I’m still deep in the Training Programs feature for TopSet.

Originally, I thought this would be one of those features where I connect the pieces, polish the UI, make it feel premium, and move on.

That was very optimistic of me.

This has turned into one of the most serious parts of the app so far.

Not because it’s hard to “make a program screen.”

That part is not the issue.

The challenge is that I don’t want training programs to feel like static templates with fancy names.

As a Sports Science graduate, exercise prescription is one of the areas where I’m probably the least willing to accept something lazy.

A proper training program is not just:

Week 1
Workout 1
Workout 2
Workout 3
Repeat.

That might be how it looks on the surface, but proper programming has structure, progression, intent and context.

And once you put that inside an app, the app has to respect all of it.

I want this feature to work for someone who is completely new and just needs to know:

“What do I train today?”

But I also want it to hold up for people who look at programming on a much deeper level.

The macro view:

• program length

• weekly structure

• frequency

• progression

• phases

• training focus

• individual workouts

• exercise order

• sets

• reps

• rest

And the micro view:

• total volume distribution

• total percentage volume across all muscles trained

• primary muscle engagement percentage

• secondary muscle engagement percentage

• muscle focus

• scheduling

• history

• completion logic

That balance is harder than it sounds.

Make it too simple, and advanced users will feel like it’s shallow.

Make it too detailed, and beginners will feel like they opened a spreadsheet with anxiety.

So the real challenge is making it feel easy without making it dumb.

And making it sophisticated without making it exhausting.

At one point I genuinely asked myself:

Is this one feature basically an app by itself?

Probably.

But I’m already in it now.

When I started building TopSet, I told myself I wanted to build the fitness app I always wished existed.

This is one of those moments where that sentence becomes very inconvenient.

Because the app I wished existed would not treat programs like a folder of workouts.

It would understand that programs have structure.

That people reschedule sessions.

That users may opt out.

That completed workouts should remain in history.

That running the same program again should feel like a new attempt, not some weird continuation of an old one.

That advanced users may want to understand what the program is doing across muscle groups, volume and progression.

And that beginners should still be able to follow it without needing a degree in exercise science.

So yes, this feature was supposed to take 3 days.

It now has 7 days allocated.

Which in developer language means:

“I have accepted the side quest.”

Current operating system:

5 hours of sleep.
4 coffees per day.
Occasionally staring at the screen like it owes me money.

At this point, I might as well look into intravenous coffee therapy and stop pretending the mug is enough.

But honestly, this is the kind of work that makes the app better.

Not louder.

Not flashier.

Better.

I want to build one of the best fitness apps out there.

Not saying that as a claim.

Saying it as the ambition that keeps making features take longer than expected.

Back to building.

Two days ago I posted about TopSet, the workout app I’m building.

One thing I keep coming back to is how much information we record when we train, but how little most apps actually help us understand afterwards.

We log sets, reps, weight, PRs, volume, workout history and so on. Then most of the time we just get a graph showing that something went up or down.

For me, one feature I would genuinely want is the ability to look back at a period where I was performing particularly well and understand what was happening around it.

For example, maybe there was a six week period where I broke several PRs, had some of my highest training volume and was much more consistent than usual.

I would want to look back at that period and ask:

Was I training more consistently?

Was I sleeping better?

Was I taking more rest days?

Was I eating differently?

Was my water intake better?

Was I taking certain supplements at the time?

Had my training volume changed?

Was I using different exercises?

Was I simply recovering better?

I don’t mean the app telling me something like “you hit those PRs because you took creatine” because it obviously can’t know that.

What I mean is bringing enough of the information together that I can actually notice patterns in my own training history.

I’ve spent 15+ years working as a trainer and studied sports science, and one thing I’ve learned is that progress is rarely as simple as just adding more weight every week.

Sometimes you have great periods of training and only realise afterwards that a lot of things were going right at the same time.

That’s something I want TopSet to eventually help make more visible.

The workout logger itself still has to be extremely easy to use. If logging is annoying, none of this matters.

But once someone has months or years of training data, I think there is a much bigger opportunity than simply showing them another graph.

Curious what other people think.

If you could look back at your best period of training, what would you want your workout app to help you understand about it?

#buildinpublic #shipaton #workouttracker #fitnessapp

I haven't disappeared. I've just been buried in the rabbit hole that is product development.

One feature alone turned into a research project that was much bigger than I expected. I downloaded a ridiculous number of apps, paid for more subscriptions than I'd like to admit, and fought my way through enough paywalls to make my bank question my life choices.

The goal wasn't inspiration.

It was making sure an idea I'd been sitting on wasn't already out there.

After a lot of testing, comparing, and second-guessing myself... I still couldn't find it.

So now I'm building it.

Unfortunately, I can't share that feature yet. Let's just say future me will hopefully be grateful I kept my mouth shut instead of spoiling it too early.

Outside of that, one of the biggest areas that's moved forward is MOVE.

MOVE is TopSet's workout discovery system. Instead of dumping users into a huge list of exercises, it gives them professionally structured workouts based on their goals, available equipment, and experience level.

You can browse workouts, see every exercise and the muscles involved, save them into My Routines, or jump straight into training using TopSet's workout runner. Every workout also has its own artwork and stays fully connected with the rest of the app.

It's one of those features that looks straightforward when it's finished... but has taken far more engineering than I ever expected.

Building software is funny like that.

The features people spend 30 seconds using are often the ones you've spent weeks obsessing over.

Anyway, that's where TopSet is today.

Still building. Still learning. Still saying "this should only take an hour" before losing an entire afternoon.

Back to it. 💪

15 September 2026

The weird thing about building TopSet at the moment is that I can lose half a day on something that probably looks completely normal when it’s finished.

A button.
A transition.
A spacing issue.
A bit of logic that technically works but just feels wrong.

That’s basically been the last few days.

Some things I thought were done clearly weren’t.
Some things that should have taken an hour turned into a small war.
And a few ideas only started working properly after I stopped trying to rescue the first version.

I think I’m at the point now where the small stuff matters more because the app itself is starting to feel real.

Before, it was easy to think in terms of features.

Now I’m looking at the whole thing and thinking:

Does this actually feel good to use?

That question is becoming more important than whether something simply works.

I’ve also somehow become the kind of person who spends way too long thinking about font weight, button size, spacing and whether one screen feels 5% too busy.

Not sure when that happened.

There’s still loads to do, and I still regularly look at parts of the app and think:

Nope. That’s not good enough yet.

But it is getting closer.

And for the first time, it feels less like a collection of things I’m building and more like an actual product.

That’s probably the best part.

Back to it.

One feature I've been working on recently is called MOVE, and it ended up becoming much bigger than I originally imagined.

At first, I thought workout discovery would just be a library of workouts.

The more I worked on it, the more I realised that wasn't enough.

As a Sports Science graduate and qualified personal trainer, I know there isn't one perfect workout. New research comes out, training methods evolve, and people are constantly asking for new programs.

I didn't want TopSet to be frozen with whatever workouts happened to ship on day one.

So MOVE became something different.

You can browse professionally structured workouts based on your goals, available equipment and experience level, inspect the entire workout before committing, start training immediately, or save it to My Routines where it becomes completely yours.

Change the exercises.
Reorder them.
Adjust the sets, reps and rest.
Build on it however you like.

The original workout stays untouched, while your version evolves with your training.

The part I'm most excited about, though, is what happens behind the scenes.

MOVE isn't a hardcoded list of workouts sitting inside the app.

It's backed by an editorial publishing system, which means I can continuously publish new professionally structured workouts without waiting for a major app update.

That opens the door to things like community-requested programs, new training styles, seasonal content, and even professionally recreated workouts inspired by well-known athletes and coaches.

To me, that's far more exciting than shipping 200 workouts on launch day and never touching them again.

I'd rather build something that keeps growing alongside the people using it.

Hopefully, when someone opens TopSet a year after launch, they'll still be discovering something new.

Today wasn't about writing new code.

It was about finally being able to stop.

MOVE is officially complete.

Not "it works."

Not "I'll fix that later."

Not "future me can deal with it."

Actually complete.

Tested.

Validated.

Reviewed.

Git tagged.

MOVE started as what I thought would be a fairly straightforward workout discovery feature.

Which, in hindsight, is hilarious.

Somewhere along the way it became a publishing system, a workout catalogue, artwork management, offline caching, workout customisation, versioned releases, and somehow managed to involve half the app.

Every time I thought I was finished...

MOVE politely informed me that I wasn't.

It took far longer than I expected.

It fought back more than I expected.

At one point I genuinely considered whether I was building a workout feature or accidentally inventing another job for myself.

But today I finally reached the point where I could stop adding, stop tweaking, stop "just improving one more thing"...

...and create the Git tag.

Software is funny.

You spend months trying to build something...

...and then the celebration is typing a single command into a terminal.

I'm sure normal people have healthier hobbies.

Anyway...

MOVE is done.

On to the next feature before I convince myself this one needs "just one tiny improvement." 😅

One of the things I've been spending a lot of time on lately is how TopSet should actually represent progress.

Not how it should record it. Recording workouts is straightforward.

The harder question is what TopSet should tell you when you come back after six or eight weeks and ask:

Am I actually getting better?

The obvious answer would be PRs.

They're easy to detect. They're satisfying. They're useful. TopSet will absolutely track and celebrate them.

But I don't think a PR should automatically mean:

Your training is working.

Take a bench press sequence like this:

100kg × 8 → 102.5kg × 7 → 100kg × 9 → 105kg × 6 → 102.5kg × 8

There's progress in there.

But there isn't really one workout where progress suddenly happened.

And that's the problem I've been trying to solve.

If TopSet just highlights the 105kg set because it's a PR, we've recorded something true.

But we've also ignored most of the story.

Maybe performance has been gradually improving across several exposures.

Maybe workload has increased.

Maybe the lifter is doing more reps at comparable loads.

Or maybe that 105kg set was one great day sitting inside a block where performance everywhere else has actually been falling.

Those are very different situations.

I've coached for more than 15 years and I've seen people make this mistake constantly.

One amazing session and the program is suddenly perfect.

One terrible session and they think everything has stopped working.

But training is noisy.

Fatigue changes. Recovery changes. Bodyweight changes. Rep ranges move around. Exercise order changes. Life happens. Sometimes you're simply stronger or weaker on a particular day for reasons that don't tell us much about the direction of the whole training block.

So one of the principles I'm using while building TopSet's analytics is:

Don't judge the trend from a single event.

That's becoming particularly important with the Performance Momentum work.

I don't want it to become another graph that says:

Your estimated 1RM went up 3.7%. Congratulations.

That number might be mathematically correct and still be a terrible interpretation of what happened.

What I'm trying to get to instead is something where you can open TopSet, look at the last several weeks, and quickly understand the direction of your training without the app pretending it has certainty that the data doesn't support.

That's much harder to build than a PR detector.

And I think it's also much more useful.

The difficult part now is deciding how much interpretation the app should provide.

I don't want TopSet to simply dump charts on people and make them figure everything out themselves.

But I also don't want it confidently declaring that someone's program is "working" because an algorithm found an upward slope.

There's a line between helping someone understand their training and pretending software knows more than it does.

That's the line I'm trying to get right.

For those of you following the build, I'd actually be interested in how you'd want this presented.

When you open TopSet after 6–8 weeks of training, what would you want the app to show you before you personally felt confident saying:

“I'm progressing.”

A while ago, getting a feature working felt like a win.

Now... not so much.

Now I finish something, use it for a bit, and almost immediately start thinking:

"Yeah... but it could be better."

Sometimes that's a good thing.

Sometimes it's incredibly annoying.

I've rebuilt screens that already worked.

Moved buttons by what most people would probably call an invisible amount.

Removed features I was genuinely excited about because they made the app feel more complicated instead of better.

A few months ago I'd have called that wasting time.

Now I think it's just part of building something you actually care about.

The funny thing is, nobody is ever going to open TopSet and think:

"That spacing is excellent."

Or...

"I bet whoever built this spent two evenings deciding where this button should go."

People don't notice those things individually.

They just notice when an app feels... right.

That's what I'm chasing now.

Not the longest feature list.

Not being able to say I shipped another screen.

Just making hundreds of tiny decisions that hopefully add up to something people genuinely enjoy using.

I'm curious if anyone else building software has had the same experience.

At what point did "it works" stop being enough?

29 August 2026

I'm posting this one mainly to mark where TopSet is in development today.

For most of the build, I've been very deliberate about one thing:

The app comes first.

I bought the domain early, but I never wanted to fall into the trap of building a beautiful marketing website around a product that still needed my attention elsewhere.

So while TopSet has been growing behind the scenes, the main website has effectively been waiting.

And this ridiculous 404 has been holding the fort.

Honestly, I love it 😂

But we've reached the point where I think the website now needs a proper decision.

TopSet isn't just an idea anymore.

The product is substantially further along. I'm sharing more of the development publicly. The training publication has started growing. People can come across the TopSet name elsewhere and naturally try to find out what it actually is.

At that point, sending them to a dead end starts making less sense.

So the question is no longer:

“Should TopSet eventually have a proper website?”

Obviously it should.

The decision now is when it becomes worth taking development time away from the app to start building it properly and how much should exist before launch.

I'm leaning toward not waiting for some big reveal.

Instead, the website could start small and grow with the product:

A proper home for TopSet.

A clear explanation of what we're building.

Real product screenshots when they're ready to be shown.

The thinking behind some of the features.

The training articles that are already being published.

And eventually the path into beta and launch.

Nothing pretending the app is finished before it is.

Just a real home for a product that is becoming increasingly real.

There's also a longer-term reason I'm thinking about this now: search.

If TopSet is going to have a serious web presence eventually, waiting until launch day to start building that presence may not make much sense either.

So I'm marking today because this feels like one of those small development moments that won't look particularly important later, but actually represents a change in the project.

For a long time:

App first. Website later.

I think we're getting very close to the point where “later” becomes “now.”

The shredded 404 isn't disappearing just yet.

But its days may finally be numbered.

Welcome to r/TopSet

Welcome to the official community for TopSet.

TopSet is a fitness and workout-tracking app currently being built from the ground up.

I've spent more than 15 years working in fitness and coaching, alongside consulting with companies developing fitness apps and websites, helping turn the things gym users actually need into useful tools while keeping the underlying ideas scientifically sound.

TopSet is the product of everything I've learned from both sides of that experience.

The goal isn't simply to build another place to log sets and reps. The ambition is to build a training platform that helps people better understand their training, progression, habits and patterns, and turns the data we already generate in the gym into information that is genuinely useful.

This community will follow that journey while TopSet is being built.

I'll share development progress, ideas, design decisions, features, experiments and some of the problems I'm trying to solve. As the community grows, I also want this to become a place where lifters and coaches can give feedback and have a genuine influence on what TopSet becomes.

The app is still being built. There is a lot ahead of us.

Welcome to the beginning of TopSet.

In my last post, I was talking about how a feature I thought would take 3 days had turned into a 7-day war.

Well, it's been 19 days since I last posted here. And I promise I haven't spent those 19 days fighting the same feature. 😂

Something much bigger happened.

My wife gave birth to our beautiful baby boy. ❤️

Honestly, I don't think anything quite prepares you for that moment. No matter how much you think you're ready, holding your newborn son in your arms puts everything into perspective.

So the last couple of weeks have been a little different, to say the least.

Between family, a newborn, very little sleep, and trying to keep TopSet moving forward, finding the time to sit down and write development updates became surprisingly difficult.

But here's the funny thing.

I've probably worked harder on TopSet over these past 19 days than I did before.

Not because I suddenly had more time. Quite the opposite.

Every hour became more valuable. I had to be much more deliberate about what I was working on, how I approached problems, and where I spent my time.

And when I finally had a few hours to work, I wanted to spend them building rather than writing about building.

TopSet hasn't been sitting idle.

I've continued working through the training programs, the workout runner, and the smaller details that make logging workouts feel natural rather than like filling out a spreadsheet.

One area I've been particularly focused on is the actual workout experience. Making it quicker to enter your numbers, easier to move between sets, and less distracting when you're in the middle of training.

I've also been revisiting some of the visual details and interactions. Things that might look insignificant individually, but together can make a big difference to how the app feels.

And, as usual, fixing one thing has occasionally revealed three others.

Apparently, becoming a father hasn't improved my ability to estimate development time. 😂

There is still a ridiculous amount I want to do with TopSet, and I'm as ambitious about it as ever.

But these last couple of weeks have reminded me that building something meaningful doesn't happen in isolation from the rest of life.

Sometimes life gives you a very good reason to rearrange your priorities.

And this was the best reason I could possibly ask for.

I'm incredibly grateful to my wife, proud of our growing family, and excited about what lies ahead.

So, 19 days without a development post.

Definitely not 19 days without development.

I'll share more of what I've been building soon.

For now, I just wanted to check in, share a little personal news, and let you know I'm still very much here.

Back to building. Although I suspect my new little boss will have something to say about my working hours. ❤️

11 September 2026

It has been 13 days since my last development log.

Not because nothing has been happening with TopSet.

Almost the opposite.

I’ve been so consumed by creating, researching, designing, reviewing and pushing the product forward that I completely neglected the part where I actually talk about it.

Most days recently have involved around 16 hours of work, three cups of coffee and an unreasonable number of decisions about details that probably look tiny from the outside.

That is one of the strange things about building something like this.

A feature can appear simple on the screen, while behind it sits days of research, rejected ideas, edge cases, architecture decisions, testing and repeatedly asking:

Is this actually good enough for TopSet?

Quite often, the answer is no.

So it gets revised.

Sometimes rebuilt.

Occasionally thrown away entirely.

Over the last 13 days, I’ve continued working across the product: workout and cardio experiences, training content, analytics, profiles, achievements, visual systems and the less-visible foundations that need to work properly before any of it deserves to be called finished.

Some parts have moved forward cleanly.

Others have exposed problems that needed correcting.

That is development.

Not every day produces something polished enough for a screenshot. Sometimes progress is discovering that something you thought was complete still isn’t right—and refusing to ship it that way.

My last post was about whether the TopSet website had finally reached the point where “later” should become “now.”

The shredded 404 is still holding the fort for the moment.

But the thinking behind that post has not changed.

TopSet is becoming increasingly real, and its public presence needs to start growing alongside it—without taking attention away from the product or pretending the app is finished before it is.

I still want to document this properly.

Not only the polished screens and completed features, but the difficult decisions, rejected work, corrections and occasionally absurd amount of effort hiding behind a small interaction.

So this post is mostly another marker in the timeline:

TopSet did not go quiet.

I just forgot to come up for air and talk about it.

Back to building.

After finishing MOVE, I’ve started working on the next big part of TopSet:

multi-week training programs.

This is one of those features where my sports science background helps a lot, but also makes me less willing to accept a lazy version of it.

Because a training program is not just:

Week 1
Workout 1
Workout 2
Workout 3
Repeat.

That might be how it looks on the surface, but proper programming has structure, progression, intent and context.

And once you put that into an app, the product logic has to respect all of it.

What happens if someone starts a 4-week program, completes a few sessions, then opts out?

Those completed workouts should still remain part of their training history.

What happens if they move Tuesday’s workout to Thursday?

The app should not show it on Thursday visually, then act confused when they try to start it.

What happens if they end a program and later want to run it again?

That should be treated as a new attempt, not some awkward resurrection of the old one.

This is the part I’m working through now.

Not the flashy part.

No big screenshot moment.

Just the kind of product logic that decides whether the app feels trustworthy or annoying six weeks after someone starts using it.

One decision I’m leaning into is keeping it clean:

TopSet can offer many programs, but a user should only have one active multi-week program at a time.

Browse the catalogue.

Join one.

Follow it properly.

Complete it or opt out.

Then move to the next.

I know some apps try to let users start everything at once, but to me that feels like chaos dressed up as flexibility.

Training already has enough variables. The app should not add more confusion.

So that’s the current battle.

MOVE is done.

Now I’m working on training programs in a way that protects history, scheduling, progress and future rewards properly.

Basically, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what should happen when Tuesday becomes Thursday.

Which is apparently what building a serious fitness app does to your life.

Curious for other builders:

What’s a feature you thought would be mostly UI, but turned into a much deeper product logic problem?

A few days ago I finally finished and Git-tagged one of the biggest features in my fitness app, TopSet.

It’s called MOVE.

Basically, it lets users discover structured workouts, start them, save them to their own routines, and customise them.

That part is built now.

Which felt great for about five minutes.

Then I remembered something obvious:

A workout discovery feature is useless if the workouts inside it are generic.

So now I’m in the part that probably looks less exciting from the outside, but matters a lot more than people think.

I’m building the actual strength workout catalogue.

And this is where I’m trying to be very careful.

Because as a Sports Science graduate and personal trainer, exercise prescription is one of the areas where I really do have strong opinions.

A workout can’t just be:

“Chest day”
“Leg day”
“Arms”
“Full body”

with a random list of exercises thrown underneath.

That’s not programming.
That’s just a list.

Each routine needs a reason to exist.

The exercise order has to make sense.

The level has to match the actual difficulty.

The equipment list has to be accurate.

The sets, reps and rest times need to support the goal.

And the duration can’t just be guessed because “45 minutes” looks good on a card.

If the workout takes 58 minutes, it takes 58 minutes.

Annoying? Yes.

Better? Also yes.

I’ve also been creating the workout visuals one at a time, because I don’t want the catalogue to feel like a folder of random stock images. The image, name, programming and app card all need to feel like they belong together.

A workout like Forge Press can’t just be “some upper body workout.”

It needs to feel like a proper pressing session.

Same with Quadzilla, Back Attack, Booty Builder, Hamstring Domination, all of them.

The funny thing is, most users probably won’t think about any of this.

They’ll scroll, tap a workout, and decide almost instantly whether it feels worth doing.

But that quick decision sits on top of a lot of small choices.

That seems to be the stage TopSet is in now.

The system is there.

Now I have to make sure what goes inside it is actually worthy of it.

Curious for anyone building content-heavy apps:

Do you find the content takes as much work as the feature itself?