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 Hardest Part
The hardest part in any exercise routine is keeping it up. Exercise is an unnatural waste of energy that you do maintain yourself. Your brain really really doesn't want to do exercise. In the olden days, you had to walk 4 hours every day to find enough food to eat. Any extra movement outside of that was going to burn off your energy reserves and require a longer walk the next day.
Sure, it may be fun to exercise, but it tends to be a very optional part of your life. It's not like eating, breathing or sleeping. Or talking for that matter. You can easily take a year off exercise. I did that. I used to do a daily 15-minute exercise routine for two years, but then we had our first child and I just gradually stopped doing the routine. For years. I only really started getting back on track when I started developing BatWerk. In that sense, it's been a personal success already. Now I want to help more people enjoy the benefits that come from using BatWerk. (And, well, if I want to keep on using it, it needs to make enough money to fund a team that keeps developing it.)
The reason you can stop exercising in the first place is because your activity driving system doesn't see exercise as necessary. From its hunter-gatherer perspective, you're going to get exercise anyway in your hunt for the necessities, so there's no need to drive extra movement - if anything, the activity driver wants you to use as little energy as possible.
The problem is that many systems in your body take the aforementioned 4 hours of movement as granted. I mean, to eat, you're going to need to walk 4 hours in rough terrain anyhow, right? Otherwise you'd starve and die, right? So there's no point in assuming you won't get 4 hours of walking every day, right?
Enter modern life with its ridiculous amounts of easily available food. Couple that with the hunter-gatherer activity driver that responds to available food by resting and feasting. It was rare to find loads of good food, so the best course of action was to load up before it ran out or the competition showed up.
If you have lots of food available, you don't move much. You likely have lots of food available right now. So you don't move much. And the systems in your body that rely on movement don't work so well.
For example, your veins rely on muscle contractions to transport blood back to your heart, your lymphatic system uses your movements to clear out waste from your tissues, your guts use the walking motion to help with gut mass transport, your joints are lubricated by movement, your bones, muscles and connective tissues grow and strengthen in response to usage. If you don't move enough, you start having health issues. And your activity driver reacts to health issues by asking you to rest, leading to more issues.
That's the problem. Exercise is necessary for your body, but it's linked to thirst, hunger and threat avoidance in your brain. Remove thirst, hunger and threats and your brain switches your body to power-saving mode. Your body doesn't work properly if it's in power-saving mode for long periods of time. What to do?
Activity Driver
The key to an exercise app that makes you actually exercise is to create an activity driver. Much like the habit-creating loops in social media apps and games, an exercise app needs to wrap the unnecessary exercise activity in a shell that drives continuous activity. It needs to make optional and unnecessary exercise into required and necessary exercise.
What we have in BatWerk is a system to drive regular exercise. The frictionless design removes barriers to getting started. The ring game drives movement throughout the day. The reward system keeps you coming back. The messaging creates an identity around taking responsibility, doing, and finishing.
The design of the activity is meant to drive daily movement because that's what you need to avoid the damage from not moving - exercise needs to be regular, like eating. A large part of the design is about getting you started every day. Once you start, the ring game pulls you towards completing all rings that day.
The short-term rewards have a random element, which drives you to continue the move loop. The long-term accumulation of rewards creates a sunk cost and a status symbol, which makes you place a higher value on the exercise you've done. The incomplete pattern in the ring game makes you want to complete the pattern by collecting the rings. The time limits in the ring game drive action in the now.
Taken together, you've got a system that gets you do the first move, uses that to drive you to do a couple minutes of moves, uses that to make you want to do 30 minutes of moves over the day, and uses the rewards from the daily moves to make you want to come back tomorrow. It's a tricky thing to build, and I could use help to get it smoother and more engaging.
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