Xenos Fit

Xenos Fit grew out of my own wishes for convenient, affordable, responsive personal training. It's a privacy-respecting, AI-powered fitness app that creates customized workout plans, integrates a personal trainer chat function, makes logging workouts easy, and offers one-page printouts for phone-free workouts.

I love moving and exercising, but for many years I went to the gym without any plan — just randomly wandering from one piece of equipment to the next until I felt done or time was up. It's way more fun going to the gym with a plan, and knowing that the work I do there supports goals I've set for myself.

A leading remote personal training app I tried for a while did a lot right, and I liked it. But at more than $100 a month it wasn't worth it for me. There were features I wanted and suggested — and I even hacked together a solution for one of my wishes myself when my requests went unacknowledged.

The personal trainer I chose was good, but not in sync with me. Responses took hours, and my trainer was often off work and unreachable. (I get that personal trainers are people too, with their own lives, but I'd prefer more timely responses if I can get them.) The accountability value was real, but not worth the price. I thought I could create the service I really wanted, and I did — Xenos Fit.

It creates plans that fit my goals, remembers every session, adjusts when I've got other priorities, and doesn't require a phone at the gym — you can print your workout and go. I opened it to a small beta because several friends asked, and because I enjoy it so much, I think other people will too.

As a former cyber security analyst, I can be pretty intense about data privacy. I'm not a fan of companies that monetize their clients' personal data or collect and retain more than they need.

The privacy approach here is informed by a simple principle borrowed from security: assume a breach will happen, and design so that a breach causes as little harm as possible.

We've designed the system as securely as we can, and part of the design is to store less information than most apps, and for the information we do store to be untraceable to a real identity. Your workout data — sets, reps, how your body is responding — is genuinely useful information about you. But without a real full name, a real email, or a real date of birth attached to it, it has almost no value to anyone who shouldn't have it.

Specifically:

• —We never ask for your real name. Any name you want to use is fine.
• —We use whatever you provide as your year of birth only to calibrate programming for your age.
• —We use your email only to send your login code and info about our service. No password is ever stored. If you use a dedicated email alias, your primary email address is never in our database.
• —We don't ask for your phone number, because we don't need it and they're too easily abused.
• —We never sell or share your data with third parties.
• —All data access by the app operator is logged. If we ever need to look at your data for troubleshooting, that access is recorded.

If we were hacked, what an attacker would find is workout logs linked to a pseudonymous account. That's the design.

These are services we use ourselves and recommend to anyone who takes data privacy seriously. We may receive a small referral credit if you sign up through the links below — we mention them because we believe in them, not the other way around.