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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

I just used it to work out for 5 minutes since I'm currently 20kg. overweight.

Here's some feedback from someone who actually used your app to work out.

1. On my iPad in horizontal orientation, I had to scroll up and down to see the exercise name and the timer, it was --really-- unintuitive.

2. I want to tap the X Minutes button and have the exercises run one after the other. Having to get up and press the "Start" button for every exercise is really counterproductive.

3. The gifs are really lacking in explanations of certain exercises. Can you use actual videos instead low framerate gifs?

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Otherwise this is excellent. I'll start doing 10 minute sessions in the morning and at night. Hopefully in a month I'll have lost this weight.

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> Hopefully in a month I'll have lost this weight

I think it's important to have realistic expectations here - 20kg in a month is a massive weight loss, and you're setting yourself up for failure if that's your goal. Even 5kg in a month is a lot.

A far more realistic and attainable goal is 1-2kg a month.

(Don't use The Biggest Loser as a guide to how much weight you can drop in a week!)

Yea this is really good advise! I've struggled with weight all my life and setting an extreme goal like that is an easy trap to fall into. When you have a big goal and don't make it, you keep yourself from feeling good about the slow but positive progress. I often feel bad about this and just fall back into old habits again and end up where I started or worse. Slow and steady definitely wins the race.

this is so awesome, you have no idea how happy it makes me to hear someone is actually using this to get healthier! i would love to hear from you and how you are doing in half a year or so: if you want drop me a short line at muellerwolfram@gmail.com

I promise I will fix the scrolling issue in the meantime.

The reason why I decided against running the exercises one after the other is because it makes it possible to chose the length of the break yourself. When I do the 20 minute version for example, I almost skip the breaks altogether in the beginning, but in the end I am so exhausted that I almost need a whole minute to recover between exercises. But I guess I could make it an option.

Do you remember which exercises are lacking explanations? I really want to avoid videos, that would make the app size enormous.

Strange - I was under the impression that GIF was larger than mp4: http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-tell...

I don't remember what exercises were hard right now sorry. But yeah, I think video is lighter than gifs in most cases. See gfycat.com for proof. :P

I will definitely ping you in 6 months, already set up the google calendar reminder with progress pics. Thanks a bunch, really. This rocks.

oh wow, you're right! i just tried it with one of my gifs [0], and it reduced the size from 537k to 147k. that is amazing. I will definitely look into this. Apparently on some android phones the gifs are not playing correctly anyways, so I need to find a solution...this might be it! thanks!

[0] http://gfycat.com/CooperativeFlusteredIchthyosaurs

You could make the videos click to play and just have image-clicks open a few Youtube videos.

Then creating a "skip break" button would probably be a better option.

I recommend making this about strength and flexibility (vs weight loss). If you really want to lose weight, have lean protein for breakfast, eliminate all concentrated refined sugars, don't eat anything after 8pm, and start running 3-4x / week.

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