Minimal, self-hosted exercise tracker

Hacker News

Share card

Minimal, self-hosted exercise tracker

After decades of tracking my exercise programs in progressively more complex spreadsheets I eventually burned out on metrics and complicated periodization programs to the point where I had almost stopped exercising. I am now at a place where I simply want the minimal amount of structure and tracking to make sure I can maintain my fitness, so I boiled the entire concept down to what I felt was its essence: enough information and structure to remind you of what is needed today, and how it went on the same exercises last week. To reduce friction, the interface is kept as simple as possible. Simple to the point where all setup is done by editing the html source file and there is only one freeform "weight" textbox per exercise to manipulate. Data is autosaved as it is entered. It never nags or judges you except by showing the last date you entered data in for that day-of-the-week's exercises. The only quality-of-life feature is a super-simple rest period timer in the footer. It has no external dependencies and only uses browser local storage. There is no possibility of monetizing it. I was on the fence about sharing since it is such a small and simple project, but decided I would share here in case anyone is looking to make a fresh start in the new year and finds the philosophy appealing.