George Green

Motion fills a gap at the lower end of the fitness market that most apps ignore. The big platforms are built for people who already dedicate a serious chunk of their life to fitness and want to optimise — VO2 max, split times, training load. Motion is for everyone else: people who want to move more, feel a bit better, and don’t want to be measured against athletes.

Instead of leaderboards, you get a Motmot — a virtual pet that grows as you move — and fair, effort-based challenges with friends. A 3,000-step day for someone recovering from injury counts for as much as a 15,000-step day for a marathoner. The gamification mechanics are tried and tested; the goal is to make moving every day feel like something you actually want to do.

I’ve battled with depression on and off for most of my adult life, and the most reliable thing I’ve found that helps is movement. Even modest amounts. Walking. Lifting something heavy a few times a week. A steady 30-minute jog. The science is pretty overwhelming at this point — exercise meaningfully helps mental health for a large share of people who struggle with it.

Knowing that didn’t make it easy. The cruel part of depression is that when you most need to move, you’re least able to. I spent about seven years caught in the same loop: get serious, see real benefits within weeks, fall off, slide back, repeat. I knew exactly what worked and I still couldn’t make it stick.

What finally broke the loop wasn’t motivation, willpower, or a better workout plan. It was building a system around consistency that didn’t ask me to feel great about exercising every day. Small wins. Social accountability. Lowered expectations on bad days. Something to come back to after I’d slipped. A lot of the ideas inside Motion came directly from that — the points system, the Motmot, the effort-based scoring, the way streaks are designed to forgive instead of punish.

I think a meaningful share of people sitting below the depression line could see real improvement from movement. They’re also the people the fitness industry serves worst. Motion is my attempt at helping.

I’ve been researching and experimenting with gamification and fitness habit formation for about a decade. A lot of that has run through my own life as the test subject — what made it stick for me, what didn’t, what helped friends and family stick. I’ve also been a runner and lifter for most of my adult life: two half marathons, a 200kg deadlift PB, and the kind of step-tracking obsession my partner finds funny.

I write the Motion blog through this lens. What actually works for ordinary people — especially women in perimenopause, anyone juggling kids and a job, and anyone tired of being sold six-pack abs as the goal.

Before Motion, I spent nearly two decades building consumer apps. I built Radio Alan, an App Store chart-topper. I ran the engineering team that built Uncover, a last-minute dining platform later acquired by Velocity Black. And I built DUSK, the UK’s #1 nightlife app. I mention this not because it makes me a fitness expert — it doesn’t — but because it means I know what it takes to build a consumer product people keep using. That’s what lets me turn the fitness research into something that works on your phone every day.

If you want to talk about anything you’ve read on the blog, share an idea for Motion, or just say hi, you can reach me at founders@motion-app.com.