The practice is the path.
Sadhana (SAH-dah-nah) is a Sanskrit word for disciplined daily practice done with intention. The practice itself is the path.
A personal training system designed and built by Primal Patel with AI, for his own training. Strength, running, and health data in one place, built around a 114 week plan that runs through the 2027 Chicago Marathon and on to November 2028.
Sadhana is a Sanskrit word for disciplined daily practice done with intention. The app is private. This page is the tour.
The Today screen, recreated from the November 2026 snapshot. The app itself stays private.
Four apps. None of them knew the whole story.
My training data lived in four places. My coach's app held the program. Apple Health held my weight, steps, and heart rate. MyFitnessPal held my food. Strava held my runs. Each one knew a piece of my training, and none of them knew what the others knew.
So I built the one system that does. Sadhana knows whether a day is strength or cardio, holds my full 114 week plan, and pulls the health numbers in on its own.
It asks me for exactly one thing: the weights and reps I lift. Everything else, it already knows.
No syncing between apps by hand. No spreadsheet holding it together. No guessing what last week looked like.
Six jobs, done quietly. The app stays out of the way and lets the training be the point.
Log a full workout in one save. No tapping save on every set. Type the numbers, finish, done.
Weight, steps, workouts, and heart rate flow in from Apple Health on their own, refreshed every few hours.
The app knows what kind of day it is before I open it. That one decision shapes everything else.
Clean analytics over everything the app collects, so progress is visible instead of felt.
The full 114 week plan on one graph. It starts at 155 lb, cuts and builds in phases, and ends at 169 lb in November 2028. Every week of training sits somewhere on this line, including the marathon in the middle of it.
Finished workouts become Instagram Story graphics in the same style as the app: my stats over the workout, my phase and week, and the countdown to my next race.
How this was actually built, and why I think it matters professionally.
"I did not write the code. I made every decision the code obeys."
I acted as the product owner on my own app. I wrote the requirements. I made every design and data decision. I tested it live in my own workouts, night after night, and iterated on what did not work at 6 in the morning with chalk on my hands.
AI did the construction. That split is the honest story, and it is also the useful one. Directing a build like this is product work: knowing the user, in this case me, well enough to make hundreds of small calls correctly, and having the discipline to say no to everything that adds clutter.
The result is not a demo. It is the system I train with every day, holding my real program, my real logs, and my real health history.
For anyone hiring or promoting people who work with AI, this is my evidence: the value was never the code. It was the decisions. A few of them are below, because decisions are easier to judge than claims.
Only weights and reps are ever typed into Sadhana. Weight, body fat, steps, heart rate, and workouts arrive from Apple Health and cannot be edited in the app. One source of truth per number, and no manual entry to drift, duplicate, or quietly go stale.
Wednesday's incline walk and my Thursday and Saturday runs have no start button, no set boxes, and no save. When Health records the session, the day simply reads as done, with the real duration, distance, and heart rate. If a machine already knows it, the user should never be asked for it.
Everywhere in the app, a set shows as 5 x 275, five reps at 275 lb, because that is how I read it mid workout, breathing hard, deciding the next set. Storage never changed. Only the presentation bent to the human.
Sadhana holds my race calendar and counts down to each one, from the photo shoot this month to the Chicago Marathon next October. The plan, the shares, and the Today screen all know what is coming. Context is a feature.
Real numbers from the app, as of November 2026. Nothing here is a projection.
The app tracks the training. This is what the training is for.
My dad. He gave to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for as long as I can remember, through my whole childhood, and he kept giving during his own fight with cancer.
When I applied to run the Chicago Marathon for charity, St. Jude was the team that picked me. I took that as him pointing me at the same work.
"Don't give up."What I tell myself when a run or a lift gets genuinely hard
On October 10, 2027, I run the Chicago Marathon as a St. Jude Hero, in memory of my dad. It is the biggest date inside Sadhana, the one the roadmap bends around, and the reason a training app carries a fundraising story at all.
Every phase on that graph, every early morning between now and then, is building toward one start line and one purpose: continuing his legacy of giving, one mile at a time.
My supporter page follows the whole road, week by week. If you want to be part of it, GivenGain is where donations go, directly to St. Jude.
Fundraising minimum: $3,000 for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Marathon countdown: counting down.