Floor Force One's answer
When I first started development on what would become Floor Force One I had no intention of releasing a pushups app to the App Store.
I had restarted my fitness journey for the nth time and I was really interested in the concept of calisthenics for using my own bodyweight and being able to workout anywhere.
So I started in on the most fundamental calisthenics workout, the pushup. Being an ‘app guy’ one of the first things I did was go to the App Store to see what was out there to help.
Pushup apps on the App Store are super abundant. And perhaps that’s the reason there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the space. The majority of apps available are simple counters that instruct the user to touch a big button with their nose as they complete a pushup. There’s a lot of problems with that approach, bad form, neck strain, and touching your nose to a potentially less than clean screen. More advanced versions use the proximity sensor on the iOS device, but this only provides simple ‘on or off’ feedback to the app which is used for counting reps. It can’t track a full rep or provide any real feedback other than a simple count.
Floor Force One uses the front facing or TrueDepth camera on iOS devices, combined with Apple’s Augmented Reality technology to track the users movement throughout the pushup cycle. Which allows Floor Force One to track the full movement of a pushup, not just a simple count, in fact it only counts “full reps” and shows an indicator on screen that adapts to the user and guides them through completing the movement.
This ability to track the full movement is what gives FF1 the ability to offer realtime coaching such as letting the user know when their movement is either slowing or shortening as well as super in-depth post workout analysis that graphs the depth of each pushup, shows time spent in each phase of the push-up, and a measure of effort which takes the users facial expressions during the exercise into account for giving what is a surprisingly accurate effort gauge.
I’m a big user of Zwift for indoor cycling and Strava for tracking my workouts. I wanted in the best case to create something that felt more like an exergaming experience as in Zwift while giving the same super detailed workout analysis you might see on a Strava workout uploaded from a smart watch.
It was once I felt that I had proved the concept and could meet those goals that I decided to take the app all the way through the development needed to release to the App Store.
My hope is that people feel a sense of quality and craftsmanship when using the app and that the mobile gaming like experience applied to a healthy activity such as pushups proves a fun and uplifting experience for users.
Pushu.ps
