Deutsche Version dieses Beitrags
Most fitness apps work wonderfully as long as your life goes according to plan. But when does your life ever go according to plan?
During my studies, my gym routine worked really well. I went to the gym and ran my own household.
Then university was over. Boom. New job, new relationship, a new apartment, plus taking care of my grandma. A completely different life, a completely different daily routine.
I kept going to the gym, but it turned into stress. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that stress is one of the biggest enemies in the gym.
Help was needed, so I installed quite a few gym apps and deleted just as many.
Not because they were badly built. Many of them are technically really good. But because they all share an assumption that simply doesn't hold up in a real gym: that you do exactly what's in the plan.
Reality looks different. The bench is taken. Someone has been sitting at the cable machine on their phone for twenty minutes. The dumbbells you need are lying somewhere in a corner.
And suddenly, what used to be a given turned into stress. Training had to be squeezed in somewhere between finishing work and time together. Cooking was no longer "I'll just make myself something", but a question of planning, shopping, and resisting the temptation to just eat along with others or grab something on the way.
I realized: my routine was never a truly consistent system. It was a by-product of my circumstances.
Honestly, it took quite a while to get back on track. And what helped me was my app REPCIPE, which started many years ago as a simple Google note.
REPCIPE: Rep + Recipe
The name pretty much says it all: Reps and Recipes. Training and cooking in one app, because to me they belong together. Your training starts in the gym and ends in the kitchen.
A few principles were especially important to me while building it:
- Offline-first: Everything works in a basement gym with no signal.
- No annoying subscription
- Little gamification, and when there is some, it's optional
- Flexible instead of rigid: The app adapts to your training, not the other way around.
- No ads.
- AI, AI and AI.
Training that allows deviations
In REPCIPE you can create exercise groups in your plan. For example "Chest" with bench press, incline dumbbell press and the chest press machine, plus a target count, let's say two.
At the gym you simply do the two that are free right now. Bench taken? No problem, dumbbells and machine it is. The app still knows your chest workout is done, and your history stays clean for each exercise.
You decide what goes into the plan
If you change something during a workout, like adding an exercise, skipping one or adjusting your sets, REPCIPE doesn't just ask you "Update routine: yes or no?" at the end.
Instead, you get a list of all changes and can pick them one by one to carry over into future workouts. Today's spontaneous replacement exercise stays a one-off, while the extra set that felt good gets kept.
After every workout you can also decide whether you want to see a hint next time to increase your weights. You decide, not the app.
The rest timer is subtle and can be turned off completely.
More than just weights
Besides strength training there's cardio, stretching routines with a hold timer, and a small exercise library with animations. I spent a long time considering building an exercise database with hundreds of exercises, and once I had it, I thought: way too much. In my situation the basic exercises are enough. I don't need an exercise for some muscle I didn't even know existed.
Progressive overload, without Excel
If you want to build muscle, there's no way around progressive overload: weight, reps or intensity have to go up over time.
REPCIPE shows you right at every set what you managed last time. And because not all progress is visible in kilos, you can also log your RIR (reps in reserve), meaning how many reps you still had in the tank.
Gamification: The Drive Score
Gamification is optional and stays in the background. For example, there's an activity heatmap like the one on GitHub.
There's also a Drive Score, made up of:
- Consistency: How regularly you train
- Training: Whether you hit your training goals
- Nutrition: Whether you hit your calorie and protein targets
- Recovery: Whether you actually take your rest days
- Reflection: Whether you regularly log your weight and progress photos
Every activity earns points, and a small colored orb shows you at a glance how things are going: green, yellow, orange or red. If you have an overdue task, it drops one level until you've done it.
What mattered to me: rest days and sick days are not punished. If you're sick, you shouldn't feel bad because a streak breaks. Rest is part of training, and the app should treat it that way.
Recipes
Tracking without frustration
You can log meals in several ways:
- Barcode scanner via Open Food Facts, without a paywall
- Your own recipes, with calories and macros per serving calculated automatically
- Voice input: You just say what you ate. Speech recognition runs on a Whisper model directly on your phone, so the recording never leaves your device
- Photo analysis: Take a photo of your plate and the AI estimates ingredients and nutrition
Meal prep and weekly planning
With a relationship and a job, meal prep became the game changer for me. In REPCIPE you can record how many portions of a recipe you've cooked ahead, and the weekly planner spreads them across your meals. Anything you don't have ends up on the shopping list.
And because nothing is more annoying than buying things you already have at home, there's a digital fridge. The shopping list checks against it and shows you what you already have. The fridge can also suggest recipe ideas that match what's currently in it.
If you're missing an ingredient or it doesn't fit your goal, you can swap it for an alternative right in the recipe, for example for more protein or fewer calories.
My recipes for everyone
I like cooking, and over the years I've collected quite a few recipes that I make again and again. I've published over 100 of them in REPCIPE, tested, cooked many times and with proper nutrition values.
So you don't end up eating the same thing every week, there's also a large library of AI-generated recipes for more variety. In the app you can always see which recipes are officially curated by me and which were generated by AI. By the way, the recipe library works offline too!
AI as a helper, not a replacement
I spend a lot of time with AI, but I didn't want an app where the AI just claims whatever. So REPCIPE follows a clear principle: the calculations are deterministic, and the AI helps with interpreting them and wherever else it's useful.
The heart of it is Train Intelligence. The app looks at the last 14, 28 or 56 days and combines your weight, your nutrition and your training. The result is one simple answer:
Are you on track, should you keep watching, is an adjustment needed, or is there simply not enough data?
That last point was especially important to me. If you've only tracked your food on three days, REPCIPE won't confidently suggest a new calorie target. The app shows you how reliable its data is and only suggests changes when they make sense, typically in small steps of 100 to 200 kcal. Nothing changes automatically without your confirmation.
On top of that there's:
- an AI coach you can chat with about your analysis
- a recipe assistant that turns an idea into a complete recipe with nutrition values
- a nutrition assistant that helps you plan meals or suggest replacements
- a fridge chat that tells you what you can cook from what you have, and helps you record what's inside
Statistics that actually help
Many apps have statistics. But often they're pretty charts you can't draw any conclusions from.
In REPCIPE I wanted statistics that answer a question. For example:
- Weight trend instead of daily values: Your weight fluctuates by one or two kilos every day, and that's normal. The app shows you the smoothed trend so you don't panic after a salty dinner.
- Training volume and progress per exercise: Are your main lifts going up over the weeks, or are you stagnating?
- Nutrition adherence: On how many days did you actually hit your calorie and protein targets?
- Progress photos: Because the scale doesn't show everything.
Together they give a pretty honest picture of whether what you're doing actually works. And I have to say: why didn't I have this app sooner?
Conclusion
REPCIPE is the app I needed when my life suddenly stopped going according to plan after university. An app that accepts instead of dictates.
It isn't perfect, and it will never be "finished" (I've been saying it's almost there for over a year now, haha). I work on it every day, and a lot of it is based on my own use and feedback from others.
If you'd like to try it: repcipe.app. It's best to open it directly on your phone and add it to your home screen.
And if something is missing or annoying: feel free to write me.