Week in Review

Published Feb. 23, 2024

How am I getting sick again? I just got healthy. I blame kids 👹 👹

Exercise Directory

It still feels like there are so many "new" exercises in LHF since I implemented The Dredge. I haven't actually added any new exercises in the last week though. I did make some modifications.

Updated Exercises

  • Frog Pumps: I used to have two variants of this exercise, bodyweight and weighted. I combined the two exercises into one that suggests using additional weight for increased difficulty. I wasn't getting a fan of LHF forcing me to use bodyweight-only on this exercise.
  • Eccentric Chest Press: The eccentric exercises are so underrated in my opinion. For example, I challenge you to try 15 Eccentric Heel Drops. I bet you'll feel your calves the next day. I love this chest press version too, but I wanted to alternate left-side and right-side each repetition, rather than doing all the reps on the left and then doing an equal amount of reps on an already tired right.

App Development

I had a good development week. I deployed three things:

RSS Feed

This blog has an RSS feed now (Link). This is purely for me at the moment, but I love RSS and the motivation this provides me. I'll get a charge every time I see one of these posts pop up in my reader. Those charges keep me going.

Weight Unit Awareness

Believe it or not, I've used LHF for over a year and it had no concept of weight units. All my weights would be some decimal number 5, 35.3, 135, and I just knew from the exercise if I used a resistance band, a kg weight, or a lbs weight for that exercise. It worked for me, but it's definitely too ambiguous for new users. Also, I'll need weight units when I eventually create some exercise reports in LHF.

Unsurprisingly, I kept the UI as simple as possible:

Screenshot highlighting weight unit input on session planning page
Weight Units on planning page
Screenshot highlighting weight unit input on session details page
Weight Units on session detail page

I added weight unit awareness to LHF's weight recommendation algorithm. If I bench 100 lbs one session and 60 kg (132 lbs) another session, LHF will recommend the 60 kg weight the next time I plan a bench session since it's the heavier of the two.

User Settings Page

With the addition of weight unit awareness, I wanted to let users set their default unit. There are only a few user settings at the moment:

Screenshot of user settings page
User Settings page

Birthday isn't even used yet, but I intend to eventually use it for the planning algorithm.

Business Development

I started that "Welcome" page that I mentioned last week. I want to do a couple of videos with it too. Finding a good time to record is tough because a lot of LHF work happens before 7 am and I don't want to wake up other folks in the house. The text explainer proceeds well though.

Another week down and I'm happy with the fundamental features I developed. Besides RSS... I can't call that fundamental at all 😂 Next week I'll continue the explainer page and anything else that comes up as a blocker for beta testers.