Making it Scale

Last month, I showed how we’re making programming (in the sense of building workout programs) fast and intuitive by enabling copy-paste, drag-and-drop, and re-use of elements you’ve already made. And while we’ve made even more progress on this front (if you’re curious, you can skip straight to the demo), building one program per client only scales so much. So how do we enable our users to create programs for thousands if not millions of clients?

The solution is Parameterization.

Parametrization

Parametrize (verb): to describe in terms of parameters.

With Vis, we’re enabling people to create programs that can be defined in terms of parameters. What this means is that our users will be able to create programs, just like 5/3/1, that take in a few inputs and generate an entire program with specific lifts, weights, and reps on every set. No more PDFs with RPEs in them, no more spreadsheets. Our customers are going to be able to build programs and sell them to an unbounded amount of people without having to customize them one by one.

How are we doing this? By allowing the attributes of sets, workouts, and blocks to be specified using formulas.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Here we’re looking at the 5/3/1 Warm-up block in Vis. As we can see, the weight of the second set is defined as =50% * BLOCK_TM. What this means is that given an input training max for the block, Vis will calculate the weight to be 50% of it. If BLOCK_TM changes, the weight changes as well (just like Excel formulas!). 

Here are two examples of the same block with different training max and movement passed in as parameters:

Here, both the exercise and the weight of every round were changed to reflect the computed values derived from those parameters. This example is only for a block, but parametrization is also supported for workouts as well as entire programs. 

Having this ability is a game changer for Vis and makes it a true replacement for Excel. More importantly, it unlocks capabilities for our customers that they cannot get anywhere else. Not only can they now build whole parametrized programs, but they can also leverage an entire library of built-in blocks and workouts to create individualized programs even faster.

This wasn’t easy to build and we foresee a fair learning curve for users looking to write their own formulas. But we did get it to work and we have a ton of ideas for how to make this easy to use. I’m stoked with how it’s turning out (and, not gonna lie, coding my own mini-Excel was awesome) and I can’t wait for y’all to try it out.

Shipping Very Soon

We’re on track right now to ship an initial MVP sometime in May. This initial MVP focuses on the use case of gyms that want to sell programs as part of their subscription as well as personal trainers looking to build programs for their clients. We already have some people lined up but do send me an email at gab@vis.fitness if you or anyone you know might be interested.

In the meantime, I hope I can satisfy your curiosity with the following demo video! If you have any feedback or questions, I’d love to hear from you! Send me an email or put it in the comment section below!

Cheers,

Gab