Week in Review

Published March 8, 2024

This was an all-around, awesome week. I hit a good balance of coding, writing, and refining the exercise directory. Let's examine each of those.

Exercise Directory

New Exercises

  • Pallof Press: I recently tweaked my lower back. I chalk it up to the hazard of training while recovering from a cold. My back is fine, but I've been looking for exercises to strengthen it and my obliques/abs. Welcome, Pallof Press!
  • Landmine Rotation: I've been on a landmine attachment kick lately and I mentioned how I've been thinking about trunk strength.

Updated Exercises

App Development

Space Blog Posts

Whitespace is important when it comes to readability. The space between headers and paragraphs encourages the flow of reading. The LHF blog's spacing drove me crazy. Headers were pushed up against paragraphs in a senseless, jarring "order" if you could call it that. I used utopia.fyi to create fluid spacing between text elements. It didn't take too long and the LHF posts look much better to me. Yes, there's still room for improvement. There always is. Someday I hope to have input from a real designer, but this is readable for now.

Paginate Session List

I've logged 217 workout sessions into LHF. Every time I logged in to the app, LHF greeted me with all 217 workouts in a long list. The page still loaded fast enough but displaying all those sessions was unnecessary. Now LHF shows 15 sessions at a time with a page navigation at the bottom of the list.

Paginated, the session list page loads in ~110 ms. Using Chrome's Lighthouse score as an indicator:

The Chrome lighthouse score for LHF's session list page showing high grades

The page is in pretty good shape. LHF: Fit Body, Fit HTML. I'll keep workshopping that tagline.

Business Development

I wrote the LHF app explainer page that I promised. The doc is too long. I know this, but I'm not sure where to cut yet. I'll onboard beta testers and ask for feedback on where the doc helps and where I can refine it. Thanks to my friend and fellow strength trainer, Jonathan, for his edits. Trust me, without his help, the doc would be even longer and less coherent.

Interested in beta testing LHF? Email me! Beta accounts are free. The only thing you'll have to put up with is me regularly asking you for feedback. That could be a good thing though. Imagine custom tailoring your workout app experience. Now is your chance.