The wrong product everyone is building
There’s a particular fitness-app pattern that’s become very popular in the last five years: a slick AI-driven personal trainer in your pocket. You answer some questions, the app generates a programme, you follow it, the app adapts as you go. No human trainer required.
Every time we’ve tried these with our clients — and we’ve tried most of them — the same pattern emerges:
- Week 1: enthusiasm, novelty, the dashboard looks beautiful.
- Week 4: motivation flagging, sessions starting to feel optional.
- Week 8: app deleted.
The reason is not that the AI programming is bad. Some of it is decent. The reason is that showing up consistently for two years is fundamentally a human problem, and human problems need human relationships to solve.
What we built instead
MyPT is not a replacement for a personal trainer. It is a tool that makes our coaching better. The distinction shapes every design decision in the product.
What the app does:
- Delivers the programme we wrote you. Set by set, with rest timers and technique cues and your previous numbers.
- Logs the meal you ate. With a photo scan that takes three seconds because logging shouldn’t take longer than eating.
- Generates the walking route from your front door. Because “go for a walk” doesn’t survive contact with daily life unless the route is one tap away.
- Reads your watch in the morning and changes the plan. Amber day = lighter session. Red day = recovery. The plan adapts to the body that woke up.
- Keeps the line open between sessions. Voice notes from us when something needs a quick cue. Text from you when something isn’t working. The conversation doesn’t stop when you leave Tal‑Qroqq.
- Tracks the long arc. Photos, body comp, benchmarks, conditioning, nutrition — all of it next to each other, all of it visible to both you and your trainer.
What the app does NOT do:
- It does not generate your training programme. Marvic writes that, by hand, for you.
- It does not generate your diet plan. Miriam writes that, by hand, for you.
- It does not replace the conversations. The conversations happen in person at Tal‑Qroqq and over voice notes between sessions.
- It does not pretend to know things about you that no app can know — your sleep, your stress, your kitchen, your past, your fears.
Why this distinction matters
The AI-only fitness apps fail because they cannot do the part of coaching that actually drives change. They can describe the programming. They cannot care whether you showed up. They can suggest a portion size. They cannot understand why a particular food is emotionally loaded for you. They can show you a graph. They cannot meet you for coffee.
A good coach does all of those things. A good app makes the good coach’s work scale to more clients without compromising what makes the coaching work.
This is what we wanted MyPT to be. And it’s what we wouldn’t budge on, even when it would have been easier to build the more popular version.
What you actually get
When you train with us at Tal‑Qroqq, you get:
- Hand-written training programmes, updated weekly based on how you actually trained, not a generic progression
- Hand-written nutrition plans from a state-registered dietitian
- Small-group sessions with people matched to your goal and level
- The app with all of the above delivered into your pocket, plus the trail catalog, the recipe library, the readiness signal, the wearable integrations, and the community layer
- Direct messaging with us for the questions that come up between sessions
When you’re app-only (because you don’t live in Malta or your schedule doesn’t allow in-person), you still get:
- Hand-written training programmes from Marvic
- Hand-written nutrition plans from Miriam (after a video call assessment)
- The full app
- Direct messaging with us
The format changes. The coaching doesn’t.
The roadmap, briefly
We’re not in a rush to add features. The next few things on our list:
- Native iOS app to replace the current Progressive Web App for iPhone users
- Maltese-language interface for clients who’d rather read in Malti
- Better trainer dashboard so we can review more clients’ weeks faster (this keeps the small-roster constraint manageable)
Things we are deliberately NOT adding:
- Auto-generated programmes. The thing we built is built around hand-written. Adding AI-generated would dilute that.
- A marketplace of trainers. We are personally accountable for the coaching. Opening MyPT to other trainers is a different product, with different tradeoffs, that we don’t plan to build.
The longer version
The bigger argument here is about what fitness technology is FOR. The popular answer is “scale”. Make one trainer’s expertise available to a million people via an algorithm. Cheaper, more accessible, etc.
We think this answer is wrong. Not because scale is bad — but because the actual product (sustained behaviour change in a real human’s life) doesn’t scale that way. The thing that needs scaling is the coach’s ATTENTION on individual humans, not the SUBSTITUTION of attention with software.
MyPT is software that lets two coaches give more attention per client, not less attention to more clients. That’s a different optimisation function, and it produces a different product.
If that resonates with what you’ve been looking for, we’d love to meet you at Tal‑Qroqq.