Why We Built This

The Industry Is Broken by Design

The conventional online fitness coaching model suffers from a fundamental structural flaw: it trades on low-leverage information, not infrastructure.

Unless you require real-time, incredibly precise biomechanical feedback or are competing at an international level, paying a recurring monthly fee to access an online coach's direct messages represents a massive inefficiency.

Much of the information underlying conventional online coaching is commoditized. The remaining value, especially as a participant becomes more advanced with training, often comes from individualized decision-making, accountability, and adaptation — services that are frequently delivered through labor-intensive communication channels rather than software.

Structural Bottlenecks, Not High-Leverage Utility

The truth is resistance training, for the most part, is a solved problem. At first principle, before factoring in other extraneous or unique variables, any program that applies time under tension close to failure will stimulate muscle growth.^[1] The human body is built to adapt to external stimuli. However, there is an incredible amount of nuance that comes with that. In other words, it is not that simple. Humans are incredibly complex, so fundamentally, it couldn't be this simple.

Therefore, the true bottleneck is how well does a certain training program or system balance applying pushing as close to failure as possible (progressive overload) with respect to the amount of energy a participant has on a given day (autoregulation) in a very simple-to-execute way to prioritize minimal to no cognitive energy and thus consistency?^[2] Ideally, we would encode such a training philosophy into a system that can make correct decisions across thousands of different training states while remaining nearly invisible to the user, prioritizing energy, accuracy, and thus efficiency.

For the average participant who just wants to get in shape, the best way to train is the most frictionless way to train because it saves energy, both physically and cognitively, while maintaining and even improving upon yield in the long-term (i.e., it has higher leverage). Without excess energy leakage in a given training program, from a biological perspective, the average participant will be more consistent than on other training programs.^[3] An increase in consistency leads to an increase in results, not to mention training without thinking is more enjoyable due to a naturally-achieved flow state. Therefore, because it is often accepted that consistency is key, that person must naturally then believe that a training program that deliberately seeks to remove all friction between their current situation and training is the best one. If they do not, that is cognitive dissonance.

The gym typically becomes a source of dread because most training programs often demand pushing well past their current recovery thresholds, which is the natural byproduct of a program not asking for real-time recovery data.^[4] Additionally, many of the most commonly used exercises in training programs often require high activation energy — this compounds over time, draining willpower reserves, and thus creating burnout. The result? An industry filled with remarkably high churn, especially concerning considering its importance for us all. For people whose training demands fluctuate substantially with life stress, recovery, performance, etc., a program that does not attempt to adapt to those variables places unnecessary decision-making and load-management responsibility on the user. People might pay for the result of fitness but they only stay because of the process. Optimizing for the journey is the only way the destination can be possibly achieved.

In almost every other domain — finance, transportation, software, etc. — reducing effort while maintaining yield is called innovation. In fitness, reducing effort is often labeled "cheating" or "laziness” — please bear in mind that this has zero to do with steroids, I am firmly against them (as a side note, common steroid use is often treated as a substitute for a lack of programming intelligence). Hustle culture, which is largely tied to the fitness and motivational industries, in general is just the glorification of low-leverage labor. It tricks people into measuring their worth by how much they suffer rather than the magnitude of their produce — busy, but not effective.

The vast majority of fitness providers are not running technology companies or engineering scalable performance engines. They are operating low-level information businesses bounded by manual human bandwidth, which inevitably creates tedious friction and thus high churn.

Selling generic templates and manually texting check-ins is not a design choice; it is often the actual ceiling of their technical capability. If it were effective, fitness wouldn't be such a struggle. When this manual model inevitably hits an operational ceiling, the industry defaults to teaching others how to replicate the same high-friction service model.

The result is an endless feedback loop of noise. One coach says keto, another says high-carb; one says RPE, another says failure. Every new provider attempting to stand out adds more contradictory content, increasing the primary bottleneck in modern human performance: Excess Physical and Mental Fatigue.^[5] In a market drowning in manufactured complexity, absolute front-end simplicity wins.

The Myth of Training Like an Athlete

Another classic case of cognitive dissonance within the fitness industry is calling a workout plan "highly efficient" while anchoring it to traditional movements such as barbell deadlifts, squats, and even bench press. While these movements hit multiple muscles at once — leading people to claim high efficiency — they impose a massive systemic energy tax. Energy, not just time, is the true resource we must optimize for.

Furthermore, the myth that, for example, "squats mimic real-life movements and are therefore superior" is fundamentally flawed. You condition your body for real-life movements by executing real-life movements in the real world. The gym is strictly a baseline training ground to strengthen the underlying muscle groups that power those movements; it does not require performing 1:1 movement simulations under heavy axial load. If your primary objective is sport-specific athleticism or hyper-mobility, calisthenics or specialized barbell work make sense. If your objective is high-leverage strength and muscle with zero wasted energy, you isolate the stimulus and remove the unnecessary joint and nervous system friction. To put it bluntly, why on earth would you train like an athlete if you aren't one? That's like buying a whole Bugatti Chiron for your daily work commutes instead of a nice sedan. If your goal is high-leverage strength and energy management, taking on an athlete's physical toll isn't dedication — it's just bad math. An athlete's job is to win, even if it destroys their health long-term. Your goal is likely just to look good, feel great, and live longer. The common retaliation to a person making a point like this will be something to the tune of "you're just soft" — if you cannot make counterpoints using science or logic, you must attack character and increase emotion.

When building anything, including a training program, it is incredibly important to think like an engineer and ask several basic questions including, "Who are we building this for," and, "What is the purpose of this program,". Due to clever conditioning, the fitness industry fails to ask these questions. When it comes to shallow and dangerous advice like one should train like an athlete, we need to ask an important question:

Does adopting athlete-training methodology actually produce more leverage for the normal person, or are we importing complexity because athletes are culturally associated with being fit?

The answer is generally the latter. The fitness industry frequently asks ordinary people to inherit the training methodology of people whose jobs require them to maximize physical performance. At Frictionless Fitness we ask one simple question: why?

A barbell, for example, is just a tool. It is not a religion. If your goal is simply to look exceptional, build dense strength, and move without pain, you do not need to touch a barbell. In fact, if you can avoid it, you absolutely should. The fact that this statement shocks you is proof of how deeply we've been conditioned by fitness culture. If you question the barbell, you are viewed as a heretic. Why? Because of social proof and survivability bias. We see elite athletes using barbells, so we assume the barbell made them elite. We don't see the thousands of normal people who blew out their L4/L5 discs trying to copy them and quietly quit the gym. A barbell is just a piece of metal. A pin-loaded machine is just a piece of metal attached to a cable and a pulley. Biomechanically, your biceps or your quads do not know what tool you are holding; they only understand tension and mechanical disadvantage.

I'd also personally argue that on average — not necessarily all the time, I personally love deadlifting for example — that training without using barbells by using machines and dumbbells can be more fun because at that point, the sole focus is incurring muscular tension and pushing targeted muscle groups to failure without worrying about all the unnecessary stress that comes when training with barbells. Working out also tends to be less dreadful because utilizing high-leverage machines removes the neurological exhaustion of balancing hundreds of pounds on your spine and such. To grow muscle, you must stimulate the muscles you want to grow, not necessarily your whole body. You can train to exhaustion without having gotten much targeted muscular stimulus, which is a glaringly inefficient way of training. Current literature also supports the notion that training using machines can be just as, if not, more effective than training with free-weights. Though one singular study cannot be used to make broad conclusions, it is worth noting that a 2023 meta-analysis found no significant difference in hypertrophy between free-weight and machine-based training across the included studies, while the strength adaptations specifically were more specific to the modality being trained (i.e., using free-weights gets you stronger in lifting free-weights and likewise for machines). However, no differences were found in direct comparison for dynamic strength, meaning either form of lifting generates more-or-less the same effective strength, which is all that matters for the average participant.^[6]

Ironically, the false notion that "if you have a body, you are an athlete" still works against the idea of "training like an athlete" by implying that an athlete does not refer to training like a professional athlete, which is what the term generally conveys, but like a normal human being. If you are a human being, you should train like a human being; if you are an athlete, you should train like an athlete. There is a huge chasm of work, exertion, injury, and joint-wear between those two modes of training. In the context of physical exertion, "shooting for the moon and landing among the stars" isn't ambitious, intelligent, or maximizing your chances — it's poor resource allocation. Why should we maximize leverage in every other facet of human life but not in the foundational domain for effective living: fitness?

To further this point, using the gym as a means for building discipline as opposed to building muscle leads to terrible training decisions, causing workout dread, injury, and burnout. Burnout is simply the result of completely draining one's willpower reserves, and thus if we want to avoid it, we need to develop systems that require less of it. The fitness industry is largely tied to the self-help and motivational industries as previously mentioned, which then makes it easy to confuse the objective of building strength and muscle with building discipline — they are far from the same thing. Suffering is no way, shape, or form, a proxy for physical growth; at a certain point, increasing the level of suffering in a training program increases the rate at which you lose the muscle you built. Again, energy is limited, so training beyond recovery thresholds means your body must then look for energy from other places, such as the actual muscle you have built. To optimize our training for maximum adherence and physical yield, we need to stop using the gym as a training ground for life, and instead use it as a training ground for muscle. Maybe the truth is you do need more discipline, but it is much more operational and effective to engineer a system that requires less of it to begin with because this makes it more accessible to those without as much discipline. If we don't attempt to do this, we are consciously or unconsciously gate-keeping the process of becoming fit, failing to accommodate those who want to get fit without turning fitness, building discipline, or suffering into their identity. Instead of attempting to fight against our biological proclivity to use as little energy to complete a task as possible, why don't we direct that fight into learning how to work with it effectively?

The Great Blind Spot: Software Engineering vs. Athletic Mileage

Attempts by the tech industry to solve fitness have failed equally, but for the opposite reason.

Traditional software teams build visually polished interfaces, fluid animations, and complex graphical dashboards. However, because these systems are rarely designed by individuals with high-threshold athletic mileage, they rely on generic logic: pre-generated form notes, social feeds, and shallow AI routine generators.

AI is a force multiplier for software execution, not a replacement for genuine domain logic. Static algorithms scrape the same ocean of un-calculated fitness PDFs available across the web. While it is true that AI can be used to model CNS fatigue or physical stress variables, generic AI systems still cannot reliably infer individualized training decisions from sparse or poorly structured inputs without domain specific rules and ongoing feedback loops. In other words, for an AI model to be useful for fitness programming, it needs to be heavily programmed, and that still cannot account for memory issues, hallucination, and limited context windows. Relying on an LLM to generate consistent, coherent, and fully logical training programs is a trap, and often a cop-out signaling a lack of domain knowledge being synthesized into software. If you have the ability to program, and you have fitness expertise, you wouldn't skip the process of properly programming that — why would you rely on a probabilistic, non-deterministic language model, shortchanging the exact thing that makes you valuable to begin with?

The CS Fitness Trap: Adding Friction, Not Subtracting It

Even in the rare instance where a software engineer approaches fitness, the outcome is often counterproductive. Technical minds are naturally drawn to data density. Instead of using software to delete cognitive friction, they use software to quantify and compound it.

They engineer bloated tracking environments — requiring dozens of manual input fields, color-coded tracking sheets, and constant manual logging. They treat physical training like a data-entry job. They fail to realize that for busy executives, founders, high-performers, and society at large, administrative overhead is the ultimate point of failure. Most people don't actually like to think, especially when it comes to fitness because it's already painful, but also because it typically involves a lot of math and science.^[7] People have finite attention and decision-making capacity. Fitness already requires physical effort, and therefore, unnecessary cognitive overhead should be treated as an avoidable source of friction for the sake of increasing consistency. Without understanding the psychological premise that users won't use what isn't simple to use, you will manufacture a product that nobody wants or can use.

The default tendency to solve a problem is to add something — additivity bias. However, often times, adding something leads to another problem, which leads to someone adding something else. At a certain point, the fact that you have so many things becomes the problem. It's like the popular arcade game "Whack-A-Mole", but instead of just getting rid of the moles, you just keep whackin' 'em. Adding steps to fix a problem usually addresses a symptom and not the root cause.

Understanding this still does not fix the problem, because ultimately, for any given domain, unless you have deep experience or expertise, you don't know what you don't need. You cannot build a subtractive system without knowing the exact things that you can safely subtract. When you are a beginner or even intermediate within a given field, your only tool is addition. You don't know what matters, so you add everything to cover your basis. When you don't know what's unnecessary, adding feels safer than removing. Think about it like writing a rough draft for an essay: until the rough draft is written, you cannot know what needs to stay for the final draft. To remove something safely, you need to know what function it was serving in the first place, and to know whether or not that function is actually needed.

An inexperienced person might look at fitness and see a pile of things: macros, meal timing, supplements, exercises, sets, reps, RIR, progression, deloads, cardio, mobility, sleep metrics, trackers, supplements, etc. They might be able to remove things in the literal sense, but that does not mean they can reliably distinguish between what is essential, useful, redundant, counterproductive, or literal nonsense because they don't yet have the model of the domain necessary to make those judgments. Subtraction requires understanding the actual structure of the system, creating the following paradox: the people who most need a subtractive system are the least equipped to build one, and the people most equipped to build one are the people who personally need or even want it the least. That is the cognitive bias known as the curse of knowledge.

In a way, for the average advanced fitness person, the entire process has become automated in their own head. Furthermore, considering being advanced in fitness is probably a large part of their identity, literally what incentive do they have to attempt to write down that entire intuitive process into code, even if it would help a mass audience? As it has been clearly demonstrated across the domain, they would rather be generic and "coach" people online because they believe it's more effective to attempt to give someone else their brain through words instead of code. Considering fitness is an unusually codifiable domain as a large portion of decisions are software-shaped, this is generally not the most efficient way to solve this problem.

Even if all of this sounds practical, logical, and likely even obvious in retrospect, there is still an incredibly large problem we need to acknowledge:

For most people, the friction to build a system that reduces friction is more friction than dealing with the friction that currently exists because they don't have the system that reduces friction. This is essentially a specific articulation of the psychological phenomenon known as the activation energy trap.

That is the fundamental paradox we aim to solve in fitness.

The Psychological Link

There is one final reason this problem is so difficult to attack. If you do not have deep psychological intuition and an understanding of the barriers to habitual adherence, the reason why any of these matters to begin with may miss you altogether.

Let me be gracious: to attack this problem, we must first detach ourselves from the cognitive and emotional attachments we have formed to the traditional fitness paradigm and be willing to question what we have spent years learning, practicing, and accepting as truth. Doing so requires enormous amounts of knowledge, experience, time, effort, and psychological discomfort — costs that most are understandably unwilling to pay.

In other words, solving this problem is incredibly complicated on a number of different layers, which is made incredibly ironic by the fact that the solution is meant to be frictionless to experience.

As previously mentioned, the complexity required to create “frictionlessness” is itself immense, and that complexity cannot be solved from a single perspective. It requires an intersection of three domains: FITNESS × PSYCHOLOGY × CS → FRICTIONLESS FITNESS.

Deep fitness experience / expertise is necessary to understand what actually drives adaptation, what is necessary, what is unnecessary, and where the physiological bottlenecks actually lie. Computer science is necessary to determine what can be encoded, automated, synthesized, and removed from the user's responsibilities entirely. Psychology is necessary to understand the human being operating the system — their energy, attention, behavior, habits, resistance, decision-making, and the barriers that determine whether any of the underlying optimization is actually realized. Miss any one of these perspectives, and the problem becomes fundamentally incomplete.

Fitness without CS can understand the problem without being able to efficiently systematize it. CS without fitness can build an incredibly sophisticated system around the wrong underlying assumptions. Fitness and CS without psychology can produce an objectively capable system that people do not actually want to use.

Even if one possesses all three of these skills, they still have to care enough to solve this problem for themselves, and they still have to care enough to solve this problem for others, which is a much more significant variable that cannot be overcome with knowledge and skills alone.

Those three disciplines are not independent inputs. They are lenses through which the same problem must be examined. This way of thinking is not something I suddenly developed while building Frictionless Fitness. In retrospect, it makes a ridiculous amount of sense why this feels so intuitive to me. I have journaled over 1,700 times and written over 600,000 words reflecting on my life, behavior, decisions, and beliefs over the last number of years. I have an absurd amount of experience performing the exact cognitive operation that this problem requires: observe → question → detach → inspect the assumption → reframe → update the belief → change the behavior.

For years, I have repeatedly practiced putting my own assumptions on trial, so when I look at traditional fitness and ask: “Why on earth do we do this?” I am not suddenly developing an entirely new way of thinking, but rather I am applying a cognitive process I have practiced thousands of times to a new domain. When you have spent years tearing down your own unexamined beliefs, it becomes second nature to look at an industry filled with inefficiency, cognitive tax, and performative complexity, and ask: What is actually true here? What is merely legacy behavior? And what can be removed entirely?

Moreover, I did not simply accumulate knowledge in fitness, psychology, and computer science, but I’ve learned how to move between them at a high level. I can look at the same problem through a psychological lens, abstract it into a systems problem, translate that abstraction into a computational problem, return to the physiological constraints of fitness, and then ask what the human being actually needs to experience without losing the underlying idea.

This is what it means to think across the intersection of fitness, psychology, and computer science: not to approach the same problem from three isolated perspectives, but to continuously move between them without losing sight of the underlying problem.

This thinking cannot stop at one part of fitness. To maximize the value a person can actually extract from the system, the same interrogation must be applied across the entire domain: What actually matters? Why does it matter? Does the participant need to do it? Can it be simplified? Can it be automated? Can it be removed entirely?

This is the thinking that Frictionless Fitness is built upon.

I absolutely despise the cliche, "You don't lack discipline, you lack a system," more than the even more cliche, "You don't need motivation, you need discipline," because of what immediately follows the former: no pre-built system to operationalize that advice — a contradiction. The fact that you are giving me that information without giving me the system to implement it is inherently a systems problem; you're externalizing the implementation burden onto the person who already has the problem. You cannot give much more useless advice than that by itself. I'd rather you not speak at that point because it's akin to telling someone who needs to use a computer to just "write their own operating system" instead of giving them a computer. To build this particular system, someone willingly has to undergo a period of significant psychological discomfort stemming from this contradiction: "I hate how much cognitive bandwidth fitness takes up, and I have zero extra cognitive bandwidth to spend, and yet I am somehow deliberately going to allow it to take up an exponentially greater amount of cognitive bandwidth for a significant period of time to build a frictionless system." I have spent time taking the bullet of that contradiction to finally build the solution.

There is an irony here that is deeply personal to me. Much of my own life over the past few years has been a transition from relying upon enormous amounts of discipline and willpower to learning how to direct that discipline toward building systems that require dramatically less of either. For years, I learned how to force myself through friction, like performing hour-long complicated morning routines and tracking over 20 different variables across my entire life every single day without wavering.

Eventually, after severely burning myself out, I began asking a different question: Why am I forcing myself through friction that I could eliminate? After that, instead of the discipline I built disappearing, it became leverage. I began to use that discipline to build a system once that removed unnecessary friction altogether. All of a sudden, because I have at least some amount of discipline and I've removed all unnecessary complexity and friction from my life, working has genuinely become the path of least resistance. Putting in effort now feels so frictionless and natural that it feels like I'm being lazy while I'm actually being disciplined. That is exactly the type of state we need if we want to truly become consistent without burning out, and that is precisely the same transformation I want to create for fitness.

I used to be on the extreme side of unnecessary friction. For example, I wouldn't just write to-do lists each day — I would write a meta to-do list to make sure I would track things like the to-do list. One of those items on the meta list was to genuinely take a picture of the completed actual to-do list and upload it into Notion to document the to-do list itself. I was king of doing and overcoming unnecessary meta-work, and not just that, but I was ruthlessly consistent with it. You wouldn't believe it. I deeply convinced myself that without doing that type of meta-work, I wouldn't be as focused or consistent, but the paradox that took me a long time to realize is that doing that meta-work was the actual thing that hurt my consistency.

That meta to-do list far from all: another example is how I used to utilize a law book in an attempt to personally govern myself — over 100 total principles for various situations across every domain of my life. One of those laws was one of punishment. Say I woke up at 5:05am instead of 5:00am like I expected of myself every single day. I would then deliberately starve myself by not eating breakfast because I wasn't "being disciplined", and those punishments would stack, so some days, I genuinely wouldn't eat out of punishment for being even minutely below my standard. I am not exaggerating in the slightest — this is precisely how I lived.

My point is that to some degree, we all tend to fall prey to doing this without attempting to change:

Instead of just doing the thing, you start doing things to support the thing and do those things so much so that the things that were meant to support the thing become the thing and then the true thing is forgotten. In simpler terms? Something like the to-do list becomes the thing to do itself.

I spent more than seven years becoming extraordinarily disciplined so I could eventually understand how little discipline should be required; I had to go deep into the friction to understand how much of it never needed to exist, and to be able to clearly see its normalization in other people.

The customer should not have to become extraordinarily disciplined to operate an extraordinarily complicated fitness system. The system should absorb the complexity while the customer should receive the result. This is where my trefoil logo comes back because the trefoil represents the interdependent relationship between training, nutrition, and recovery — the three foundational components whose interaction produces fitness, but it represents something deeper, too.

The same structure describes the disciplines whose intersection makes Frictionless Fitness possible:

Fitness×Psychology×CS→Frictionless Fitness

Fitness Expertise Tells us what actually needs to happen.

Psychology Tells us how the human being actually interacts with that system.

Computer Science Tells us how to encode that knowledge into a system.

Fitness expertise tells us what actually needs to happen, psychology tells us how the human being actually interacts with that system, and computer science tells us how to encode that knowledge into a system — and what they should never have to think about in the first place. Individually, none of these disciplines is sufficient, but together, they form something greater than the sum of their parts, and to build a frictionless fitness product, the interaction between those three domains needs to be frictionless in and of itself. The first trefoil explains what we are optimizing, and the second explains how we are capable of optimizing it. The complexity required to create the system belongs beneath the surface. The customer should experience only the simplicity of the result.

That is Frictionless Fitness.

The Fix

Performance does not need more accountability quotes, social feeds, or bloated applications with dozens of manual tracking variables.

It needs infrastructure.

It requires an Frictionless Performance Operating System that strips the cognitive tax out of physical progression. A system that embeds athletic logic directly into low-latency code, performing autoregulation calculations silently in the background so you can focus entirely on execution. I am not attempting to argue that fitness is complicated and so we should therefore make it simple. I am saying that fitness contains a lot of complexity, and that I've spent years learning which complexity actually matters, and now I'm going to hide the complexity that doesn't need to be yours.

Someone had to bridge the gap between computer science and high-threshold performance to eliminate the noise permanently.

Samuel Conduah Jr.
Founder & CEO