Why I built this
My name is Dr. rer. nat. Pablo Bañón Pérez, and I have always been a very cordial and multidisciplinary person. I studied physics at the University of Valencia, and I recently graduated with my PhD in theoretical physics, on mathematical physics and gravitation, at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
One of my biggest side quests, let's say, has been physical training. I have been training very hard all my life; it has kept me sane, or relatively sane, from studying so much physics.
Because of the nature of my mind, I was not only satisfied with training hard; I was also very much interested in how and why to train in different ways to stimulate or produce different adaptations of the body.
For me, it was basically a puzzle: if a person is in a certain situation and has certain constraints, how can I bring that person to their goals, or what is the most efficient path to bring them to their goals? After studying this for many years, I decided to start a company with a friend of mine called Enso Movers, back in 2016.
Under such a brand, we have been training hundreds and hundreds of people through the years to achieve their goals. So much so that currently we have five hired coaches who work with us, and we are continuously growing, promoting functional and a little bit alternative fitness for the Spanish community.
Over many years of training and coaching other people, I have learned a lot. Not only about the technical methods of training, but about what works with people and what does not. While we have constantly refined our tools and techniques, one element that has gathered more and more importance over the years is the necessity of measuring things.
Measuring tells you exactly where you are and where you are going. Practically, this means recording how much weight you lift, how many reps you perform, the range of motion you achieve, and how long you hold your isometrics in any given position.
This data does not just give you practical information about your progress; when done properly, it is a very important tool for knowing when to change what. There are many cases where a client thinks they are not progressing, but it is simply that the progress is very slow, we are not recording the metrics well enough, or we are not looking at the right metrics.
Seeing progress and recording your metrics rewards you psychologically. It makes you more engaged with the training, more motivated, and more likely to keep working, which in turn makes you work harder and get even better results.
For many years, I was using personalised Excel sheets with my clients, and I saw how much they started to value seeing graphs of their progress over time and analytics for their improvement in strength, range of motion, and conditioning. As the analytics got more and more complicated, we started measuring more and more.
The clients who measured the most and were the most strict with it were the ones who progressed the most. However, putting the numbers into an Excel sheet while training was a pain in the ass, basically because it is not very comfortable to use on a phone. Because of that, I have wanted to create a more mobile-friendly tool for logging workouts for a long time.
I have tried all of the apps on the market so far, but none of them could cover all my necessities. My training is super varied: I have done gymnastics, weightlifting, parkour, acrobatics, handstands, yoga, circus arts, climbing, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Because of this, there were many times when I needed to record very weird exercises that were simply not present in the usual training apps. I also very often need to invent new exercises and measure aspects that were not possible on those apps, both for myself and for my clients. For example, when I do a side split, I want to know how far I am from the floor, the width of my split, or the angle of my hips.
Before AI-assisted coding tools became useful, I made many attempts to create a workout tracking app with the different tools available, but none of them provided enough for me to build what I wanted. In 2025, when LLM models became good enough to provide strong coding capabilities, I started to play with them out of curiosity about how good these tools were and what their limitations were.
What was supposed to be a one-month project turned out to be a project of more than six months: developing, debugging, testing, adding features, polishing, and testing over and over again. Eventually, I got a product that I was happy with, which I could reliably use in my training and the training of my clients to obtain all the data I wanted in a manner that is easy, reliable, and flexible.
And that's how Workout Lab was born. I purposefully did not include AI coaching capabilities into the app, because I do not feel comfortable selling bells and whistles about the best workout coach only to give people generic advice. I built this app as a better Excel sheet: a flexible training diary, with useful analytics, that I use regularly and plan to maintain, improve, and adapt to feedback from the people who train in ways regular apps do not cover.