HN Reader

Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform

255

I was the main contributor to workout.lol, an open-source fitness app to easily build a workout routine. The project had traction (1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks, ~20K visits/month), but was eventually sold due to video licensing hurdles. The new owner stopped maintaining it, and the repo went abandoned.

Over the next 9 months, I sent 15 emails to try to save it : no replies. Feature requests & issues were ignored. The community was left with a "broken" tool let's say.

I couldn't just let it die So I built the new version from scratch with the same open-source spirit, but a better architecture long-term vision, more features and no license problems.

It's called : Workout.cool (https://workout.cool). What it offers: 100% open-source, MIT-licensed - 1200+ exercises (with videos, attributes, translations) - Progress tracking - Multilingual-ready - Self-hostable

I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing it because I believe in open fitness tools, and I’ve been passionate about strength training for 15+ years.

If this resonates with you, feel free to: - Star the repo - Share with fitness/tech friends - Suggest features - Contribute code/design/docs

Together, we can build the open-source fitness platform we all wanted to easily build a workout routine and get in shape

Website: https://workout.cool GitHub: https://github.com/Snouzy/workout-cool

Oh funny to see it here. I'm the original author of workout.lol.

I sold the app to a guy who seemed to just abandoned it. I also texted him multiple times if he needs support, but he didn't answer anymore. It makes me really happy to see it being maintained again!

Great work on the UI improvements.

6 hours agoby Vincenius

This is great! I've been looking for an alternative to Strong, since it has a limit on the number of workout templates that you can have in the free version (and $100+ for such a simple app feels excessive).

I added a link to my home screen to make it feel like an app and I'll give it a go for a week to see how it goes.

4 hours agoby mywittyname

It does not appear to be working for me right now, I get "error loading exercises".

What are your thoughts about the wger project [0]? It is a FLOSS AGPL-licensed self-hosted fitness/workout/nutrition manager that has existed for almost a decade (I think?) It's a django app and has a companion flutter app that runs on android/ios/windows/linux/macos. It supports multiple users and could even be used to run a gym. Body.build [1] is a newer FLOSS project (also browser-based) that is focused around building a weight lifting program. The author of body.build also contributes to wger.

I'm using wger in my homelab and while there are a lot of moving pieces to the self-host process, it works well. I'd say the biggest limitation is the comprehensiveness of their exercise database, but that is something that many people have recognized and are steadily expanding. If anyone is willing to contribute exercises (and exercise media) to this AGPL licensed project, they would definitely appreciate it!

[0]: https://github.com/wger-project

[1]: https://github.com/Dieterbe/body.build

7 hours agoby minimalist

This is cool, as someone whose been lifting for ~5 years its nice to see a fleshed out opensource tool for weightlifting.

The main problem with any app I've tried is that after enough experience the bells and whistles of the app don't really matter and mostly what you care about is consistent tracking for progressive overload.

I think this is a good app for people who want to get started weightlifting I would say the two main things needed for wider adoption would be 1. A mobile app ( or pwa, I've made and used my own personal workout app for a while as a PWA and its been just as good as any native app I've tried) 2. A way to save specific workouts as routines and track those for long periods of time

7 hours agoby toyetic

Damn, I made an app to track gym progress back in college; I've made a deal with the gym owner so I could workout for free. I hoped one day to polish it up and release it to the public.

Mine had some good features, like the ability to share your protocol with other people

4 hours agoby atum47

Am not sure what your data source is, but l run the following:

- https://wrkout.xyz/ (exercise database api with images and videos) - https://github.com/wrkout/exercises.json (open source exercise dataset)

If they are of any interest / help

6 hours agoby olliejennings

It looks promising.

I retrieve error response when fetching exercise:

0:{"a":"$@1","f":"","b":"eETmgndxtv4Ar0i8Wync1"} 1:{"serverError":"An unexpected error occurred."}

My request: curl 'https://workout.cool/' \ -H 'accept: text/x-component' \ -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,pl-PL;q=0.8,pl;q=0.7' \ -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \ -H 'content-type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8' \ -b 'Next-Locale=en; _fbp=fb.1.1750253718188.954698194752805529' \ -H 'next-action: 7f80b017f78704b00d2411aebde5ba8318b475de6d' \ -H 'next-router-state-tree: %5B%22%22%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%5B%22locale%22%2C%22en%22%2C%22d%22%5D%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%22__PAGE__%22%2C%7B%7D%2C%22%2F%22%2C%22refresh%22%5D%7D%2Cnull%2Cnull%2Ctrue%5D%7D%5D' \ -H 'origin: https://workout.cool' \ -H 'pragma: no-cache' \ -H 'priority: u=1, i' \ -H 'referer: https://workout.cool/' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Google Chrome";v="137", "Chromium";v="137", "Not/A)Brand";v="24"' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"' \ -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \ -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \ -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \ -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36' \ --data-raw '[{"equipment":["PULLUP_BAR","BANDS","BODY_ONLY"],"muscles":["TRAPS","BACK","SHOULDERS","TRICEPS","FOREARMS","GLUTES","HAMSTRINGS","CALVES"],"limit":3}]'

7 hours agoby adobrawy

As a fitness newbie, my first and most immediate feedback is confusion at the otherwise delightful muscle selection interface, which seems to be required during onboarding before I can see what the product does. I'm loosely aware of "push", "pull" and "leg" groupings, but I'm not personally familiar with what specific muscles each routine is actually meant to target.

This seems to mean the app is currently only meant for those who want to seriously study their anatomy. Would it be possible to ease a novice into things more gently somehow? Perhaps with recommended muscle groups?

5 hours agoby zeta0134

It would be great if the equipment and muscle selection wasn't mandatory. For example, I have a pull-up bar but I have no idea what muscles I can train with it. Why not let me filter on beginner exercises instead?

6 hours agoby Sander_Marechal

I started working out without a trainer a few months ago as well as doing rehab for a nasty shoulder tear. Today I see the benefit of targeting precise muscles and muscle groups, unlike other beginners in this thread.

One feature request I'd add to the pipeline is to filter exercises available by Gym. Planet Fitness is ironically super unfriendly to beginners and limited in what they offer. People could add the exercises available at their gym and grow the database. Conversely, this could help beginner home gymmers plan what machines / weights to buy to maximize their routine.

6 hours agoby cssanchez

I don't get the pick the muscles thing almost as much as I get the open source fitness thing.

7 hours agoby stephenhandley

This looks great. Yours isn't loading for me, but workout.lol looks like it'd provide the perfect level of instruction. (I'd skip the exercises/sets screen and DIY, but picking muscles and getting ideas/examples is helpful.)

One note: if you're using the same video set as workout.lol, the one that loaded for me (male_dumbbell_hammer_curl_front_ani.mp4) could be compressed from 3.3mb to <300kb with little quality loss.

6 hours agoby ryanwhitney

I don't want to track any of this myself. I want to walk into a gym, have some cameras follow me around, and have it analyze what I did while I was there, including statistics over time.

6 hours agoby daxaxelrod

Thanks for doing this! I recently was looking at enhancing workout.lol and noticed that but was wondering what happened. I have some enhancements and think still an open PR on the original repo I will port over.

7 hours agoby nickjantz

Love it! Would be cool to be able to optionally select muscle groups first, i.e. before selecting equipment. Also, seeing all available exercises for a muscle group rather than the pre-defined 3 would help tailor the experience more.

7 hours agoby mariotacke

"Error loading exercises". Are you getting hackernewsed?

7 hours agoby jcmontx

I struggle to see the point of most fitness apps.

Fitness really is a solved problem. The fitness apps and influencers will try to convince you that you need a whole database of “creative” and new exercises to see progress, making it seem like there’s “secrets” to getting the body you want fast.

There are no secrets. The truth is, you just have to do the same dozen or so “boring” exercises that everyone already knows. But you have to do them consistently, and you have to increase their difficulty over time. And then make sure you eat right.

A lot of coaching should just be on getting the numbers right and correcting your form. But once you learn how to get that right, you can pretty much be on your own, and fitness apps become little more than a place for you to track progress, if you even care about tracking progress. Progress will happen whether you track it or not, you can just go by feel.

4 hours agoby deadbabe

I was just poking around, but how/why aren't there issues with the videos now. Sure you're just embedding youtube videos, but what's to stop them from taking that down?

Are there really no open licensed workout-movement animations out there? That sounds like a fun beginner animation project honestly.

7 hours agoby atrus

I like the idea of some of these every day basic information type things having nice free sites.

7 hours agoby duxup

Thanks for sharing -- I'm a personal trainer and will give this a shot. Is there any plan to allow users to create workouts to share (or does it already and I haven't discovered it yet?)?, or API integration with common platforms like Strava, Garmin Connect, Healthkit, Google Fit, Coros, etc?

7 hours agoby eitally

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing :-)

5 hours agoby captainkrtek

Got an error when trying to build a workout. Looks useful though! When I travel I only have bands if there are no local gyms offering reasonable prices, and doing the same 3 workouts gets boring

https://imgur.com/a/Z71iT65

One thing that would be super nice, make the back button and forward button work. Its really tempting to want to hit the back button when you select equipment, click next, and realized you missed one.

5 hours agoby czhu12

Awesome tool. Thanks for Sharing

5 hours agoby _justroy

wow, its great tool

has muscle selection is so much more help full than 80+% apps on app store right now

7 hours agoby tonyhart7

"Error loading exercises" on what should be a simple SQL where query? and no way to retry the selection without refreshing the page.

5 hours agoby sergiotapia

Wow! You're a legend! Thank you!

6 hours agoby unstppbl

I count calories and use chatGPT to do so by taking pics of my meals / what I eat.

I'm looking forward to Meta adding this feature to their Ray Ban smartglasses so the glasses automagically count my calories each time it sees food on my plate or going into my mouth. A feature they possibly should make optional, but for me who has prescription Metas it would be a big time saver (try to eat 1500 to 2000 calories a day and burn 250 to 500 in exercise). I think the knowledge of how many calories you consume done automagically would prompt 1/4 of people thinking and or on Ozempic to not do it.

6 hours agoby paul7986

Looks a lot like https://workout.lol/

7 hours agoby SeeManDo

Just out of curiosity: if the original project was open source, why did you decide to restart from scratch?

6 hours agoby abtinf

Is this not just more AI slop? Why is anyone commenting or voint it up?

7 hours agoby kylebenzle

Do we have any assurance that you won't sell it again?

6 hours agoby bityard