Show HN: HackerBody – A Geek’s Guide to Getting in Shape (opens in new tab)

As a hacker who enjoy fitness and lifting weights, the message "'meat head' free" tainted my impression of this site, as if my way of working out was bad. I happen to be someone who doesn't want "muscles on muscles on muscles" but I am also someone who works at a desk 8 hours a day and wants to stay healthy, and trust me, even lifting heavy weights 3 times a week does not turn you into some freak of nature.

That said, I'm really not even sure what the value add is here for bodyweight videos: they've been done so many times over, and with the recent popularity of the 7 minute workout[1] I just don't see what you're trying to bring to the table that is specifically "for hackers" other than the marketing appeal.

My suggestion would be to offer something that appeals uniquely to your hacker audience that isn't found elsewhere. Off of the top of my head, hackers are "lazy" (in that we aim to optimize and remove redundancy) and are convinced by science, so if you can prove that your videos are shown to be efficient, effortless (meaning everything but the workout is taken care of for you), and that it delivers marketable results, then I think you might have something.

[1] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-mi...

What makes a fitness program hacker friendly? That's basically reinforcing some stereotype that all coders belong to this fraternity of brothers. We don't. We are professionally programmers, but once I step outside of my job I am no longer a programmer. Fitness shouldn't be targeted at a specific profession, instead it should be targeted at people who work in similar conditions. Office jobs vs programmers, which makes more sense to target? There's way more people working office jobs with health issues from sitting, but the converse isn't necessarily true about programmers. A programmer might not work in an office, they might work at some hip startup with exercise equipment everywhere. My employer has it's own gym with personal trainers, but I doubt most small non-engineering offices do. You're going to hurt the bottom line by using a "hacker" tagline to sell this service.

On your registration form, you are sending passwords over plain http.

http://my.hackerbody.com/membership-account/membership-check...

My feedback: I'd love to see some examples of the kinds of workouts the service sends before signing up.

No HTTPS on login or signup pages? You lost me at hello.

At work, I get a lot of heat for being the one and only guy who is never around on the seat. It's turned into a favourite joke on me with a number of people. Despite that, I don't mind it one bit -- in fact, I joke about it myself. I have made it a point not to sit on a chair in front of a computer continuously. I take breaks quite often. I stand up and work/read. I roam around the office, spend time with people from other departments, discussing things, solving issues, etc. I learned early on how detrimental a geek's profession is to their health and body. Not only your eyes, wrists, and your back, but your entire body is at risk. As we read so often, our bodies were never made to be forced to remain in a sitting posture for a considerable length of time. Obviously, it didn't descend on me from nowhere. I learned the value of proper ergonomics and proper health management the hard way. Bad eye-sight, headache, migraines, yadda yadda. But I'm glad I learned it before things got out of hand.

I also try and follow a 7-minute workout routine every morning. Apart from that, I'm an active tennis player -- although, after having joined a work-from-office job (since a year), I've been getting less time to be on the courts than I'd like.

As a "geek", I can vouch for the bodyweight fitness that this guy is recommending. The toughest part is working out regularly. The main benefit of choosing BWF is that you can literally do it anywhere. I even did it on vacation. The things I've found that help are:

1. Subscribe to fitness-related forums on reddit or find friends with whom you can compete. Huge motivational boosts here.

2. Try not to let yourself get depressed when you have weeks upon weeks of really tough work with no end in sight. This happened to me recently and I let go of my habits which I had built up over months. It's seriously killing me and my mood is suffering. It's a vicious cycle.

3. Eat well. Doesn't mean eat like a rabbit (you'd be surprised, you don't even need to eat remotely like a rabbit.) Like Scooby said in his videos: eat a little less, exercise a little more and lay off the carbs.

In as little as one month, people noticed the difference to the point where they said I appeared even more intimidating than usual (I'm pretty tall). I want to get to the point where I do this continuously for at least one year. But man, is it hard.

What's wrong with meatheads? As if getting in Bodybuilding-shape didnt require the same dedication as programming. I'd even say true bodybuilding is far more demanding than being a programmer. Not necessarily requiring as much math, but nobody in his right mind would compare against that.

Also, this program will not help you get in shape.

There are 5 fields to fill out to sign up? At the very least, provide a Facebook or other one-click sign in option.

It's a nice start although it is hard to tell without signing up. There needs to be more available prior to committing.

Not sure where your TOS came from but there seems to be a lot of focus on free trial that moves to a subscription after 30 days. This is a valid choice for a business model but it seems like it will limit your growth.

From a technical standpoint it looks like some of the routes for authenticated users are available to unauthentic folks like me. Also, ssl is a requirement even for early stage projects, pick one up asap.

All that said, you o have a nice bootstrap based layout that looks nice which is more than many projects have.

Lastly, being from Grand Rapids I do like the 'Made in the Mitten – By geeks, for geeks.' slogan.

Lost my interest at "A New Workout Every Day" - that's the antithesis of useful training:

"Exercise is physical activity for its own sake...Training is physical activity done with a longer-term goal in mind...random exposure to a variety of different movements at different intensities...is Exercise, not Training, since it is random, and Training requires that we plan what we are going to do to get ready for a specific task." - Mark Ripptoe

It also removes the ability to accurately track progression, which is something that tends to matter to the geek with a fitness app. AKA your target market.

As a hacker who codes all day and likes to understand how things work, I don't find this particularly enticing. I'm not particularly interested in paying for something when I don't even know what I'm going to get, how it works, what it's track record is, etc. Furthermore, you're going to have a tough time competing with all the stuff I can get for free or the much more well known things that I can pay for.

Are the videos necessary, how about photos and a timer for low bandwidth/speed? Just a though. ;)

As a fellow weight loss geek, I recommend dropping gluten and milk from your diet.

Out of curiosity, where in Michigan are you based?

Why do you show different exercises everyday? Technique is important especially for bodyweight exercises.

How can you call it "HackerBody" when bodyweight exercises are so much less effective than Weight lifting?

Will there be an API for this?