If you’ve read this blog recently, you might have noticed that I’ve been using Lou Schuler’s New Rules of Lifting book to structure my workouts at the gym. It’s been a brilliant book for me, having never really stepped inside a gym before.

The only problem has been that I’ve been juggling spreadsheets and Evernote notes to keep a track of what I’m supposed to be doing.

The mobile broadband at the gym is very, very poor. I suspect that the building acts as a large Faraday’s cage. The consequence is that I end up waving my phone in the air desperate to pull some internet from the air between exercises so that I can update my trusty old Google sheet. Plus sometimes switching between Evernote and Sheets means that the app resets, leaving the sheet to download again and Evernote to go back to the index.

As well as that, I end up with different sheets depending on the programme and so knowing what I’ve done with a particular exercise means digging out records from old programmes. It’s not uncommon to recall doing an exercise in a programme three months ago, but then having to dig out the sheet to see what weights and reps I’d been doing.

The whole thing has been unsatisfactory.

I’d played with other apps, in particular Full Fitness, which seemed ok, but didn’t cover what I wanted. So I was very pleased when directed to something called FitnessBuilder.

This lets you build up programmes, has photos and videos of exercises being done, appears to have a vast library of examples and also allows you to add new exercises if they don’t already cover it.

It’s the last of these that is most handy. I rely totally on the pictures to remind myself what I’m supposed to be doing. For example. if someone quickly asked me to do an “offset reverse lunge”, I’d be lost without some picture of some muscle-bound bloke or woman demonstrating it. Their vast library is awesome, but somehow 50%+ of the book’s exercises don’t seem to be covered by the app. So some cutting and pasting does a good job of putting an exercise and then a programme in place.

The result is a single app, that doesn’t need network connectivity; that remembers the sets I did last time and shows me the pictures – and synchronises back when it’s on a network. It’s like the perfect thing that I’ve been waiting for.

So today was the first time I used it, and it was brilliant. I’d put in the details of the previous four sessions on this hypertrophy programme and so was able to see what I’d done on previous sets of reps and weights. Very cool.

I also ran for 1km as my warm-up. I tried going at 13km/h, but couldn’t keep it up for more than two and a half minutes, had to slow right down and then jog the rest of the way. I’ve done it before, so I’m not sure why it was so hard this time.

In addition to the gym and run, I walked over to the school again today. I’ve re-worked my route to take me on a more zig-zagged path which comes to 3km almost precisely and which should therefore take around 30 minutes to complete. It came in at a little over 30 minutes because I walked past one gate which was locked and towards the second main gate, reaching 30 minutes and getting well over the 3km I was aiming for.

I walked back from school with the children as well. The more direct, 1.8km route; although the children were so slow, it would have been quicker to take the wheelbarrow and push them back home…

So that’s my janathon day 13 – 4.8km walking, 1km running and in the gym for 45 minutes.