Why We Built Saker

A few years ago, our training setup looked like this: log sets in a phone app, export a CSV at the end of the month, paste it into Google Sheets, and spend an hour writing formulas to calculate estimated 1RMs, DOTS scores, and volume load trends. We had a separate tab for bodyweight, another for Acute:Chronic Workload Ratios (ACWR), and a color-coded matrix just to track our periodization phases.

It worked. Barely. But every time we wanted to answer a simple question like, "Is my squat actually progressing, or is my running volume just masking my recovery?" it turned into a 30-minute spreadsheet project.

We kept thinking: why does this have to be so hard? The data exists. We logged it. It is sitting right there. Why can't something just do the math for us?

Phone apps are great for logging. You are resting between sets, you punch in the weight, and you move on. That interaction needs to be fast, and it needs to fit in one hand.

But when you want to zoom out and look at the big picture, a phone screen is the wrong tool. You want to see volume load across an entire mesocycle. You want DOTS plotted over six months. You want to compare your ACWR curve against your injury history to see exactly where you overreached.

That is desktop work. That is "sit down with a coffee and dig in" work.

We couldn't find anything that handled both sides well. You either got a great mobile logger with shallow analytics, or a complex desktop tool that expected manual data entry. Nothing connected the two in a way that respected the data.

Saker came out of our own frustration. We wanted a mobile app that was frictionless on the gym floor, seamlessly connected to a desktop app that could run lab-level analysis on that exact same data.

The first version was honestly just for us. We built the local .fit file parser because we were already wearing Garmin watches, but we were frustrated that Garmin's ecosystem didn't know what to do with heavy barbell work. We wanted to see our running heart rate zones and cycling power curves directly alongside our lifting volume. We needed to track metabolic load and mechanical load in the same room.

Once we had that pipeline working for ourselves, we realized other hybrid athletes probably had the exact same itch. The same fragile spreadsheets. The same "I know this data exists, but I can't get it to talk to each other" feeling.

When we decided to turn this into a real product, we wrote down three rules.

Data ownership is non-negotiable. We wanted you to be able to export everything, anytime, in open formats. If you ever stop using Saker, your history leaves with you.

Heavy analytics belong locally. We didn't want to force you to upload your Garmin .fit files to some expensive cloud subscription server just to see your own heart rate curves. The .fit processing happens on your machine.

The split model is the future. Phone for logging. Desktop for analysis. Web for building plans. One account connecting it all.

That was the whole thesis. It's why we built Saker, and it's exactly what the ecosystem is today.