Stay Ready is almost here

It's been quiet here for a few months. That's because I've been heads-down finishing the thing.

Stay Ready is days away from the App Store and Google Play. iPhone and Android, same app, same features, launching together.

What it actually does

Most fitness apps are three apps stapled together. One plans your training, one logs your food, one guesses at recovery, and none of them talk to each other. You end up being the integration layer: reading four numbers every morning and deciding for yourself what they mean.

Stay Ready connects them. Your sleep, your soreness, your check-in, the sets you logged on Monday, and where you are in a cut all feed the same decision: what should today's session be?

Here's the version from my own training. My shoulder started hurting as my bench got up to 185. My trainer didn't tell me to push through it and he didn't tell me to stop. We changed the grip, dropped the weight, adjusted the rep ranges, and worked on the weak part. I ended up at 250.

That's the reasoning I wanted in an app. Not a program that ignores you, and not one that panics and benches you for a week. One that adjusts and tells you why it adjusted.

What ships on day one

Programs that adapt. Real progressive overload, tracked per movement. If you fall short on a set, next week's prescription knows. If you're crushing it, it moves up.

A readiness check-in that changes the workout. Rough night, high stress, sore joints: the session in front of you gets lighter, and it says so. Readiness is advice, never a gate. Your workout is always there if you want it.

Horsepower. One score for how strong you are relative to your bodyweight, tracked across movement patterns over time. It's not a measure of your overall health, and I don't pretend it is. It's an honest strength number that moves when you do.

Nutrition that doesn't take ten minutes a day. Search, barcode, or describe your meal in plain language and let it estimate. Targets adjust as your weight trends.

Volume tracking against real landmarks. How many hard sets each muscle actually got this week, and whether that's productive or just fatigue.

Apple Health and Health Connect. Sleep, steps, heart rate and HRV come in; your finished workouts go back out.

It works without signal. Log your whole session in a basement gym and it syncs when you surface.

What doesn't ship on day one

I'd rather tell you this now than have you find it.

Cardio is loggable but not yet programmed the way lifting is. A treadmill block is a block of time right now, not a prescribed conditioning session. That's the next thing I'm building.

Weights are in pounds. Kilograms are coming, and I'd rather ship it properly than half-convert your history.

The Apple Watch app is minimal. It mirrors a session; it doesn't run one yet.

There's no web app. Everything lives on your phone.

And the recommendations get better the longer you use it. Day one, it knows what you tell it. Month three, it knows what you actually do.

Free for people who serve

Active-duty military, veterans, law enforcement officers, firefighters and EMTs get free lifetime access. Tick the box when you set up your account, or email [email protected] from the address you signed up with. No documentation, no verification service, no hoops.

I'm patriotic, and this is the part of the launch I'm most glad to be able to do.

What it took

I think you should know what's behind the thing you're about to install.

I made the first commit on March 16th of this year. Just under six months ago.

Since then, across the iPhone app, the Android app, the backend and this website:

• 3,504 commits
• About 333,000 lines of code written, broken, and rewritten
• 84 database migrations
• Roughly 6,800 automated tests that run before anything ships: 4,252 on the backend, about 1,500 on iOS, over 1,100 on Android
• 356 builds to TestFlight and 124 to Google Play

That build count is the number I'd point at. It isn't 356 releases. It's 356 times I thought it was ready enough to put on my own phone, and then found out what was still wrong with it.

It hasn't only been my phone, either. Dozens of testers have been living in these builds, lifting with them, finding the parts that made no sense, and telling me plainly when something was broken. A fair number of the decisions in this app started as somebody's message about a screen that annoyed them.

But the real testing didn't happen in a test suite. It happened at Summit Strength, four or five days a week, for six months. Every session was a test. Does the rest timer survive locking your phone? Can you hit the set button with chalk on your hands? Does the summary make sense when you're too wrecked to read carefully? Does the program still make sense when you skip a week?

Rough estimate on the hours: somewhere between 700 and 900, almost all of it evenings after the kids are down and early mornings before work. I'm one person with a full-time job, a wife and two kids, getting my own health back at the same time as building this.

Every feature in the app exists because I needed it at some point between 367 pounds and now. The joint tracking is there because my elbow and my knee kept ending my attempts. The readiness scoring is there because I kept training hard on days I had no business training hard. The explanations are there because I spent years doing what I was told without understanding any of it.

None of the numbers underneath it are invented. Before I wrote most of this code I spent months in the research: how training volume relates to growth and where the productive range actually sits, how strength scales with bodyweight, how fast a lift fades when you stop training it, what recovery markers are worth listening to and which ones are noise. Then I spent the months after that arguing with it, because the literature describes populations and you are one person. Where the two disagreed, I went with what my own logs and my testers' logs were actually showing.

The last few weeks have been the unglamorous part: fixing the way sets sync between two phones, making error messages say something a human can act on, and going through the app looking for places where it showed you a number without telling you what the number meant.

That's the work that decides whether you still trust an app in month three. It doesn't demo well.

Getting in

There's a signup on the home page. Put your email in and you'll hear from me the day it's live: once, then nothing until there's something worth saying.

Your first month is free when you subscribe through the App Store or Google Play. After that it's $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year, and there's a one-time option if subscriptions aren't your thing.

See you in a few days.