Happy workouts!
edit: i'm taking a look at RoutineTap, i'll give you some feedback once I get more time (olark + comments here are blowing us up)
Anyway, I hope you guys can get things going, I think there's some things to be done in that area, specially in combination with statistics and social/gamification.
The best of luck!
Personally, I would love to use something like this since I find myself floundering at the gym and picking random exercises when I am not on the treadmill. But as a woman, I don't want a suggested routine of 100 x 50 lb bicep curls.
We did enable google doc sharing and collaboration capabilities for workouts so those who did not have a set plan could use plans shared to them by friends or access a publicly created plan to try.
Feel free to customize your own workout and share it :)
* It'd be nice to have some sort of search feature for adding activities (incremental search or otherwise)
* On a similar note: if you don't see the exercise you're looking for on the exercise database, it'd be nice to be able to add the exercise from the same modal.
* it seems like there are a lot of missing workouts for strength. I know it's not easy to find a centralized database for exercise listings, but common things like 'squats' shouldn't be too hard to add in.
Definitely would like to see some sort of FitBit/Withings/Myfitnesspal/LoseIt! integration. It'd also be lovely to have charts documenting progress, and an ability to export to csv.
I think once the mobile apps come, this could be fantastic--I always have my phone at the gym for music, but will occasionally forget to bring a journal for tracking.
Thanks for the suggestions, one idea with the exercise db we had is to allow users to submit new ones / update existing ones. We would have to approve it, so our db would stay clean. Thoughts?
check out myfitnesspal; they have user-submitted recipes. the recipes can either be private, or public with user-submitted confirmation on the ingredients/accuracy.
As far as analytics...i'm excited with the ideas we have for that, we just couldn't make them happen for this launch
Ads aren't our focus for making money and we feel it ruins the experience.
+ If you're going to show Exercise + Variation, it might simplify things to not include the variations in the Exercises column.
- For example, Barbell Shoulder Press (4), Barbell Close-Grip Shoulder Press(1), Barbell Wide-Grip Shoulder Press(1), and Barbell Reverse-Grip Shoulder Press(1) are all listed under exercise. No matter which I choose, I have to choose it again in the variation. Seems to me like you shouldn't include a variation in the exercises list if it's a variation of an exercise already in the list.
* Add Exercise through Journal>History: I should be able to tab between lbs, sets, reps, mins. I have to click each to edit.
* Let's say I want to add my workout history to this. Adding my historical data is difficult. I have to go day by day in the journal and then click Add Day from Plan or Add Exercise. Can you handled any kind of CSV import?
* I see I can track my body weight, but can I track my weight gain/progress per exercise? How many lbs have I added to my squat this year? What did I bench press during my last workout? Similarly, when I lift weights I look back at my previous workouts in my workout log (which is currently a thread of emails) to know how much weight I should be lifting for my workout.
* I added individual exercises to my journal for yesterday, but they don't show up on the calendar. Only activities show up on the calendar.
* When I click the activity on the calendar view, I'd like to be able to see what I did. It doesn't show me the exercises in the popup.
* There's not great support for me missing a rep. Let's say I'm squatting 3 sets, 5 reps each. That's easy enough to plan, but what happens if I miss a rep on the last set? For me to enter that data I have to change the exercise to 2 sets, 5 reps each, and then add a new exercise with 1 set, 4 reps. But that doesn't seem right because I didn't plan to do 4 reps on that third set. I planned to do 5 and I failed.
We're in the process of redesigning the exercise search experience. We'll be adding in more granular analytics over time (i.e, measuring your performance over time tied to a specific exercise). Selecting a day in the calendar and viewing the exercises completed for the day is also planned. We understand this is incredibly helpful when viewing your exercise history too.
To your last point, this issue is solved by making a round of the exercise and treating each round as a set. When you get to round 3 (aka set 3) of your exercise, you can change the # of reps from 5 to 4, specific to set 3.
You should also make it clearly what your business model/pricing/fees/plans/what to expect once you sign up. This information is really difficult to discover without subscription.
As far as FB connect, it's in the plans.
BTW, hijacking this post to say we're having sign up issues right now.
Maybe your plan is to have users create these "workout plans" and then share them, which would be pretty solid and might simplify matters.
Promoting a ready-to-use SL/SS plan on /r/fitness would be a great way to build an immediate audience. You'd be removing all of the friction, enabling beginners to move directly into the workouts without worrying about setting up their routines or tracking their progress.
Quick note: I found the "birthdate" field in the sign-up flow to be a bit annoying. In this day and age, just have me type mm/dd/yyyy instead of going back through a calendar widget.
I'm working on something in the 'quantified self' space, so I love seeing projects like this launch.
As someone who has lost > 100 lbs through completely obsessive data tracking, I'd be happy to give you some feedback over the next few weeks. Feel free to reach out via the contact in my profile.
Initial impressions: good job on launching! Next, I'd say that the initial page could be improved by drawing focus to the center in the headline area. Right now, it feels a bit out of balance with both the left and right sides competing for attention. Instead, try using the 5-6 word version of Thryv in big, bold, centered text. Maybe: "Plan your fitness lifestyle in one place. Use Thryv."
Concerning the product itself, I'll have to use it for a bit.
co-founder here, i'll def get in touch with you after the craziness of the launch settles.
* Let me export my historical data as a CSV file. The data I record in your app is too important to me to lock up in a single app.
* Let me link to Runkeeper so that my daily aerobic exercise gets crossed off the list automatically.
* Let me link to LoseIt! so that when I check off an exercise LoseIt! learns about it and adjusts my daily calorie budget accordingly.
* Let me link to Withings so that when I step on the scale Thryv automatically learns my weight for the day.
The problem with #2 is that we don't want to start having to juggle multiple APIs. There are so many fitness services out there, so we might start with the most popular such as Runkeeper
The one thing about your site, the landing page in particular, that stood out to me is how there's no strong statement on the page, so my eyes just wondered around.
I would recommend making the "Learn to Thryv" bold as well as the bullet points below to guide the user to your message quickly.
My only complaint would be the name. What does it mean? How do I pronounce it? Is it supposed to be "thrive"? because it took me a good 5 minutes to guess at that. Maybe some caption should be added "We help you thryv at your workout goals" to give better context?
Noted and yes, "thrive" would be correct :)
"We're sorry, but something went wrong.
We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."
when I try and sign up.
Sharing workout results and sharing workouts with groups are in the pipeline.
You can share a workout to a group currently but you have to add each individual person to the workout.
Is there any way to change lbs to kg?
The last few days have been really hectic, trying to make the servers strong enough to handle the heavy anticipated traffic from HN.
Now we have 250 active visitors our website, yet the apdex score is 0.98!
To put in a nutshell, we did all that is needed to handle heavy traffic - from caching to moving static assets to CDN.
I will write a detailed post later on what we did and how we did!
I found that when it comes to workouts I have a set plan that I follow, but other trackers are limited to tracking <= today and don’t handle > today very well, so my friends and I are building this web workout planner, with mobile apps to come.
The way it works is you create a workout plan, with however many days you want, then put it on your calendar (ex: recurring weekly). Each day, all the scheduled exercises are given to you in a list that you check off. It lets you change fields if you deviate (or add stuff if you’re ambitious), but for the most part when we’re in the gym we just focus on completing the workout.
In the backend, activities are isolated from their plan as soon as you start tracking so you can deviate from the plan without affecting goals or update the plan without affecting history.
We also gave the workout planner Google doc like collaboration / sharing capabilities, although right now you won’t see changes made by others at the same time until you refresh.
Thanks in advance.
