Up until now I had been tracking my data on paper and with a google spreadsheet. This is fine, but it creates problems. Due to the fact that each exercise has both weight and time under load it is hard to organize for easy charting in a spreadsheet. Also, each time I want to add a new workout I need to change the extents of the chart to accomodate the new workout. Very annoying so I don't bother doing it for each of the dozen or so exercises and it is hard to review progress. Also, I have seen places that track this on a piece of paper, in a notebook, etc. That is fine, but it might be better to have the information in a database for later perusal.
As a result I create the tracker in the tool. Here are some images from it and some comments.
Main entry screen with list of workouts and buttons to add or edit a workout.
Workout edit screen. From here you can add exercises to your workout and enter in the weight used, time under load, and general comments(which I found useful).
List of exercises that constitute a menu for the workouts.
My favorite part, a graph of progress. I can choose the person, an exercise, and a date range and it automatically generates graphs of weight and time and shows a table of the results. In this case you can see where I was overtraining and decided to rebaseline with lower weights and only going to positive failure. Progress is fairly consistent from then on!
I am not sure if anyone cares about this, but it sure made it easy for me. All in all I built this in around 8 hours, including learning the program. I think the technology is pretty impressive as a result. If anyone is interested I might be able to host this on the amazon cloud and allow multiple users. Any takers? Any other comments about how this might be improved?
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6 comments:
Hi Jeff,
I'd be interested in using this tool.
I am a fellow paleo/primal/evolutionary/ancestral fitness practitioner. I'm also friends with Brent (Healthcare Epistemocrat), which is how I've come to read your blog.
Happy Holidays!
Brian
I'd find it useful to track my BBS workouts. Are you sure there aren't any licensing issues?
Mark,
Good point. I have had preliminary discussion with the Mendix guys but nothing specific yet. I am not looking to make any money so it could be a showcase for their technology. Another thought I had to make it more commercial is to make it available to trainers for them to add comments, fill in workout plans, etc for their clients. I think this could easily be enhanced to handle that. I will follow up on the licensing and going live on line with it if I get enough interest. So far so good.
jeff
Brian,
Good hearing from you. I just subscribed to your blog. Thanks,
jeff
ancestralfitness.org
Hey Jeff,
Not sure if it means anything quantifiable, but since TUL is important, and weight is important, is the product of these two a better indication of increasing performance?
I guess it is proportional to work (i.e., W=Fd), but you don't exactly know the velocity and start/stop times, etc. Anyway, it may be interesting to see how that tracks.
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