BatWerk - Intro

The goal of the BatWerk exercise app (Android / iOS) is to keep you healthy, happy and productive without requiring you to overhaul your life. This is a series of blog posts that talks about the different aspects of an exercise app and how we're approaching them in BatWerk (Intro, How do muscles work, Pains, Maintaining the routine, How to play). Interested? How would you like to improve it?

The Purpose

I believe that people can live healthier, happier and more meaningful lives with technological assistance. To wit, I believe _I_ can live a healthier, happier and more meaningful life with tech to help me. There's still some time left to live, and I'd rather live them feeling good instead of collapsing into a shambling creaky tangle of pain.

So I made a small free exercise app called BatWerk (Android / iOS) to keep myself from hurting at the end of the day. It's been working pretty well, back pains are mostly gone and neck pain is less frequent (and I have a script to deal with it). Better mood and sleep too. It's awesome (well, I would say that, wouldn't I?)

How does it work?

BatWerk challenges you to complete 12 rings over the day. Each ring takes about 2 minutes of easy moves to complete. Easy as in "Lift your arms to your sides ten times"-level of challenge. The moves are randomly picked from a selection of 40 exercises.

The trick with the rings is that the next ring unlocks on the next half hour. To complete all 12, you'll need to move a bit every now and then over six hours.

So it's a bit different from your run-of-the-mill exercise app. You use it constantly. It uses messaging to boost your mood. It doesn't really try make you sweat. Its goal is to periodically wake up your main muscle groups and maintain your mobility.

Obligatory screenshot from a version from 6 months ago.

How did this come about?

At first, the app was about doing this 15-minute workout. Just reminding you of the moves and the reps. Then taking you through a quest to the workout dungeon. Warmup on the afternoon fields, first set at the dungeon entrance, second set in the hall of warriors, third set in the volcanic mines, and the fourth set in the evil hall of lava with blood-red fog swirling about. After finishing the workout, you'd fly to the blue skies to do stretches.

It was good. But too much and too little at the same time. The workout needs a reasonably cool place, workout clothes, and half an hour of buffer for shower and changing clothes. It'll also beat you up pretty good, so you can't really do it several times a day (well, unless you're developing the app and need to test it.) Too hard and time-consuming, and it doesn't keep you moving throughout the day.

Back to the drawing board. Let's try an infinite sequence of random moves. Just open the app and move. Okay, this is easy and quick to do. I could do some of this every day. But, how often should you move? What's a good pattern?

According to Exercised, you should move a bit every half hour. And to flush the fast energy reserves in your muscles, you only need 15 seconds of anaerobic exercise. Right. Let's plug these together into a game where you need to move every half hour, doing about four different moves, 15-30 seconds each. Forces a refresh cycle for the muscles involved and doesn't take much time.

Still, well, you can't move _every_ half an hour. What about the meetings? What about lunch? Not to mention that 2 minutes of exercise every waking 30 minutes is pretty exhausting.

The current design is a game where you try to collect 12 rings over the day. This way you don't have to move every half hour, but it still drives you to have 6 active hours a day.

The 12-ring game was working OK for about 8 months, but now I've had some slowdown, hitting only 3-6 rings for a few weeks. Could be just the summer heat making exercise a bad idea in general, but I see it as something that could be fixed in the design of the activity. If the goal of the app is to keep you active every day, it really should keep you active every day, not just on days where you feel like it.

Still, 3 rings is way better than zero rings. Six minutes of exercise spread across the day. Without the app, I'd be at zero minutes. Still, it creates feelings of inadequacy, even with the non-blaming nature of the app. I did eventually break out of the funk and get a few days of full rings in a row. But I'd like it to rescue you a bit more. Get you back on track faster.