Introduction
PJL Fitness is an online fitness journal built from the ground up to specifically address the shortcomings of other fitness applications on the market. The hope of PJL Fitness is that it gives those who are dissatisfied with their health, and have a vision of a healthier self, the final element necessary to take action and make that vision of a healthier self a reality.
What is a Fitness Journal
Many people keep a written log of their workouts to help plan future workouts, track their progress, feel extra accomplished, or for a litany of other reasons. This written log is often referred to as a ‘fitness journal’. Fitness journals are popular because tracking your fitness really is critical for getting the most out of whatever it is you’re doing as it allows you to progress in a structured and methodical way.
Limitations of a Fitness Journal
Despite the obvious value in keeping a written log of your workouts, there are a lot of reasons why people choose not maintain one, but they all basically boil down to two major drawbacks:
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Notebooks are cumbersome - Carrying around a notebook is annoying, and tracking your work by hand takes valuable persistence you should be saving for your fitness.
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Notebooks are low-tech - Assuming you are diligent enough to keep detailed records of your fitness, you can’t ask your notebook questions. Your only recourse is to flip through your notes trying to get the answer you’re looking for.
To summarize, it is both difficult to get data in and out of a fitness journal
What is an Online Fitness Journal
An online fitness journal, is a high-tech alternative to a traditional fitness journal, which allows users to input the same information online that they would ordinarily write down. Ideally, the online fitness journal would address the issues with the traditional fitness journal. Namely that it should be easy to get data in and out.
Limitation of an Online Fitness Journal
Although straightforward to define, a fitness journal is inherently difficult to model with code. And even with a usable model, an online fitness journal must contend with people’s innate reluctance to track their workouts. This difficulty manifests itself through the variety of fitness tracking applications on the market, each of which tries to handle fitness tracking slightly different.
Why PJL Fitness
Yes, PJL Fitness is yet another fitness tracking application; however, PJL Fitness was built from the ground up by someone acutely aware of the inherent difficulties involved in tracking complex workouts, and someone who had first-hand experience of the limitations with existing solutions.
In general, the PJL Fitness Journal offers the following:
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Simplicity - The UI and UX was meticulously designed to ensure users have the flexibility to add a huge variation of movements and workouts with as little effort as possible.
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Support Across Devices - You are not dependent on your phone. The application runs on all modern browsers, which means you can view and edit your journal from any device at any time.
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Support Across Fitness Domains - It doesn’t matter what type of training you’re doing. The application can track workouts for runners, CrossFitters, powerlifters, bodybuilders, olympic lifters, you name it!
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Flexibility - You can provide as little or as much detail about your workouts as you’d like. The more detail you provide, the better the analytics, but there is no requirement to add more than a workout name and date.
PJL Fitness is far from perfect, and if you are happy with your existing fitness tracking app then we encourage you to stick with it. However if previous attempts at tracking your workouts has left you dissatisfied, PJL Fitness invites you to give us a try.
About this Document
This website contains documentation explaining how the PJL Fitness application works and how the application can be used.