Workout Tracking app

Current workout trackers are too cumbersome. It takes too long to set up a workout and type in all your results.  

The problem is that there is just too much information that needs to be entered in order to track a workout. No matter how nice, simple and intuitive you make it, there’s just too much to do for the user to have a good experience.

Things that take a while:

• finding the right exercise to record (is that an Isometric incline bicep curl or a Hammer Bicep Machine Curl, or…)
• entering sets, reps, weights, and then changing them if I typed something in incorrectly
• forgetting to close out a workout at the end of it, and having that screw up stuff for me later on.

Our solution:

• An app that lets you take pictures and record voice memos about your workout. It would have a way to record weights, reps and sets by tapping on the screen if you wanted to, but you would also have the option to record a voice memo where you can describe what you did.

At first, we’d have live humans transcribing and interpreting the workouts. Later, we’d augment that with machine learning.

Why we need volunteers:

We’ll start out simple and will focus on your needs and what it is that you’re looking for in an app like this.  We want to make sure we build it right the first time, and your feedback will help us build exactly what you’re looking for. 

At first, we’d use What’s App or something similar. You’d take pictures, and record voice messages during your workout. We would take that and put it into a spreadsheet at first, and later a simple web-based database for you to view. You would be able to look at your improvement over time, share it with a coach, etc. If things go well, we’d eventually build an app for all of this.

Here are two sample exercises, and how you’d record things:

Power cleans

• you’d take a picture of the loaded barbell on the ground
• you’d record a voice memo that says that you did 3 sets of 6 reps at 185 lbs with a warmup set of 135 lbs, total of 4 sets.

bicep curl machine

• you’d take a picture of the machine, and then record your voice telling us how many sets, reps and the weight you used. We may set up a way for you to take a picture of the weight and let allow you to type in how many reps.

Bottom line is that we want to make this as simple and quick as possible for the user.

What you get out of it:

• Free membership for life. We’re projecting that we would charge 20-50 dollars a month for the service, so this is a significant savings for you. Obviously, this isn’t the type of thing that a starving college student would pay for. People that spend $200+ a month for a personal trainer could easily pay for it, though.
• if we don’t end up going forward with this app, you’ll have the satisfaction of saving us untold grief, and you’ll get to see a little bit about how apps like this are investigated
• You’ll get to talk to some really cool software nerds.