Rami Alhamad has built two companies at the frontier of fitness technology — first PUSH, the pioneering strength-tracking wearable that was later acquired by WHOOP, and now Alma, an AI-powered nutrition companion taking on one of the most persistent unsolved problems in health: getting people to actually track what they eat. Matthew Januszek and Mohammed (Mo) Iqbal invited Alhamad onto the LIFTS Podcast to trace that journey and extract the lessons that apply broadly to anyone building in fitness tech.

The conversation moves from the founding of PUSH and the decision to sell to WHOOP through to the pivot to AI and nutrition with Alma, covering persistence, startup timing, decision-making frameworks, and what it looks like to compete in a market where ChatGPT is your main rival. Alhamad's story is as much about the craft of building companies as it is about any specific product — and that's what makes this episode worth an hour.

What This Episode Covers

Rami Alhamad describes himself as an entrepreneur and engineer, and both identities show up in his work. PUSH was a strength-tracking wearable that brought barbell velocity measurement — previously a tool only elite sports programs could afford — into commercial fitness. Its acquisition by WHOOP validated both the product and the market thesis, and gave Alhamad a ringside view of how one of the fitness industry's fastest-growing tech companies operates.

Alma is Alhamad's current venture: an AI-powered nutrition companion designed to make food tracking frictionless enough that people will actually do it. The challenge he's addressing is well-documented — nutrition tracking has enormous impact on health outcomes but notoriously poor adherence, because manually logging food is tedious and imprecise. Alma's approach involves voice logging and AI interpretation to lower the barrier while maintaining the data quality that makes tracking useful. Alhamad is candid about what he sees as his real competitive challenge: not other nutrition apps, but ChatGPT and general-purpose AI that people are already using to answer food questions.

LIFTS is the weekly fitness-industry show hosted by Matthew Januszek and Mo Iqbal of SweatWorks (https://www.liftspodcast.com/). Alhamad's story spans both hardware and software, strength and nutrition, early startup and post-acquisition — making it a particularly rich conversation for the fitness professionals and entrepreneurs who make up the LIFTS audience. Matthew Januszek's own experience building Escape Fitness into a global equipment brand gives him real common ground with Alhamad's builder perspective.

Key Moments from the Conversation

• Persistence is identified as a founder's core advantage: Alhamad reflects on how the ability to stay committed through the extended timeline of hardware development — longer and harder than most software founders anticipate — was the decisive factor in PUSH's success.
• Timing in startups is examined with real specificity: PUSH was early to strength-tracking wearables, and Alhamad shares his framework for deciding when being early is an asset and when it's a liability that should change the strategy.
• The decision to sell PUSH to WHOOP is discussed as a strategic choice with clear reasoning — and Alhamad shares what he learned about when selling a startup is the right move versus when it leaves value on the table.
• The pivot from hardware to AI-powered nutrition with Alma is traced through the logic of where Alhamad saw the next genuine unsolved problem: strength tracking was becoming commoditized, but nutrition adherence remained as hard as ever.
• ChatGPT is framed as Alma's real competitor — not other nutrition apps — because consumers are already turning to general-purpose AI for food and health questions, meaning Alma must deliver a meaningfully better experience to earn dedicated use.
• Voice logging is highlighted as a key design choice in Alma's approach to nutrition tracking: the premise is that reducing the friction of data entry is the most important variable for long-term adherence, more important than feature depth.
• Branding and offline communities are discussed as underappreciated forces in fitness technology adoption, with Alhamad pointing to Nike as an example of a brand that has consistently used community and identity to drive behavior change in ways that pure product quality cannot.
• Generational shifts in technology adoption are examined in the context of fitness: younger consumers' relationship with AI, data, and health tracking is meaningfully different from older cohorts, and building products that span those differences requires intentional design choices.

Why This Conversation Matters

Rami Alhamad's career is a case study in what it looks like to build at the frontier of fitness technology across two distinct product categories. His experience with PUSH and Alma covers hardware, software, acquisition, and the challenge of competing with general-purpose AI — a range that makes his perspective unusually relevant for anyone thinking about where fitness tech is headed and what it actually takes to build something durable in the category.

Matthew Januszek and Mo Iqbal built the LIFTS Podcast to surface exactly these kinds of builder conversations: not just industry trend coverage, but the decision-making frameworks and lessons learned that help practitioners and entrepreneurs make better moves. Alhamad delivers on that promise — and his work on AI nutrition tracking connects directly to the data and personalization themes that Matthew explores through Escape Fitness USA's focus on the next chapter of fitness.

▶  Watch the full episode on YouTube

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