But in this case, you upload one photo a day, the AI then spots lots of different patterns and gets you feedback. That is the difference. Okay. I also don't think it's like Noom. Okay, Noom is I'm not gonna go down that road. I don't want to compare to other apps like that. Okay, let's keep going. So I might do another episode about that if you guys want it. Let me know. So I've just covered training and nutrition. The third thing that you need, okay, so training and nutrition are usually separate apps today. It's rare that those are together. There are a few apps that put them together, and when they do that, it's kind of less less well designed for both, right? But that's just two pieces. Another piece you need is education, reminders of the science and the evidence and what works, strategies, guidance, right? A lot of the reasons you're probably listening to this podcast, but the problem with the podcast is it's it's kind of random. It's all over the place. We have over 400 episodes now. I love sending people specific links to the episode that might work for them, and I'm always happy to do that. You could also search. But what if you had a quick briefing every day in the morning that was targeted exactly to what you needed that day, that adapt and evolved with your progress, that adapt with what you said your goal was. For example, as I'm as I'm testing the app on my end, I'm trying to work on sleep. So a lot of the briefings were relate to sleep. Now, if all of a sudden my sleep gets locked down and it's good, the app is actually gonna change to my next biggest constraint, my next most immediate constraint. That is as personalized as it gets. That's again like if you had a human coach every day in the morning who said, Hey, hey, what's the big thing right now I can help you with? But it's even more powerful than that because the AI knows everything going on, the data. It has your Apple Health data, it has all anyway. I don't want to get into the features of my app specifically, even though I'm doing that already more than I expected. I want to talk about what's missing in current apps. And I think that's a big one. Personalized lessons, or even saying, hey, out of Phillips podcast, here's the one you need right now. Maybe you've heard it, maybe not, but here's the one you need. Your protein's been low, here's a strategy for getting more protein. Your sleep is affecting recovery, here's sleep optimization, right? So it the education itself adapts to your situation. It's not just a static curriculum. And, you know, I'm cannibalizing some of my own stuff here because in physique university we have courses that walk you through all the things. But imagine if you can take one of those courses, take a piece out of it, and have it automatically fed to you on a given day that you needed it. And then, of course, this is huge. This is why people tend to join communities and hire coaches. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers ideally immediately. So all my clients have 24-7 access to me, but that doesn't mean that I respond at 3 a.m. That means you send me a message at 3 a.m. And then during business hours, I respond. But what if you could just get an answer immediately? So in my app, and again, I'm getting into the features of the app today. You know what I did? Today is a non-training day for me, but I wanted a form check on something I did yesterday. And there wasn't an activity for that today because it's a non-training day. So I went over into the coaching chat and I said, How can I give you a form check? And it said, you know what? I'm gonna create an activity right now for you so you can put a form check in. And I did that, and it did that. That's what I've designed the app to do. It's it's it's it's blowing my own mind. And I hope it blows your mind too, because of how on demand and adaptive it is. So you don't have to wait for a call, you don't have to wait for a group call, you don't have to wait, you don't have to schedule something, you don't have to wait for your coach to wake up or get back to you. You don't have to post some Facebook group and hope somebody responds, right? Just ask the coach, hey, why is my weight moving? I'm really struggling right now, I'm trying to lose fat. Why is my weight moving? And it can then help diagnose what is going on right now. And it will know based on your data, hey, you know what? Your sleep has been six hours a night lately, used to be eight. That could be part of the issue. Let's talk about it, right? Incredible. So that's what coaching does. That's what human coaches do. But imagine if an app can do that and make intelligent personalized decisions for you or suggestions for you. Until now, as far as I can see, and I've done a lot of research, and I hope you guys have as well. No app can really do that as good as an actual human coach. But what if it could? What if you can get that interpretation layer without the cost and the scheduling and the time and the effort of one-on-one or group or community-based coaching? What if the app could do the interpretation for you? And that is what I built. And that launches tomorrow. So there's your pitch. There's your pitch. Now, what's interesting about all of this is when I was building the app, I always came back to the same question. What would I want myself if this was five years ago and I was starting my early 40s? Because you guys know, you know, I didn't have my stuff together until then. And I'm still figuring it out, like we all are. But what if I could, what could I have back then? Right. Like when Macro Factor came out, I jumped out on day one because it was a game changer compared to what was available. Well, I think this is going to be at least as much of a game changer in the space because back then I was, I was where a lot of you are now, right? I had so much information. I was up, I was gobbling up podcasts and videos and books. I was reading, I was even reading studies directly, right? And I understood the principles after a while. It took me a while to learn it and absorb it. But there's still so much guessw and detective work. And like, is this training right for me? Am I using the right intensity? Should I add weight or reps? Am I recovering properly? What do I do with my food and my calories and blah, blah, blah. Right. And all the apps I used, it's they couldn't really answer those directly. So I had to become my own coach, but I also had to work with some other coaches who coached me. And then I became a coach because I realized people were struggling with this. And now we have something with technology that can do that. I think it's so impressive. And you know what? Maybe coaches are gonna hate me out there. Maybe if you're a coach and you listen, you're like, Philip, you're gonna take our jobs. You know what? I don't know what the future holds. I just know that when a solution exists and we can make things better and we can help people, let's try to do that. And it especially if it's more accessible to more people. And that's why I built Fitness Lab the way I did. Not to replace your tracking apps, by the way. Look, if you want to keep using Macro Factor for the calories and macros, I actually encourage that. I encourage like a few different apps that are in your tool set that work really well together. I believe you probably could replace those with just this one app. But I would say, look, when this launches, it's brand new. There's gonna be a lot of things I still want to add to the app going forward. And, you know, don't just drop everything. Try it, give feedback into the app, and we're gonna make it better and better over time. But really, it's that coaching layer. And once you have that, then whatever you are already tracking. In the app or outside the app becomes exponentially more valuable because now it's driving decisions, right? Instead of just sitting there in a logger, it's driving intelligent decisions. All right, so let's wrap it up. Most fitness apps are great at tracking data, terrible at interpreting it. I think we've established that. It's not their fault, it's just what we were capable of doing with modern technology. That interpretation gap is where people get stuck, especially as we get older when recovery and hormones require a little more nuance. You don't need more information, more tracking. You need to take that data and understand what to do with it. So tomorrow, Tuesday, November 18th, all right, I'm launching Fitness Lab. It's the AI coaching app that fills this exact gap. Daily coaching briefings personalized to you, meal photo analysis to spot your eating patterns, adaptive strength training that responds to recovery, real-time AI coaching when you get stuck. Um, there's progress metrics. There's so much. There's so much I haven't even talked about. And I'm gonna talk about it a little more tomorrow, so stay tuned. But what matters most is I think it actually ends up teaching you how to coach yourself. So I always joke that I want people to fire me once they've learned what they need to learn and know how to do this and have the confidence. I think the app is gonna be a similar situation where you could get to a point probably where you're like, yeah, I probably don't need this app anymore. I believe the app is gonna be so valuable and have so much runway that you're probably gonna not run out of ways that it can help you improve for many, many months. And I hope years, of course, you know, from a as a business perspective, I hope it's years, but I still think it's going to teach you how to coach yourself. It's not gonna hide that behind the scenes. It's gonna explain why. It's trained on all my podcast episodes, all my coaching guides, and a ton of manual instructions that I gave it to emulate our philosophy of this show: flexibility, sustainability, self-autonomy, and efficacy, right? Not just getting the result, which is important, but how to read your body's feedback, how to make better decisions about everything, training, recovery, et cetera, and how to think like a coach about your own progress, but not have to stress about wondering what to do. It takes the stress out. And it's built specifically for adults over 40 who want to build muscle, lose fat, improve your body composition without guessing. The Black Friday pricing is gonna be 20% off through Black Friday. I don't know if there's gonna be any more discounts in the future, probably big holidays and stuff. You know how these things go, but it'll be 20% off at launch. If you want early access today, I know it comes out tomorrow, but if you want to get access today, just join my email list right now at witsandweights.com slash email, and you'll get an automated response that says, hey, if you want the secret link, let me know. I'll send you the secret link. It's the same link that's gonna go live tomorrow, but nobody knows what it is. Okay, so I'm gonna send that to you. And then tomorrow I'm gonna release a shorter bonus episode that walks you through how it works. So check your email, join my email list, witsandwaits.com slash email, and keep following the podcast for that tomorrow. If you want early access to Fitness Lab, be first in line before everybody else, witsandweights.com slash email. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And I'm gonna talk to you tomorrow with a full walkthrough of Fitness Lab. My name is Philip Hape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights.
