A lot of people in my family were athletes. Then high school ended, and so did the training. They stopped taking care of their bodies the way they used to, and their diets didn't support a long, healthy life. I've watched the health consequences of that up close.
That's the reason this company exists. Everybody deserves fitness in their life, so we made it free for the people who train.
Where the name came from
People ask about the name a lot. I like the question, because the answer explains almost everything else about the company.
"Technically fit" means two things to me.
The first is technical competency: being sharp at the work you do with your mind. The second is the joke we've all made at some point. Well, technically, I'm fit.
I didn't come up with it to name a company. I came up with it in 2018, during an internship at Adobe Research. Every day at lunch I left my desk and went to the gym. I was sitting and coding all day, and I wanted my body to keep up with my brain. After a while my coworkers started asking where I kept disappearing to at lunch.
After enough of those conversations, I put a name to what I was doing. I needed to be technically competent and physically fit at the same time. I needed to be technically fit. Technically fit in the gym, and technically fit in my mind.
How the journey began
I played a lot of sports in high school, and I didn't plan on going to college. When I did go, to Morehouse College, I wanted to study physics. Then Google started teaching a computer science course at Morehouse. I enrolled, and that course led to a computer science internship.
My sports journey ended in high school. I didn't play anything in college, but I still needed a physical outlet. I found the gym, and I fell in love with it.
I applied to PhD programs and was accepted into the computer science PhD program at Cornell University as a GEM Fellow. That's how I ended up at Adobe Research, and how the name was born.
Then the PhD got hard, and my gym habits stopped working. I couldn't beat myself up in the gym every day and keep up with PhD-level work. I had to train smarter, not just harder. So I did what a computer science PhD student does: I wrote an algorithm. It was a personalized workout planner, a command-line tool I built for myself, backed by a database of exercises I'd scraped from a public website. That's what I used to program my own training.
Around the same time, apps like Fitbod were taking off. I didn't think a grad student with a command-line tool could compete with them, so the project stayed mine.
The gym had other plans. People at my local gym noticed my physique and the way I trained, and they kept asking if I was a trainer. I kept saying no. Then the gym owner told me it was something I should seriously explore. So, in the middle of my PhD, I studied for and earned my personal trainer certification through the National Academy of Sports Medicine.
The day I passed the exam, I ran into the next problem. Taking on clients came with a mountain of administrative work, and it was a real hurdle. That frustration became one of our flagship products: the coaching side of TechnicallyFit exists so the next trainer who gets certified can spend their time coaching, not doing paperwork.
Over the rest of the PhD I studied optimization, scientific computing, and machine learning, and did a lot of industry internships. I also built software end to end on the side: designing screens, writing the front end, building the back end, provisioning databases, renting servers, and configuring my own reverse proxies. I did every piece of it by hand, and it was slow.
By the time I finished my PhD in computer science at Cornell, AI agents had arrived. For the first time, the bottleneck wasn't how fast I could type. It was how fast I could think something through and get it out into the world. One person could build what used to take a team, and I knew which idea I wanted to build.
Where we are today
We don't just reason about workouts. We reason about the body. That's where the name of our AI, VERA, comes from. It's a recursive acronym: VERA Embodies Reasoning Anatomically.
Our flagship today is the TechnicallyFit Engine, a deterministic engine that builds your program and adjusts it from what you log. VERA sits on top of it. It explains why your training looks the way it does and proposes changes for you to approve. The engine does the programming, and you stay in control.
Here's what that means in practice.
For teammates. Let us handle your programming, or write it yourself. Either way, you can track your progress end to end, train with the community or on your own, and take on challenges along the way toward the health outcome you're after. That works whether you compete or train for the love of it.
For coaches. We take care of the administrative work of running a coaching business. Coaches can connect with teammates on the platform, or bring their own clients, who join as teammates. Those clients join free, because teammates are free in perpetuity.
We're starting with the individual on purpose. To solve performance at scale, you have to learn how to solve it for one person at a time.
We also believe humans need to stay in the loop in the age of AI. Our AI-native features extend coaches and individuals. They don't replace them. Asking real questions of your own training data used to take serious math and computer science skills, the kind you'd build in a degree. Now you just ask.
Why every human should be technically fit
We live in a knowledge-work society. Physical labor isn't valued the way it was during the Industrial Revolution, and most of us spend our days sitting.
Biologically, though, our bodies haven't caught up. They still expect physical stress. Something about being pushed physically keeps the body working the way it should. So when I say everybody should be technically fit, I mean everybody deserves some fitness in their life. Movement is medicine.
This is personal for me. I opened with my family for a reason: when the training stopped, their health followed.
That's why teammates train on TechnicallyFit free, in perpetuity. If we do this right, there will be at least one piece of technology in the world that helps people live better, as long as they show up.
We're not selling medicine. You still have to put in the work. But if you put in the work, we can put the technology behind you that helps you reach your goals.
Where we're going
Training is where we start, but it isn't the finish line.
Our mission is to close the gap between what a body can do and what it actually does.
Our vision is to become the operating system for human performance: an ecosystem where humans collaborate to optimize every aspect of physical capability. That means training today, and recovery, rehabilitation, and nutrition as we build toward them. Health for all.
Most tools record what you did. TechnicallyFit optimizes what you do next.
Thanks for reading. This is the first of many posts, and I'm glad you're here for the start.