Movement Athlete - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

We work with a team of incredible developers & UX designers with experience in building web and mobile apps. We are very lucky to have them on the team.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

When we started building the app we aimed to set you on a journey to redefine how we do bodyweight fitness. Instead of getting you to do random exercises, we wanted to create a journey of bodyweight mastery, where you unlock and master harder and harder skills as you get stronger and more mobile as well as create a more engaging & holistic user experience.
With that in mind, the most challenging aspects were:
Being flexible as we learn more about our customers and adjusting the functionality on the go.
As we were developing the app and working closely with our customers we were learning new things about the required functionality and UX. That meant a lot of changes to what already has been developed that extended our development time.
Making a complex technology easy to use.
As our app is fairly complex under the hood creating a User experience that is easy, flows, and makes users happy and makes the complexities of the app.
Delighting customers and solving real-life problems has always been a priority for us.

_{Agnieszka Nazaruk - CEO and Founder}

Agnieszka Nazaruk, the CEO and Founder of The Movement Athlete, is a serial entrepreneur with multiple successful startups under her belt. She is a full-time traveler and whenever she gets some time, she likes to speak and mentor aspirants on a range of topics including team-building, company culture to the art of selling.

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

We look up to apps that are trying to bring the complexity of the technology and package it in beautiful user experience to make it really easy for an ordinary person to be better. Whether it’s exercising more, eating better, meditating more or just building new habits - technology should always be aiming to solve problems to improve the quality of people's lives

We absolutely love headspace and the UX from fitness apps; we think the Nike app is doing an incredible job in terms of creating a very smooth interface for doing your workouts with audio cues.

How long have you been working on this app?

This app has been two years in development.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

We wanted to provide an easy, engaging and holistic way to do enable someone to get on a journey of bodyweight mastery. To take the training methodology and philosophy that is available only for professional athletes and put it in a simple app interface.

Bodyweight training has been the biggest trend in the fitness industry for the last 3 years and we have seen many apps that have been having incredible success providing home, no-equipment workouts that you can do anytime, anywhere.

Those apps although great for short term goals like losing fat yet they simply fail to drive long term engagement. They get boring as you end up doing the same exercises over and over again because the only way to increase difficulty is to add reps or time limits.

Progressive bodyweight training/ calisthenics is a bodyweight training that is focused on gradually building strength mobility and flexibility towards a certain skill. This type of training is extremely powerful. It’s holistic, safe, bulletproofs your joints nad conditions your nervous system for incredible strength and control.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

We do things very differently at The Movement Athlete and our sole purpose was to provide an innovative training platform web and app to make progressive bodyweight training easy, safe and fun for everyone.

Our app is structured as a journey. Each time your workout you get closer towards a specific goal you are currently working on eg a pullup, a squat fundamental or a handstand.
When you join The Movement Athlete, first you take a comprehensive assessment - To establish where on the journey are you. Then we create a Personalised training program just for you as you workout we adjust your training in real-time based on your feedback. As you get stronger and more mobile, you UNLOCK HARDER AND HARDER SKILLS.

Our workouts are incredibly personalized. Additionally, we use AI to adapt the workouts to you in real-time. We only generate one new workout at a time as we take feedback from your previous workout to generate the current one. It means that you will not get ready ade routines in our app - each workout is generated based on your previous workout and your workout history.

Including mobility, flexibility, skill strength, muscle, and endurance all in one workout.

We are competitively priced and going after customers who are looking for a complete solution; not just chasing aesthetic goals but a lifelong journey of bodyweight mastery.

Most of the apps on the market will get you be doing random, level-based exercises with us. We provide solutions to folks who would like ultimately build INSANE amounts of real-world strength, to be pain and injury-free, and to be able to move freely, how he wants, when he wants, until the day they die. Our customers are not just searching for aesthetic goals but a training system that will keep them strong and mobile for years to come and give them a sense of achievement and rewards.

You can see all our success stories here https://themovementathlete.com/success-stories/
"I've tried a few other bodyweight apps, but they sort of left you to make it up as you go along. No structure just some random routines"-Edward
"The other apps, at some point, were just too hard. It was just super unrealistic, very disappointing and very frustrating"-Nicholas
"You can get a bit of help through YouTube videos and all of that, I really struggled to put a comprehensive training program together.-William
"I used so many bodyweight apps... I felt a lack of variation and long term motivation as the exercises were repeating and not increasing in difficulty.-Jelka

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

As a team, we are only getting started and we have a lot in store.

Apart from making the app more stable across different devices, we are super excited about a new workout generation feature that will enable our users to pick the workout based on specific muscles, skills they want to train for, mobility or body part vs just having one workout generated at a time. That also includes time and equipment preferences and all workouts are personalized to their current level.

As a company, our goal is to create the best possible tools for our customers to train and live their best and healthiest lives. Hence we are constantly in touch with our customers about their wants, needs, and challenges and we use those to drive your product direction and improvements.

In 2020, in particular, we are looking into creating way more content with our featured trainers both for your paid customers and free ones and engaging with the community across the world.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

If you are looking for a bodyweight training app that will take you on a journey of building real life strength, mobility and bulletproof joints and gymnast like body and learning over 100 calisthenics and gymnastics skills try The Movement Athlete App for FREE here: https://themovementathlete.com/
You can also sign up for our FREE Course called School of Strength that teaches you the basics of progressive bodyweight strength training and calisthenics. https://themovementathlete.com/school-of-strength/>