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tylerscott

Hey folks! I would love to get some feedback on this project if you have a spare moment.

The intent is to provide a common format for training data.

By training data, I mean data you'd commonly find in a workout app. Think "Squats at 500 for 10 reps" sorta thing.

Anyhow, thanks for looking!

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I am developing an open-source full-body VR fitness game [1] It's mainly for body-weight exercises, but if it makes sense to use Traindown for showing the results in a readable manner and having it in an interchangeable format I would be interested to add support for that.

Here is a video showing what I mean [2] and here is how the data is currently presented [3]

[1] https://vrworkout.at

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c-74EfrKAQ

[3] https://portal.vrworkout.at/share/944835fbb97e451395ea3d2944...

That is SO RAD! I’m always around if you need to spitball some ideas on how to use Traindown. tyler at greaterscott dot com. Thanks for looking and actually considering using it.

Will send you a message

I love the idea. Open to try it one day.

If you have SideQuest you can check it out. It's already pretty stable and people seem to mostl enjoy it, at least if you accept that it's a workout first and a game second, but for quite a few people that's even more compelling.

I developed it because I didn't want to go for several hours on Beat Saber et al but wanted sonething to give me a very intense workout in a short as time as possible, think of HIIT in VR

As a runner/triathlete, this is pretty useless to me. As another commenter describes - we prefer real-time time series data. TrainingPeaks captures everything I could think of.

Seems like it might be useful for lifting though. At the same time, I don't know that the "common format" problem is really a problem. When I've logged lifting workouts, I just used the app for the program I was on (Starting Strength). Maybe more serious lifters feel differently...

Yeah, for things that are measured solely in time, Traindown isn’t a good fit.

For the question of the usefulness of portability, let’s imagine StrongLifts uses Traindown and you have the ability to access that data directly as Traindown files.

Now imagine someone has developed an analytics package that slurps your owned data and that allows you to easily spot patterns that can improve your results. You could use that immediately and find value. You would not need to export whatever mess and try to make it work assuming they even let you do that.

That’s the idea, anyhow. I feel very strongly that YOU should own YOUR DATA and applications should provide value ON TOP of your data. This provides you true freedom of choice.

Ran out of space in the mobile app I use for HN. Wanted to make sure and thank you for the feedback!

As someone who used to log lifting in plain text files (copied from a notebook) I think this is a really good idea.

To avoid all of the comments from people asking about GPS tracking, I think you should make it clear that it's primarily for strength training. The format is clearly oriented around that.

An addition that could make it more useful for recording cardio workouts like swimming/track/indoor cycling would be the concept of rest intervals. For example, it's common to prescribe a part of a swimming workout in a format like this:

  4 x 100 at 1:20

Meaning you have 1:20 to complete each 100m rep, where any extra time is rest. You could also add extra fields for recording the actual time taken to complete rach rep. E.g:

  #Unit: m
  #TimeFormat: M:S
  
  4r 100 @1:20
    1:05, 1:07, 1:11, 1:06

Yeah, for sure the first use cases were strength oriented (I like heavy things).

I have a bit in the FAQ in the Guide that hand waves how you could model things like cardio. I personally model my intervals like an example from today

Squat: # bands: 200lb # box: 12 inches # rest: 45 seconds * wide and medium alternating 225 2r 10s

I love how you did your metadata in your example. I intend to leave the language VERY open ended and hope folks build tools for athletes that provide functionality that is spec compliant (thus portable!) but leverages nuances for the given sport. Thanks for taking a look!

Whoops. Another bad formatting. Lemme try this

    Squat:
      # bands: 200lb
      # box: 12 inches
      # rest: 45 seconds
      * wide and medium alternating
      225 2r 10s

It's interesting to me, because I use a custom format that I created for simplicity. I'll just share a snippet for comparison:

    # skip travel
    2020/07/15 push 14,18,14,14,30 # hpu w3c3d1
    2020/07/14 pull 5,5,5,5
    2020/07/13 push 22,30,20,20,30 # hpu w3c3d3, succeeded
    2020/07/12 pull 5,5,5,5
    2020/07/11 push 20,25,15,15,40 # hpu w3c3d2, rests were 30sec too short

I like having a single data file (or maybe one per year), with each session on a single line. I only use it for pretty simple bodyweight exercises.

I love the simplicity of this. For you, Traindown may not offer much over what you have come up with. Here is what it would look like using the inline syntax

    @ 2020/07/15; #r:hpu; #w:3; #c:3; #d:1; push: 14; 18; 14; 14; 14; 30
    @ 2020/07/14; pull: 5; 5; 5; 5
    ...

Definitely not as human readable as yours for your use case. Thanks for sharing!

Can you quickly explain how this meshes with existing data formats such as gpx or fit? Will there be converters? Can traindown express time series or is it more of a high level log (I did x of y at parameters w and z) thing?

Definitely more of a high level logging primarily of strength based training. I built it for myself and I have run the gamut of powerlifting to strongman to Olympic weightlifting and back again. Traindown is geared toward those efforts including “meta” sports like CrossFit. Thanks for looking!

One use case might be for the routines prescribed by physical therapists.

IIRC, my PT from Kaiser Permanente gave me access to a workout app, but none of the sets, reps, or durations matched with what my PT wanted me to do. It would have been nice to take the routine and import it into a better app.

It seems like it would be pretty hard to account for all the small variations though!

Devil is in the details, for sure! I hope one day that Traindown could support such cases. For prescriptive training, I am working on a template syntax to express what you WILL DO in addition to the currently support what you HAVE DONE. I hope to wrap that up the first quarter of this year. Thanks for looking!

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