Navy Platinum Santiago Planning Pt1
IDEA:
At its very simplest the main goal of project NTS is to provide a website and/or app that will help people track their workout routine. Ease of use is the theme of the project. It is our hope that the ease and accessibility of the project will aid in the promotion of self accountability and motivation by taking out the job of manually tracking your routine with excel or a similar tool.
FEATURES:
Because the goal is to make it simple we aim at keeping it at the bare minimum. Minimum but done well. There are two potential avenues that we need to explore for feasibility.
Option 1 -> The workout routines are provided to the user. For us that would mean adding extra pages with routines and single exercises, as well as having them as database entries. Simple but time consuming. Bigger problem is finding adequate visual representation of the exercise. It could be aided with a youtube video, but a concise clear image for the website is still needed.
Option 2-> The workout routines are to be imported from approved sources. Difficulty: analyzing the documents(likely pdf/excel/html), can be inconsistent and unpredictable. Benefit: people get their routines from sources they trust. It partially fixes the visual representation problem since we could use the ones provided by the original websites but they wont always be there, we still will eventually need our own images.
After the source of the program is established and user has their routine setup there are two ways to go about it:
- User starts program manually
- User sets schedules, receives push notifications.
Good to have both options, but 1 is easier obviously.
Once the workout routine is launched we again focus on the simplicity. The way i envision it is a user bar on top(if we decide to incorporate the ability to log in), the routine ticking on the left, and a big button in the center of the screen depicting current exercise.
Lets focus on the tab on the left, the routine ticker.
The basic view i see is it displays a vertically aligned thumbnails clearly depicting each exercise. By default it is split into specific exercises and sets. It could be an option provided for the user to combine sets into one. Once user clicks on the image in the center the exercise is recorded as completed and it scrolls one up.
So the image in the center will just be a large button which the user clicks once the set/rep is completed. There is a default value attached to it for reps and weight but user should have the ability to edit it. If the user has the ability to combine sets into one, the number for sets should also be there.
Potential feature 1: rest countdown between sets, set by user.
Potential feature 2: beeps once the countdown in PF1 is done.
Potential feature 3: history, progress tracking.
Potential feature 4: trivia tracking, i.e. total weight lifted, calories burned.
The stack should be bootstrap react redux postresql, however that new state management for react should be explored as well as mongodb, which honestly seems more appropriate.
There is also a consideration of where the data should be stored. There is a strong argument for this being a browser extension. Browser extension will allow us to forego any database and store the user data entirely locally. It would also give us greater access to those websites that i mentioned that would be the source of workout routines. That being said the device people are likely to use while working out is a mobile phone. Even if people were to use a mobile phone with a browser extension(which in my experience is unlikely) any history or data of that user would have to be transferred manually or semi-manually between the devices.
It is also important to me that the site would meet accessibility standards.
SIMILAR PRODUCTS AND LINKS TO SUPPORT:
The best site for someone trying to get into fitness is probably https://darebee.com/
We’d like to be able to incorporate similar clean design, but even more barren. The pdfs(if created correctly) represent exactly the kind of input for generating program that we would love. The images are beautiful, clear, easy to track and understand.
Another startup doing similar project is https://www.simpleworkoutlog.com/
They are incorporating a very similar idea through very similar tools. There are two things to be skeptical about. The overuse of popups makes it difficult to use and the lack of options and pre-generated workouts make it little better than excel. But the simplicity of the design is something we aspire to.
A more fleshed out competitor is https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nsuns-5-3-1/id1265494052 although it also has a lot of complexity to its interface that we would like to avoid. It is probably more suitable for advanced user but our goal is to accommodate for complete beginners.
