Mjönir Forge

Generic fitness apps don’t prepare athletes for strongman. Mjölnir Forge turns competition events, equipment and athlete feedback into adaptive programs built to forge strength.

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Inspiration

I built Mjölnir Forge after struggling to find resources and details on what to expect or how to get started, experiencing first hand how difficult it is to prepare for a strongman competition. I discovered that while conventional fitness apps worked for programing they could only take you so far and the interfaces all lacked what I desired. Given these hurdles and the fact that strength athletes are not training for general strength but to move mountains there needed to be a better way to train. For this reason I decided to build something targeting strength sports directly, something meant to be a training companion that helps newcomers understand how to prepare while giving experienced competitors a structured, responsive approach to training.

What It Does

Mjölnir Forge transforms an athlete’s upcoming competition into a personalized training program. It does this by taking into consideration the competition events, available training equipment, experience, and physical limitations to provide:

  • Preparation for individual competition events
  • Targeted RPE and workload guidance
  • Suggested rest periods
  • Exercise instructions and coaching-style guidance
  • Explanations of each exercise’s purpose within the program
  • Workout logging and progress tracking
  • Recommendations informed by athlete performance and feedback The ultimate goal is to help athletes understand what to train, why they are training it and how each session prepares them for competition.

How I Built It

I designed Mjölnir Forge with a local-first architecture with zero ads and zero personal data collection. Athletes do not need to create an account or send personally identifiable or sensitive health information to a remote service simply to train. Instead they rely on their Apple ID and Apple StoreKit to process payments.

What's more is that this approach also solves a practical problem within strength sports. Many strongman/strongwoman and powerlifting gyms operate in warehouses, industrial buildings and other locations with unreliable cellular service. This has caused me countless hours of frustration as I am trying to see my prescribed workout but due to lack of service I just can't. I believe athletes should not lose access to their programs simply because an app cannot reach its backend.

The brand evolved alongside the project. I initially called the app Mjölnir, reflecting the strong Norse influence within the strength community. I later realized that Mjölnir, the hammer, is the finished product. This is how I came to the final name Mjölnir Forge: the forge used to build the competitor.

Challenges I Ran Into

The greatest challenge was translating the reliable judgment of a coach into software. A coach can observe an athlete, interpret incomplete feedback and adjust recommendations through personal interaction. How do you recreate this with software. The answer is that you can't but you can emulate a large portion through logical deterministic alterations in prescription, and exercise selection.

Strongman/strongwoman lacks standardization available in many more established sports. Events with similar names can use different implements, heights, distances, rules and loading patterns. Building Mjölnir Forge required standardizing terminology, connecting related movements and developing the instructional and coaching guidance needed to make that information useful.

Safety was another essential challenge. Strongman/strongwoman can be dangerous sports, particularly when athletes train with heavy or unfamiliar implements. The app’s guidance needed to be deliberately tempered—encouraging meaningful progress without continually pushing users toward unnecessary intensity. As such, recommendations had to account for effort, recovery and physical limitations while reinforcing that adding more weight is not always the correct answer.

Accomplishments I’m Proud Of

I am especially proud of:

  • Creating competition-specific program-generation logic for a sport with limited standardized resources
  • Organizing exercises, implements and competition events into a consistent training system
  • Supporting strongman/strongwoman athletes across different experience levels
  • Building a local-first architecture that limits the collection of personal and health information
  • Building a fitness app that does not try to sell you anything, does not collect your data, and focuses solution on UX and training
  • Developing the project from an initial concept into a complete application built around the real needs of strength athletes

What I Learned

I learned that effective training software requires much more than generating sets and repetitions. It must explain the purpose of the work, interpret athlete feedback and provide recommendations that remain useful without overstating what software can know.

Building Mjölnir Forge also taught me how to improve prompts to generate better code and more complete results. I learned to provide clear context, detailed requirements, edge cases, acceptance criteria and testing expectations rather than relying on broad feature requests. Over time this evolved into a more disciplined development process covering everything from comprehensive testing and debugging to the design and implementation of complete feature sets.

Most importantly, I learned that technology can make strongman and strongwoman competition more approachable. By organizing fragmented information and converting it into understandable guidance, Mjölnir Forge can help athletes enter the sport with greater confidence, prepare more deliberately and arrive at competition ready. Mjölnir Forge is the tool I wanted when I began preparing for competitions.

What’s Next for Mjölnir Forge

The next phase will focus on protecting user progress, refining the brand and expanding access. First, I plan to integrate iCloud backup for athlete profiles, programs and training history. This will help ensure that users do not lose their progress when replacing or restoring a device while preserving the app’s privacy-focused, local-first design.

With the core features set, I plan to build a feature-equivalent Android version of Mjölnir Forge, making the same strongman/strongwoman-specific training experience available to athletes regardless of their preferred mobile platform.

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