FitGrit is an upcoming minimalistic app for tracking your workouts that stays out of your way.
This document describes the concept. I'll start developing it as an open source app once I figure out all the basic details of the concept.
The idea came out of frustration from existing fitness tracking apps and a simple Google Drive spreadsheet that I found much more convenient despite not being tailored for fitness.
Main concepts:
- The centerpoint of the app is a timeline visualization of your training. It's a grid with dates as rows and exercise areas as columns, with heatmap-colored cells that give you a quick overview of your training goals, when and what areas have been worked on, and what areas haven't been given enough attention.
- Set/rep numbers are optional - they're only for reference. Consistency of working out every aspect of your training regularly is much more important.
- Both exercises and areas are configurable - you can add your own. Some people will want to view their training in context of just 4 groups (push, pull, core, legs), some will want more detailed muscle groups, and some will add skill-related areas such as hand balancing or kata.
- When you input an exercise (e.g. "narrow push-ups"), it will highlight cells of corresponding exercise areas as worked out (e.g. "pushing", with green color), then mark several next days as rest days (e.g. with blue), and highlight all the skipped days after that with more and more intensity as time you didn't work on a particular area increases (e.g. different shades of red), until you work on it again.
- Exercises and areas will be configured as JSON (at least initially) for simplicity, with some predefined templates (e.g. "Convict Conditioning", with 6 exercise series as areas of focus and all the steps for each series defined). You can build on top or create your own training framework.
- The app will stay out of your way, trying to automate as much input as possible: autocomplete for everything, intuitive keyboard interaction, context-sensitive defaults for values, etc.
- No social features. No sharing buttons, no friends, no comments and all that crap. Your training is personal, and this is just a tool that makes logging less boring and more useful. No cruft, only the useful stuff.