Coalface Log: Excel Fitness Tool

*Please note that this blog was written on the 5th November.

A number of changes and progressions have taken place (including the BETA release) since then, and time of writing (4th Dec, 2011)

The Coalface Log is essentially a recording, planning and sharing effort for people who want to embed exercise into their daily life.

I started this project in Jan 2011, and despite 5 month moratorium between April and September, am looking to release a fairly functioning incarnation before the beginning of December 2011. The nature of this kind of project means the deadline may drift, but wouldn't it be something to have an offering for January, that time when we all make plans to get our 'houses' into order?


What currently works (or has previously, prior to being dismantled into tiny bits)

• Log records exercises (up to 12 specific exercises per day) and tallies weekly totals.
• Up to 27 exercises can (in theory) be customised and tracked.
• Workouts can be recorded in the log, which represent (and log) any combination of all exercises. Adding one rep to the workout, instantly adds a rep to every exercise.
• Pace, Instances of each activity, Calories burned (inc. BMR calcs), Min, Max and Avg. HR and Weight all displayed and recorded.
  
• Graphing. Using a GUI, all stats can be graphed and compared with each other.
• Data export / sharing. All stats can be painlessly uploaded and ranked on an initial leaderboard hosted online. Some statistical bugs to be addressed.
  
• Goals. Various incarnations of training programs, daily/weekly goals are integrated / in various states of being unplugged.
• A *very* rudimentary (and horrid) food tracker is integrated.
  

What functionality is essential to give the log a chance of finding some loyal owners?
Training programmes

• Allowing users to pick a training programme ('How to do 100 press ups / Your first 10k'), attach a start date to it, and then see the requirements displayed on relevant days in the log... is for me a cool and motivating feature.
• Online details with graphics / demos / timers for each day of a training programme are currently planned to be available via a hyperlink on the relevant day of the log. This would help those with less expertise or knowledge keep muddling through.
• Allowing users to share their home-brew programmes to create a library of screened, effective workouts will make the log itself a more desirable resource and tool.
  
• Graphing of training programme expectations, and *actual* performance will be a powerful reminder of progress made. Couple that with colour indicators of when a days req. have been met/missed, and stats on the number of goals achieved, ...and we will have something here!
• ...the promised land of multiple training programmes running simultaneously. There's currently a dirty fix in which two programmes *can* be run, but only properly if they are 'day on, day off, day on...'. This may require the design of the first inbuilt programmes to be exactly this. The user currently has to sync the start date such that they fit between each other, instead of overlapping (in which case a seemingly random choice of the two will be ignored).

Online rankings

• Must be formatted in a nice way (and break down into weeks leaders, in addition to month / historics)
• Challenge section: Allow users to share when they will start a programme (and the programme details), to encourage synchronised efforts by log users.
• Social: Comments box for each section, or a prominent link to a social media (FB) group.
• Social: Newsletter each month to log users to request feedback and communicate 'winners' if appropriate (e-mails required).
  

Log

• Upgradability: The log will need macros that allow user populated data to be retrieved and then transplanted into new versions, to allow new features / bugs to be addressed without leaving any user base behind...
• Remote Graphing / Comparing: Encourage users to upload their data, such that others can directly compare progress with others, espectially on shared training programmes.

________________________

Not all of these can be done in the time set out!

So of all those mentioned above, here's our list to do first - and be disciplined on that...

• Upgradability: I need a Macro to extract userinfo to a 'lifeboat' worksheet(s), such that new log versions can then transplant all this data straight into themselves, like nothing had happened...!
• Training plan: I need one training plan which has some example Web resources.
• Training plan: I need a basic GUI to allow users to generate customizable plans.
  
• Training plan: They need to be able to export plans to share in future versions.
  
• Graphing: Just needs to work with all local data.
• Online Rankings: Needs to just show week / month leaderboards - with at least a link to a FB group / comments box.
• ...everything else needs to either be made to work, or to disappear from the untrained eye!
  

Achievable = Yes. Though there will be some agony in putting it all together, knowing it'll need to be dismantled ready for improvements the very moment the test version is launched.

http://www.coalfacerec.org

http://www.excelfitnesslog.com

http://www.exerciselogger.com