I’ve been doing regular gym workouts since the late 1990s.
I mostly work on machines, but also do some free weights on occasion.
From the start i have been using pen and paper to record which machines i did, weight setting and number of reps. It felt good to get some kind of record of the accomplishments in the gym. And I'm probably a bit of a geek too. ;)
I never felt like I wanted to use my smart phone to record these things, but since I got my first smart watch that could record pulse, more than ten years ago, I wanted to be able to use it to record my workout too.
Since I'm a software engineer I did consider to develop a smartwatch app myself using the connect IQ SDK, but the project has unfortunately never gotten prioritized enough to get out of the starting blocks.
So, last autumn I got a Garmin Fenix 7 Pro and to my positive surprise it does include a gym workout app that is built a lot like I imagined my own gym workout app would be, however as I will try to explain, it is currently not quite usable in the way I hoped.
My imaginary app would have the following base elements.
- It would let me set up a gym program listing a number of machines or other training routines that I would do in a gym visit
- For each of these it would let me record the weight and the number of reps (and sets), and possibly also a plus or a minus if I felt the selected weight should change on the next training.
- It would allow gym equipment manufacturers to create plugins so I can select the exact machine type and get a good view of which muscles it works on, and a good measure on how much my muscles need to work at the selected setting ( different manufacturers use different scales). This could also give both Garmin and equipment manufacturers a good selling point to gym goers.
There are also optional enhancements that can be imagined like:
- Using the rfid interface and a tag on each machine to select the gym machine. This could be connected to the machine brand and model. (Some machines might have multiple tags if multiple exercises can be selected )
So my imaginary app has a lot in common with what is on the Fenix 7 Pro. Nice!. But...
- My primary complaint is that i do not see a way to change settings during the exercise. Anyone who has been going to a commercial gym quickly realize that usually, I cannot take all the machines in the same order on every visit. There are (fortunately or unfortunately) other visitors there too, who plan to use the same machines.
The solution seems easy, like on paper, I just need to be able to select the next machine if the intended one is taken by someone. I do not see how I can do that on my watch, however.
- Also, I am not a professional athlete who can plan how my strength should evolve over the coming weeks and months so I need to be able to update the weight during the exercise. I also need to be able to update the actual number of reps after the exercise since the Fenix is most often not counting them accurately.
One could think of different improved sensors in the watch or extra sensors on the Pulse belt, on the other arm or a shoe, to improve automatic reps counting but thats for another discussion, i think.
I did send this suggestion to the Garmin support. They replied that it's a good idea and that I should send it to the Garmin developer suggestions.
So I have done that but received exactly NULL in response.
What do other think? Is the standard Garmin Gym App usable?
Is anyone using it?
Are there other downloadable ConnectIQ apps that I have missed?
