Freeletics Is the Brutally Tough Robo-Personal Trainer for Your Phone

“Are you ready to get in the best shape of your life”? screams the Freeletics app, accompanied by a picture of seven chiseled models.

Yes? Well, get acquainted with a virtual coach who’ll suggest short, tailored workouts that you can do in the park, in the gym, or on your bedroom floor. Equipment or machines not required—you work against your own body weight.

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I downloaded Freeletics after someone told me they got six pack after using it, but it is worth noting that there is world of pain involved in sticking to the schedule religiously.

Technically, you become a “Freeletics athlete” as soon as you’ve downloaded the app. From there you can watch video tutorials for individual exercises, ranging from the “standard” burpees, push ups, sit ups, and squats to “endurance” exercises that are “less complex,” but allow athletes to train with high volume and focus on what the app calls “cardiovascular endurance.”

Then there are the terrifying “strength” exercises, including a “muscle up” which is a bar pull-up, with an added press up for good measure, and an “OH push-up” which combines an upside down handstand with a upside down press-up. (Can you picture that? Me neither. Thankfully none of these cropped up in my schedule while I tried the app out.)

You can browse through the workout suggestions for free—all of which are given suitably heroic Greek names including Aphrodite, Helios, and Zeus. But to understand what to do week-on-week, it’s recommended that you make the in-app purchase for a robo-coach who will deliver a tailor-made 15 week plan for about £2.75 a week, or slightly cheaper if you sign up for longer.

Here’s how it works: After you’ve completed your “fitness test”—really just a set of timed exercises after which you inform the coach how out of breath or excruciatingly unfit you feel—you are ready to be an athlete.

You can then choose how many days a week you want to train, as well as whether you want to focus on strength, cardio, or a mixture of both. Most girls, you are told, choose the combination option as it helps you shed fat and become more toned.

In a typical week, you’ll be given a range of workouts that reach different parts of your body and help you “progress as an athlete.”

On week five, to take a random example, I chose to work out three days a week with a mixture of strength and cardio. On the first day, I was given the Atlas special: a two kilometer run followed by a hundred jumping jacks and 50 reps each of squats, burpees, and other fitness moves. On the second, I was hit with the Dione workout: a round of 75 jumping jacks, 25 burpees, 50 straight leg levers and sit-ups, followed by another 50 burpees—repeated thrice. On my final day, I was treated to a round of two 20 meter dashes and ten push-ups, all repeated four times.

Sound easy? We haven’t even gotten to the Hell Weeks that come twice in the 15 week schedule, during which you’ll be expected to do a routine a day for seven days.

These are, apparently, about “reaching true exhaustion, reaching our performance limits several times within a short period of time and exceeding our expectations.”

The app tells you to make sure you get a lot of sleep, stay hydrated, and eat the right food to help your body be the strongest it can be. Hell Weeks make you “stronger—both physically and mentally” according to the app. They also hurt a lot, and no one’s going to blame you if you space the workout over two weeks instead of one.

Unlike most fitness apps on the market, your trainer isn’t a personality but a faceless computer. That doesn’t make it any less persistent: It goads you to “get back out there” if you’ve gone dormant for a few days and if you turn the notifications off on your phone, it’ll send you an email. If you ever try and quit a workout halfway through, it’ll remind you that “giving up is not an option,” which is surprisingly effective.

Freeletics relies on another form of subtler, looks-based motivation: you are encouraged to take a picture of your flabby stomach before you start, so you’ll always have a reference point for how far you’ve come.

There is also an Instagram-style feed within the app where you can look at other people’s progress and inspirational quotes about the challenges they’ve overcome. Most look suspiciously like models or personal trainers—but perhaps they’re the only people willing to boast about post workout selfies.

Freeletics is, to put it in a word, intense. Once you decide you’re happy to get shamed by an algorithm, you need quite a lot of personal resolve to keep yourself motivated. Speaking from experience, you’re only guaranteed “insane results” if you stick strictly to the training plan and don’t pig out on pizza every weekend. But even following about 65 percent of the workouts helps you lose weight and improves your overall muscle strength.

You’ll also have to get over a hatred of burpees—a hatred shared by everyone ever, really—to get past the first week. The squat thrust-push-up-jump movement “makes everything burn: your muscles, your lungs but most importantly a ton of calories,” according to Men’s Health.

That certainly holds true, especially after you’ve sweated through a punishing circuit and then realize your virtual coach wants you do 50 burpees, then another 50, and then another 50 as quickly as you can.

In fact, for sadists there is a sub-app within the Freeletics app called the Burpee Challenge, where people do one thousand in one go. Quitting is not option. Except, with the press of button, it kind of is.

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This article was presented by Danone and was created independently from Broadly’s editorial staff.