My watch said I slept badly
I woke up full of energy and a number told me I was wrong. That's when I stopped trusting training apps and built my own.
A lot of mornings I woke up with energy, ready to train, and then I looked at my watch and it told me I had slept badly. A bad number for a good morning. And the strange part is that for a while I believed the number more than I believed myself.
That is the whole problem with how I used to train, in one small scene.
For a long time I had no structure at all. I trained some weeks and then I didn’t. I did strength workouts very randomly — whatever I felt like that day, no plan, no progression. So I did what an engineer does and went looking for an app to fix it. I tried a lot of them. Hevy only does strength and I didn’t like the interface. Garmin Connect has a bad interface too, and strength training there is bad both on the watch and in the app.
But the real issue wasn’t the interface. It was that all of them are the same thing: metrics, metrics and more metrics, and no human feeling. They measure everything about your training except how you actually feel doing it. They give you a sleep score, a recovery score, a readiness number, and then you are supposed to trust the score over your own body. That is exactly backwards.
Around the same time I started reading Manu Sola Arjona on training as a complex system instead of a machine you optimize. The body is not a dashboard. You can’t reduce it to a single number you push up and to the right. A morning with energy after “bad” sleep is not a contradiction to fix — it is information, and the metric simply doesn’t know what to do with it.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same enemy in different rooms. Nutrition apps hand you a value to decode instead of telling you the human thing — is this food good or not; that’s the bet behind Eat or Skip. Training apps do exactly the same, and that’s what made me build Peak Health: they optimize a number and forget the person standing there.
So I built my own. First a “Trainer” workflow with Claude that actually asked how I felt and worked from there. Now I’m starting to use my own app, peakhealth.es — it adjusts to how I feel and has AI built in. It’s early, honestly. But I already use it, which is more than I can say for the others.
I’m not against data. The watch can keep its score. But the number works for me now, not the other way around. If I wake up with energy, I train. The dashboard doesn’t get a vote it didn’t earn.