As an exercise afficionado, I'm constantly trying to track my physique and optimize it with workouts. I've been storing workouts for years in notebooks and spreadsheets, meticulously tracking my sets of weights and reps, all with the idea that someday I would come back and do analytics on them. I never have.
I want a system that makes it easy to record workouts and analyze this data. Now, it's true, I can easily use pen & paper. I can keep a workout diary in a notebook and then copy it to a computer for durability. This has all the usual obvious problems: what happens if an page gets spilled on or torn out? What if my handwriting is bad? What if I run out of space? How do I share it simply with a personal trainer or friends? How can I see the underlying trends in the data?
I could easily use a spreadsheet. That's suggested to be the "lowest effort" electronic solution. It solves digital durability, clarity, is conceptually more difficult to run out of space and easier to share.
But it still involves tedious, manual work. I have to write down the meals, copy them down into a spreadsheet. If I want to make a graph, I have to learn Excel's charting tools. I could do fancy manipulations with Pivot Tables, etc...
But what I really want is a way for all of this to be done for me. I don't want to have to type out the contents of my workouts, plot my weight/body fat % over time, and then analyze them later. In my ideal world, my phone can automatically add an exercise to my workout in "one click."
That log can be automatically shared with trusted contacts like friends and personal trainers. The log has machine learning applied to find patterns and surface correlations/offer tentative causality hypotheses. The auto-collection of data prevents me from making silly mistakes and can integrate with other systems that take actions based on the readings. I want to be able to visualize my workouts over a week, a month, a year, and track changes in my weight, body fat percentage, muscle mass, etc. I want to be able to correlate specific events, like hospitalization or illness, with changes in median levels. Speaking of medians, I want to be able to simply calculate summary statistics.From information, we can achieve freedom. So let's build a system that makes it simple to gather this information and easy to use it to improve someone's health.