Nov 13, 2013

Planned workouts: Coming soon!

For the last few weeks we've been hard at work on an exciting new feature that marks a new direction for SportTracks . It won't be ready for a few weeks, but it's now close enough we can give you a preview.

Workout planning

For years SportTracks has been a powerful analysis tool that helps you look back on your workout history and past performance. The new planned workout feature helps you look forward. You can create a planned workout from the calendar workout view by clicking on a day in the future:

  • Set the sport and sub-type
  • Pick the workout date and optional time (or approximate time)
  • Set your time or distance goal and optional pace/speed goal
  • Enter training notes

You can also flag the workout with a key color (shamelessly stolen from Google calendar).

Viewing your training plan

Once you've created your planned workouts, they appear on the calendar month view:

A more detailed view appears on the weekly view:

Pre-workout preparation

Several features are designed specifically to help you prepare for your upcoming workouts.

  1. A new "Planned workouts" section on your dashboard shows workouts in the week ahead.
  2. Email reminders will tell you the details of tomorrow's workout.

Workout performance to plan

After you've finished your workout, it's time to check whether you hit your target goals! During import, planned workouts will be auto-matched; no need to take any action. A new section appears on the workout detail showing your plan goals vs actual workout metrics:

Ok… that piece isn't done yet. So you'll just have to imagine it.

Overall plan monitoring

So how are you doing overall? Back to the calendar, we can see workouts we've missed. Here I am looking at a particular day on the monthly view with a swim+bike+run planned:

(Can you blame me for missing the pool workout? Sigh…) On the weekly view I can get a bit more detail:

You can click the planned workout to get a quick view of the full details. You'll also see missed workouts on the dashboard view along with the recent workouts - where you can tag them as completed, or delete them and pretend it never happened. Hah! Please don't tell my coach I said that. Seriously.

Adding planned workouts also activates progress bars in the weekly summary blocks. See how you're doing at a glance by scanning your monthly calendar:

And for future weeks, you can see sport types and goals for each day, as well as goal totals for the week:

The weekly view will also show the planned workouts in the future with more detail. But honestly I'm getting tired of taking screenshots. I don't know how DC Rainmaker does it!

Things we won't get to in this update

As mentioned in last week's blog post we don't like to wait until things are perfect until we release them. Instead we focus on getting features out quickly, getting them into user's hands, listening to feedback, and working to improve the next version. It means a couple things didn't make the cut:

  • Creating training plans for a specific race
  • Creating a multi-race seasonal training plan
  • Advanced goals: heart-rate targets, interval training
  • Calculating TRIMP on planned workouts to project fatigue and fitness
  • Exporting workouts to your GPS device
  • Publishing your planned workouts through iCalendar

Are any of these critical for you? Let us know an we'll put them near the top of the list for the next round.