Why I built Coax: easing back into exercise after illness

Early this year, I got sick. Really sick — the kind that doesn’t clear in a week, that comes back in waves, that quietly erases months. For long stretches, I couldn’t train at all. Getting back into working out after being that sick turned out to be much harder than I expected — and it’s the reason Coax exists.

Coax is a gentle-nudge workout app for exactly this situation: coming back from an illness, an injury, or a long pause without pushing yourself straight into another setback. Here’s the story behind it.

Coming back too fast is how I kept getting injured

Before I got sick, I worked out three to five days a week. Consistent. It was part of me. So when I finally started feeling a little better, I did what I thought you were supposed to do: I went back to what I used to do.

And I got hurt. Then I’d rest, feel a bit better, go again — and get hurt again. Each time, the finish line for “recovered” slid further away. I wasn’t just failing to make progress; I was actively pushing it backward.

If you’ve tried to return to exercise after being sick or injured, you might know this loop: you feel 80%, you train like you’re at 100%, and your body sends you right back to the start.

Your body is giving you cues — the trick is listening

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see the obvious: my body had been talking the whole time, and I hadn’t been listening. The soreness that wasn’t the good kind. The morning my grip felt weak. The day the energy just wasn’t there. Those weren’t excuses to override — they were information.

A few things that finally helped me ease back in:

Start smaller than feels necessary. Twelve honest minutes beats a heroic session that costs you a week.
Treat low energy as data, not a character flaw. It’s a signal to scale down, not to push through.
Protect the cranky joint. Work around it instead of testing it.
Let “showing up” mean showing up — not always doing the whole thing.

A great plan still needs a bad-day version

I want to be clear about one thing, because it matters to me: I have a great trainer, and the plan was never the problem. The problem was the gap between a good plan and a real week — the days I didn’t have the time, or the energy, or, honestly, the confidence to do it. On those days I had two options: force the full session and risk another setback, or do nothing and feel like I’d failed. Neither one was helping me get better. (Some days it’s just energy that’s missing — and that’s worth planning for, not powering through.)

What Coax does differently

I had a lot of free time while I was recovering, so I built the thing I actually needed. Coax starts by asking how you’re doing today, then meets you there:

A quick daily check-in sizes the session to your time, energy, and mood — even if that’s just twelve minutes.
Wiped? It offers an easy recovery session instead of the full workout.
Cranky knee or a tender shoulder? It plans around it, with a low-impact mode for gentler days.
No streaks, no guilt, no comparison — because you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to show up.

The whole point is to keep you moving through the hard stretches instead of bouncing off them — because the fastest way I know to lose months is to keep getting hurt trying to rush back.

If you’re easing back in too

I built Coax for the version of me who kept getting hurt trying to prove I was fine. And for anyone else in that spot — coming back from an illness, an injury, a burnout, or a long pause — who’s tired of all-or-nothing. You don’t have to earn rest, and you don’t have to be at 100% to show up. You just have to listen to your body, meet it where it is today, and let that be enough.

Some days that’s a real workout. Some days it’s twelve easy minutes and a full breath. Both count. Both are showing up.