Earlier this year I got a WHOOP band to track the fitness and the sleep and what have you. As with all things around this time I was provided with my year in review. Here’s a tidy summary.

A summary of my year wearing a WHOOP band. The summary states that I've worn the band for 294 days, my top activity was Strength Trainer, my highest day strain was 18.4, highest recovery was 99%, and my longest night of sleep was 10 hours and 7 minutes.

A short, squat blueish dinosaur grinning excitedly and standing in front of a barbell.

I’m a fan of weight training. Everyone should do some sort of resistance training and picking heavy things up and putting them back down is the kind I like best. I’ve been through multiple routines and multiple apps for tracking progress and you must track progress or risk spinning your wheels, getting bored, and quitting. I’m currently doing GZCLP which isn’t the focus of this post but the app I’m using. Ahhh the app. I happened upon Liftosaur a few months ago and it has so nailed what I was looking for in an app that I’m compelled to take a minute and type this all out.

Now, their tag line is “Fitness Tracking for Coders” and I assure you I’m no coder. The app is highly configurable and I’m sure will do amazing things if one wants to go and apply their coding skills to it. I’m using it as is to track my routine and it has managed to walk the line between simple to use and highly configurable. There are a bunch of routines built into the app so you can jump in and get started right away AND the developer has an open Discord server in which they are super responsive to feedback and bug reports.

All the tracking is great but they did one more thing that I appreciate and have missed since the days of Fitocracy (RIP although the site is still live and some use it, it’s a zombie). Fitocracy was so close to nailing fitness tracking with a social component it is quite sad that they weren’t able to keep it going. It’s easier to do this fitness thing when you have others to encourage and/or commiserate with. While Liftosaur doesn’t have an actual social component they do provide a public facing web page with your fitness data. And this is enough to make me happy. I can share it with those who are interested or on their own fitness track and compare notes. If you’re one of those you can find it at https://www.liftosaur.com/profile/xzdpgtipfa

Liftosaur has apps for Android and iThings as well as a web option which is a little easier for building routines. Do try it.