Founder story
Eleven years ago I started lifting in my parents' basement. No plan, no idea what I was doing. I just wanted them to let me play football again.
I'd been hurt a lot growing up, and by my junior year of high school they weren't loving the idea of me going back out on the field. They told me if I wanted to play, I had to prove I was serious and that I would not play scared. So I started lifting.
I didn't know how to program a workout or how many calories were in a gram of protein. I was just a kid in a basement trying to get bigger and stronger so my parents would let me play the sport I loved and missed.
So I did what every kid with internet access did: watched YouTube. Athlean-X, Elliott Hulse, Scott Herman, Jeff Nippard, More Plates More Dates, Matt Wenning, Nick Bare, whoever I could learn from.
At first lifting was just a means to an end. I wanted to play football. But somewhere in there I started liking training more than playing, and that's when it turned into an obsession.
Fitness has been one of the biggest parts of my life ever since. All the way through high school, college, and now. Always trying to learn more, train better, recover better, understand why things actually worked.
In college I got lucky and found someone who coached me through powerlifting for next to nothing, and I learned a ton from him.
Why Mass in Motion was built
But once I got into the real world, that changed. A job, less free time, trying to balance lifting and running at the same time. Programming for myself got a lot harder. I knew how, but doing it well takes real time: periodization, recovery, RIR, exercise selection, fatigue, running volume on top of lifting volume, whether the whole week actually makes sense as a unit instead of a pile of disconnected hard days.
That's where every app I tried started falling apart.
- A good lifting app doesn't know what to do with your running.
- A good running app has no idea what heavy squats are doing to your legs that week.
- A recovery app might hand you good data, but it rarely tells you what to actually change because of it.
And then there's the new wave of "AI coaching" apps. These apps are basically ChatGPT wearing a fitness skin and charging you for it. They sound confident. They're not always right.
I tested one that scheduled a hard interval session the day after my heaviest leg day. I asked if anything looked off. It said no. I had to point at both days directly before it admitted the interval session would probably take a hit from the leg fatigue.
I knew enough to catch that. Most people wouldn't.
That gap is where Mass in Motion came from.
This is the app I'd been looking for since college.
Something that treats lifting and running like they're part of the same training, not two apps that don't talk to each other. Something that actually factors recovery into what it tells you to do next. Something consistent, because it's built on real programming logic instead of a language model improvising a workout on the fly.
Training doesn't happen in a vacuum. Every gap I kept running into became something I built into Mass in Motion: the lifting algorithms, the running prescriptions, the recovery logic, and the way it adjusts your week around how much time and energy you actually have.
I'm building this because I think fitness apps can do better. Not just for beginners, or lifters, or runners, but for anyone trying to train hard, recover well, and actually keep getting better at both at the same time.