How I Built GymSteals: Finding the Best Gym Apparel Deals in One Place

Finding a genuine sale on gym kit should not be a full-time job. Between checking brand sites, waiting for email drops, second-guessing whether a "sale" price is actually a deal, and watching the same hoodie fluctuate in price week after week — the mental overhead of buying gym clothes is absurd. GymSteals was built to fix that.

The Problem: The Deals Landscape Is Fragmented

If you train regularly, you probably buy gym wear more often than the average person. You know the brands, you know the quality tiers, and you have a rough idea of what things should cost. But actually finding a real discount — not a fake 10% off a price that was already inflated — requires jumping between a dozen tabs, maintaining a vague mental model of historical prices, and hoping you have not missed a 48-hour flash sale.

Nike, Adidas, Gymshark, Under Armour — they all run promotions on their own schedules, through their own channels, often with different discount depths across product categories. A hoodie that is 30% off on the brand website might already be at clearance price on an outlet section. A shoe that looks like a deal might have been at that price for six months. Without a reference point, it is impossible to know.

This fragmentation is not accidental. Brands benefit from the friction. If you have to work to find a deal, you are more likely to just buy at full price. GymSteals removes that friction.

How the Aggregator Actually Works

At its core, GymSteals is a deal aggregation engine. It runs scheduled scrapers against the product feeds of supported brands — currently Nike and Adidas — and normalises the data into a consistent format: original price, sale price, discount percentage, category, product URL, and image.

The normalisation step is more important than it sounds. Different brands structure their pricing data differently. Nike might express a discount as a percentage off in the product metadata. Adidas might just list two prices and leave the calculation to you. GymSteals standardises everything so you can compare apples with apples across brands.

Once normalised, products are ranked by discount depth and surfaced in the feed. The default view shows the deepest discounts first — because if you are coming to GymSteals, that is what you are after.

The Brand Selection Process

Not every activewear brand is on GymSteals, and that is deliberate. The brands we aggregate are ones that:

1. Have a meaningful presence in gym culture — people actually train in them
2. Run genuine sales with real discount depth (20%+ is the informal threshold for a deal worth surfacing)
3. Have stable enough product pages to scrape reliably

Right now that means Nike and Adidas. Gymshark and Under Armour are next — they have both been heavily requested and are in active development.

What Counts as a Genuine Deal?

This is the question at the heart of the project. The activewear industry is rife with manufactured urgency and inflated original prices. A product listed at £80 marked down to £60 sounds like a 25% discount — but if it has been at £60 for the past four months, it is not a deal, it is just the price.

GymSteals approaches this by anchoring to the brand own original price as listed alongside the sale price. Products with less than 15% discount are filtered out, because below that threshold the sale is usually cosmetic.

As the platform matures, smarter deal validation — historical price comparison, sale frequency signals — is on the roadmap.

What the Community Has Been Saying

Since launch, the most consistent feedback has been: more brands, faster. People want Gymshark. They want Under Armour. They want to filter by category so they can browse just shoes, or just training tops, without scrolling through everything.

All of that is coming. The platform is being built incrementally, with real usage shaping the priorities — not a product roadmap written in a vacuum.

What is Next

The immediate priorities are:

• Gymshark integration — their flash sales are some of the best in the industry, and the community has been asking for this since day one
• Under Armour — technical kit at genuine clearance prices
• Category filtering — so you can browse just shoes, or just training tops, without wading through everything
• Deal alerts newsletter — opt-in emails when something you would want hits a meaningful discount

GymSteals is built for people who take training seriously and do not want to overpay for the kit to match. The best gear should not require an afternoon of tab-switching to find at the right price. Browse the latest deals and see what is live right now.