As part of my attempts to exercise more, I would like to track how much I am actually exercising. This means that I am currently seeking something that satisfies the following spec:
Basically, I want to be able to log what exercises I’m doing in a moderate amount of detail. Something to the tune of:
Date: Blah
- Pushups: 5, 7, 5, 5, 8
- Swimming, moderate intensity: 10 minutes
- Barbell Squats, 20kg, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5
- etc.
I would like to have historical stats, etc in the app but it’s not required.
What is required:
- I have to be able to enter data on my android phone (it’s OK if this is mobile web, as long as it’s vaguely usable mobile web rather than accessing some completely unsuitable for touch desktop site)
- There has to be an API I can access the data with from devices that are not my phone
- It has to actually let me record detailed information about the workout
- It has to actually work
My least worst contenders at the moment are fitocracy (fails the API requirement. I could scrape the site but I don’t really want to. There is an open source project which implements an API for it based on that, but it looks broken and bitrotted) and myfitnesspal (less good in all regards for this than fitocracy except that it has an API, but I have to apply for access to the API and tell them what “my company” wants to use it for. This is not really better than scraping the site)
Things I have considered and rejected:
- Endomondo, looks nice but fails 3 hard. It lets you bucket into a bunch of nonsense high level categories and record how much time you’ve done on them. This is totally uninteresting to me.
- Runkeeper, fails 3. Not its fault, it’s not really for this.
- The Squat Rack. Barely squeaks by on 2. Fails 1. Mostly fails 4. Looks like it would do exactly what I wanted beautifully if it actually worked. Probably worth checking back in 6 months time.
My fall back plan which I’m suspecting to be the best option is to have a paper notepad and a weekly TODO item to transcribe my notepad into a google docs spreadsheet. Is this really the best that’s on offer?
I use Simple Workout Log, which I think does some but not all of what you want. I really like the Android app, it’s very straightforward and mostly stays out of my way. It has a “cloud backup” thing, where you can send all your data to their website, but it doesn’t sound like they expose an API for it. Not sure if they let you download the backup. They do let you take backups locally and will export Excel format from the app too if that’s useful.
Would be interested to know if you did find something!
Ah yes. I saw that but didn’t think there was any sensible way to automate getting the data off my phone. I’ll investigate, thanks.