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?
How to play?
There are two ways to play BatWerk: The hand-held mode and the free space mode. In the hand-held mode you hold the phone in your hand and tilt the phone or move your head to move your character as you do the moves. In the free space mode, you place the phone on a chair and move in the camera to move the character and do the moves.
For example, you get the move "Look left and right" with sports balls appearing on the left and right sides of the screen. In the hand-held mode, you'd hold the phone in front of your face and look to your left to pick up the first ball, then look to your right to pick up the next ball. Your hand holding the phone would stay stable in front of you, just your head would move and exercise your neck.
In the free space mode, you'd place the phone on a chair or low table in front of you so that your entire body is in the camera view. To pick up the balls, you'd move your body to look left and then to look right, like a dancer. You could also pick up the balls by stepping from left to right. The exact way you do it doesn't matter so much, as long as you move in a good form and don't hurt yourself.
If you don't know how to do the moves, look at what the guide character is doing and copy that. If you're having difficulty moving the character, check the camera view for image quality. You should have your head in view reasonably lit (i.e. not totally dark or super backlit). The free space mode works best if you keep your entire body visible in the camera frame.
Most of the moves are on timers, the reps are up to you. Some moves have a fixed number of reps, but the pace is up to you. If these moves are too much work, you can go to the phone and tap through them. If you can't or don't want to do a particular move, you can do something else instead or press the skip button. The goal is to move for a couple minutes, and the suggested moves are just suggestions that you don't have to follow.
As you do moves, you earn coins and complete rings. A minute or two of moving is enough to fill up one of the small rings. There are 12 small rings in total every day. A new ring starts filling up every half hour, so the way you play is to do a couple minutes of moves, fill up the ring, then go back to doing other things for half an hour or hour, and come back to do the next ring. Complete all the small rings to get half an hour of exercise spread across the day. Every day at midnight, the rings reset and you start anew.
The game design might sound a bit odd, but there are scientific reasons behind it. You should move for about two minutes every half an hour according to research. But life doesn't always allow you to take a few minutes to power up. Or maybe you're on a long walk already, so extra moves on top of that would be pointless. Whatever the case, you only need to do moves across six hours of the day.
Workouts
The workout mode takes you through a 15-minute random workout. Put on music and move to the beat and it's good fun. The first set is a gentle warmup, followed by the four main sets, and the stretching set at the very end. I don't do the workout very often (+32C summer, ugh), but it's a great mood lifter. Fist pumps and cheers all around.
If a move in the workout is too tough, or it's a floor move and I'm outside, I do something else. Burpees become crouching jumps, sit-ups turn into bending backwards, and so on. Most moves don't have a number of reps, just a timer. And if there's a fixed number of reps, you can tap through it after you get fed up.
As you might guess, it's not exactly a Spartan routine where you curse the app and the developer after failing to complete the first half of the "Beginner Workout". At least I hope so. Have fun, don't overdo it. The workout mode is there for having fun and getting your mood up.
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