Why I built this

My dad had a Total Gym when I was a kid. This was the Chuck Norris era — late-night infomercials, Christie Brinkley, the whole thing. It sat in the corner of the basement, mostly idle, the way these things do. I thought it was kind of a joke.

For most of my adult life I trained the normal way. A gym membership, barbells, a lifting app I loved that kept me consistent for years. That consistency was real. I showed up, I tracked my progress, I got stronger. The app made it easy to know what to do next. I didn't have to think about it — I just had to show up.

Then I had open heart surgery.

Recovery changes the calculus. My cardiologist said: low-impact, progressive resistance, start easy, build slowly. No free weights dropped on a healing chest. About twelve months ago I found a Total Gym on Facebook Marketplace — like my dad's, but mine. Cable machine, adjustable incline, easy on the joints. Perfect for what I needed.

I went looking for an app. Something that would do what my old lifting app had done — tell me what to do each session, track my progress, move me forward automatically. Something I didn't have to think about on the days I didn't have much left to think with.

I found nothing.

TotalGymTV, the official app, is a video library. Useful if you want to watch someone work out. Not useful if you want to be told what to do next. Every other fitness app assumed barbells and a gym membership. The Total Gym community was tracking workouts on paper. In Facebook groups, people asked "does anyone know a good app for this?" The answers were: YouTube. Paper and pencil. "I've been searching for ages too."

My brother had the same surgery

Ten years before me. Different decade, same machine in the basement afterward, same search for something that could guide you back when you're not sure where "back" is yet.

When I called him and said I was going to build a Total Gym app, he said "okay, I'm in" — and then, because he's an Enterprise Architect who has seen what happens when people build things too fast, he also said: we're doing this right.

So we did it right. Nights and weekends. Vampire hours. A lot of coffee. My wife came downstairs more than once to find me showing her a screen she'd already seen three times. She was kind about it. She said this was going to be a real business and meant it.

Eight weeks from that first night to the App Store.

What we built

Six exercises. Three sets each. Every time you finish a workout, your reps go up by one. Hit twenty reps on any exercise, raise the incline, reset to ten, and climb again. The app tracks everything. You just show up.

$4.99/month or $39.99/year. 7-day free trial. No account. Your data stays on your phone. We're not in the business of your data — we're in the business of your workout.

No leaderboards. No social feed. No badges to collect. When you hit fifty workouts the app celebrates — it should, you earned it. But there's no points system, no streak to protect, nothing designed to make you feel bad for missing a day. The milestone is real or it isn't.

Who this is for

If you have a Total Gym or an incline trainer, this is for you. The person who bought the machine, used it for a while, and let life get in the way. The person who went looking for a system and found YouTube videos instead. The person who's written their reps in a notebook and lost it twice.

You don't need to know anything about progressive overload or periodization or any of that. You just need to show up. The app handles the rest.

One thing v1 doesn't have — and why

SLED doesn't have videos showing you how to do the exercises. That's by design.

TotalGymTV already has that nailed. It's a great video platform — hundreds of workouts, real trainers, the official resource from the people who built the machine. And if you want a YouTube rabbit hole, there's no shortage: Hybrid Resistance, Rosalie Brown, and others have put out years of excellent Total Gym content for free.

I didn't need to rebuild that. What I needed — what I couldn't find — was something that remembered where I was and told me where to go next. A system, not a library.

SLED is the system. Use it alongside whatever videos you like.

It's called SLED. It's in the App Store now.

It's what I wish had existed when I dragged that Total Gym home from a Facebook Marketplace stranger's garage — a $900 machine I got for a deal, and one of the best purchases I've made. I use it every morning.

If you're figuring out where to start on your own machine, I put together a simple beginner routine based on what actually worked for me.