Workout.cool: A self-hosted fitness platform rebuilt by workout.lol's lead contributor

The recurring problem with fitness apps is hostage data: cancel the subscription and your training history goes with it. Workout.cool is an open-source platform you can host yourself — an exercise database with video demonstrations, workout planning, and progress tracking, running from a single Docker command. The repository had 8,656 stars on November 1, 2026, is MIT-licensed and written in TypeScript, and the hosted instance at workout.cool doubles as a live demo. Its origin story is worth knowing: the author was the lead contributor to workout.lol, an earlier fitness platform that was sold and then abandoned — and after nine months of trying to reach the new owner, he rewrote the thing from scratch.

Core features

• Exercise database: a large library where each movement carries instructions and a demonstration video, with a dedicated import step to load the data on a self-hosted instance.
• Workout planning: build and schedule plans yourself, arranging exercises into days, sets, and a calendar.
• Progress tracking: log reps and weights per session, track body metrics over time — all of it in your own database, not a vendor’s.
• Community: the README ships in eight languages and the contributor graph stays active.

Typical use cases

The backstory explains why this exists: workout.lol was sold after exercise-video licensing fell through, the new owner found the costs prohibitive and abandoned it entirely; the author made 15 contact attempts over nine months, got silence, and rebuilt from scratch — a rescue motive, not a fundraising one.

• Lifters who want training records on their own server instead of behind a subscription.
• Learners looking for a real-world Next.js + Prisma full-stack reference: auth, CRUD, and file uploads are all in there.
• Gyms or small teams standing up an internal training log, where a Docker deploy keeps the starting cost near zero.

Quick start

Self-hosting needs Node.js 18+, pnpm 8+, and Docker:

git clone https://github.com/Snouzy/workout-cool.git
cd workout-cool
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d

The README documents both the Docker and manual routes, with a dedicated import step for the exercise data. If you’d rather try before hosting, sign up at workout.cool and move your data back to your own server later if it sticks.

Summary

Workout.cool fits lifters who want their training data on their own server, and developers looking for a real-world Next.js full-stack reference. Two cautions: the latest tagged release is v1.3.2 from December 2025 — code is still being pushed but no release has been cut since, so check the issue tracker before deploying — and the video demonstrations depend on assets the project provides, so follow the README’s import flow on a self-hosted instance. For raw exercise data to build on, also see exercises-dataset. GitHub data verified November 1, 2026.