How to Create a Custom Fitness App for Free in 4 Easy Steps

Creating your own app can have a huge positive return on your training business, but at what cost? Mobile apps, especially of high quality, are often expensive to build and the cost can vary drastically. According to Wave Digital, a quality mobile app can cost between $50,000–$300,000 AUD or more, which is A LOT of money to invest before you even begin to generate revenue from the app.

At Movement, we wanted to give personal trainers and other health & fitness professionals a better solution to take their business online — and to make the process of creating your own app fast, affordable, and accessible to anyone regardless of their technical or design skills. Designed to break down the barriers to fitness app development, Movement gives you all that you need you to create your own fitness app, workout app, or nutrition app — no costly development team or lengthy (minimum 6–12 month) development process necessary.

Here are the 4 easy steps you can take to create your own fitness app for free.

1. Determine Design & Structure

To get started, it’s best to do some market research and discovery. Planning will play a huge part in how efficiently you can get your app live. We recommend taking inspiration from some of the best fitness apps out there.

Start by downloading apps like Sweat and Centr that have a free trial, so you can browse their basic features and functionality, and content organization to get ideas for you’d like to structure your content. If you have an iPhone or iPad, check out Apple Fitness+ inside the fitness app. Take note of the aspects and you like about each app you review, and take screenshots for reference.

Begin mapping out a structure for your content using pencil and paper, the Notes app, a Google Doc or whatever you have freely available to you. The better idea you have of how you’d like to structure and lay out your app, the easier it will be when you’re ready to start building.

2. Plan Your Content

Once you have an idea of how you’d like to structure your app, it’s best to start planning your content. There are multiple components you might want to consider here, we recommend starting with a high-level view, and then breaking it down.

So, you might start by planning what fitness programs, workout plans or educational content you are going to offer & how you are going to sell them (e.g. Subscription / One off purchase).

Consider, how are they structured? Are they broken up by week? day? phase? This not only improves user experience but also ensures that your members can easily comprehend and follow the content as they progress towards their fitness goals. Clear, well-organized sections or step-by-step processes are key to a user-friendly fitness app.

Once you have that nailed down, it’s time to break it up into the components of those “sections”. These are typically as follows:

Articles - blog posts or informational content you’d like to include
Meals - recipes or nutrition plans that might supplement your workouts, or form a meal plan
Exercises - will you film your own exercise content or are you happy to use a ready made library?
Workouts - workouts are typically built upon exercises, as a series so it’s good to plan your workouts

Each section of your program may consist of 1 or more of each of these components.

Don’t get too bogged down in the details, but having a good idea of what is going where will help you fly through the build process. You’ll have already done the hard work.

3. Source High-Quality Imagery & Video

Imagery

Imagery can have a huge impact on creating an amazing-looking app, so it’s important you get this one right. If you spend time reviewing the top training apps, you’ll notice that high-quality imagery is a constant. But you don’t need to spend money hiring a professional photographer, with freely accessible photo sites like Unsplash and Pexels that give you millions of stunning snaps instantly. These two photo heavyweights are seamlessly integrated into Movement, so you can pull beautiful free imagery into your app without ever leaving the app builder!

With imagery, it’s important to remember that you should maintain a sense of your brand visually. And, the key to maintaining your brand is being consistent.

For ideas on how to display your brand with your imagery, you can:
• add your logo in the same place to each of your photos (ie. bottom left)
• choose photos that incorporate your brand colours
• add a colour overlay to your photos
• add a filter or Lightroom preset

If you’re looking for more tips on creating great photography with minimal or no budget, check out our 5 Secrets for Taking Better Photos with Your Phone.

Video

As with imagery, the quality of your video content will make or break your app. It’s important to maintain consistency and minimise distractions in your exercise videos, so try to ensure your filming is executed with a similar setup, including backgrounds, lighting and more.

For more guidance, have a read of our tips on recording better workout videos.

4. Launch Fast & For Free

Now that you’ve done all the hard work of planning and creating your content, it’s time to drop it into your app and get set to go live! By this point, you’ve likely scoped out various mobile app builders or development platforms. If you opt for a platform like Movement to create your app, you can launch faster and completely for free so it’s a great option for developing and testing an MVP (minimum viable product).

Launch Faster

Launching your app with Movement is a lot faster and easier than launching a traditional app. You don’t need to involve costly developers or deal with the headache that comes with building something from scratch. Just plug in your content, add your branding, and you’re live!

Most people falsely believe that a successful app must be on the App Stores. App Stores can simply be a source of wasted time and energy. Each app for both the Apple App Store & Google Play Store must go through a review process. This can sometimes take up to a month! What’s worse is that the smallest thing–i.e. a typo or a broken link–can send you all the way back to the start of the review queue, wasting valuable time that you could have used to generate revenue or obtain feedback. Plus, you’re not losing large amount of your earnings to app store commission fees, that are taken on every in-app purchase.

This is just part of the reason as to why Movement provides you with a progressive web app. Web apps have a number of advantages over a native app, including:

• There’s no need to build different apps for iOS and Android — your app is cross-platform so it works automatically on all devices (even desktop!).
• Your app users can get access to your content simply by clicking your link. No download required means higher conversion & usage.
• Your app is instantly updated, avoiding the need to go through the app stores & their approval processes.
• Your users are still able to save your app to their home screen, just like other apps on their phone.
• If you are selling content, you don’t need to pay Apple 30% (or 15%) of every transaction.
• Since your app is web-based, your content is automatically indexed by search engines giving you organic traffic that is not possible on the app stores.
• Your app can be accessed offline.

Additionally, Movement provides a selection of pre-designed templates to get you up and running quickly. It’s simply a matter of picking your favourite template and dropping in your crafted content!

Launch for free

Not only is Movement free to sign up and start creating, it’s free to launch your app! Our Free plan is free forever, and allows you to have an unlimited number of paid subscribers. There is a 15% transaction fee on in-app purchases, but you won’t be charged a cent until you start making money yourself. If you’d prefer to give away your content for free, there are paid plans that you can upgrade to when the time suits.

So, ready to create your app?

Whether you’re ready to start building or you just want to have a look around in the builder, head to our website to see how Movement can help you expand your business online.

Start exploring Movement →

About Movement

Movement is a no-code app development platform that enables trainers, fitness coaches and brands to create, deliver and sell programs, workouts and nutritional content to anyone, anywhere. From yoga apps to healthcare apps, Movement is equipped with the essential features needed for all types of fitness apps, and provides a platform for users to create and distribute their content and engage their community via their own custom, branded web app.

Key fitness app features include an integrated workout builder, progress and habit tracking, 1:1 direct messaging and group chats, unlimited video and audio uploads (available on paid plans), push notifications, and much more–ensuring you have everything at your fingertips to create a comprehensive and engaging fitness app experience.

Find out more or sign up for a free account here.