noscrolls.com blog

I have a little detour from our normal Noscrolls workout logging content. Over at this post , I recently voiced my opinion that swimming should not be an event in the CrossFit Games. Fras asked if the olympic lifts have the same problem. My response grew so long that I decided it would be better to make it a self-contained blog post. What follows is my response. If you have any comments, feel free to reply either at the CrossFit Games link above or here.

Since it's been awhile since we've posted here it may seem that not much has been happening with Noscrolls. But we've been busy and I'm pleased to announce that we're rolling out the features that have been in development.

First the body stats page has been changed a little. We broke height, weight, and body fat into separate sections, so you can remove them individually instead of a whole entry at a time. There's also a section at the top that gives you your current measurements at a glance.

There's also a link on the "body" page that says "Switch to body measurements". This takes you to a page where you can record detailed data about your body geometry. We have identified a set of measurements that allows us to calculate your range of motion for all the major CrossFit movements. This information will allow us to automatically calculate work capacity and power output for the workouts you do. We are still working on this part, but if you get someone to help you carefully measure all the distances on that page, you'll be ready to take advantage of the power output calculations when we deploy them.

And finally, the part we are most excited about is the new groups features. This feature allows a group of people to track their workout results together. This is obviously beneficial to CrossFit gyms and trainers, but it's not restricted to just that audience. Any group of people who work out together or want to share fitness data can use these features.

The "List All Groups" menu option takes you to a list of all the groups in the site. Groups can be public or private. Anyone can join a public group, but private groups require an invitation. To create a group, click the "Create new group" link in the group list page. You choose whether the group is public or private and you can enter usernames to send invitations to. If someone has invited you to a group, an invitation will show up at the top of the page allowing you to accept or decline the invitation.

When you join a group, your name will show up in the group page, and your workout results will be visible to all the other members of the group. You can get to the group page from the "My Groups" link in the menu. This page shows all the groups that you own or are a member of. It allows owners to manage or destroy groups and provides links for group members to go to the group page, or leave the group. When you click on the name of a group, you are taken to the group home page.

The group home page is the heart of the group system. One of the first things you'll notice is that we even created a way for you to make the group home your personal home page on Noscrolls. If you do this, then you will be taken straight to your group's page when you log in, or when you click the "home" link in the top menu. Workouts recorded by the group owner appear on the group home page. This allows each group to maintain their own WODs and keep them somewhat separated from the rest of the site. The group home page also shows a graph of the group members workout results for the current day. The chart shows workout results on the horizontal axis and body weight on the vertical axis.

The links above the WOD give you different ways of looking at group workout information. We'll talk more about these later, but they should be fairly self-explanatory. Keep on eye on this area of your group page, because this is most likely where you'll find new features. We've got many exciting new features coming. If you train at a CrossFit gym, get them to try it out. And as always, let us know how what you think.

We recently changed the name of the "Custom Workout" form to better reflect its purpose. We noticed that too many people were using it instead of more appropriate forms. We also added a short explanation of the form's purpose at the top of the page. Be sure to check it out. We want to have all our users on the same page regarding the intended use of workout forms. This will maximize our ability to leverage the treasure trove of data Noscrolls has available.

You can now follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/noscrolls.

We've added four new exercises: Bear Complex, Muscle-up (scaled), Farmer's Carry, and Waiter's Walk. The scaled muscle-up is intended to reflect any kind of muscle-up scaling not described by the others that we already have.

The bear complex is a sequence of power clean, front squat, push press, back squat, push press. It is demonstrated in this video. To record the workout shown in the video, you would use a Max Weight workout with 5 sets (each set is a separate line) of 7-rep bear complex. This allows you to record each of the different weights. If you were keeping the same weight each round and doing a bear complex for time, you could use a Time Score workout instead.

Today we released a new feature on Noscrolls: SMS text message support. Have you ever forgotten to write down your workout results before you left the gym? Or you wrote it down, but you forgot to take the piece of paper with you? Now, you can save your workout results on Noscrolls by simply sending a text message. Sound interesting? Read on for more.

To take advantage of this feature, you need a Facebook account that is linked with your Noscrolls account. Once your Facebook account is set up with Noscrolls, you must tell Facebook to allow text messages with Noscrolls. To do this, go to your Noscrolls user profile (click "profile" in the menu bar at the top of the page) and click the link "Enable SMS Messages". And that's all there is to it.

Now you can send workout data to Noscrolls by texting 32665. Your text message must begin with the word "noscrolls". Everything after that will get sent to the website and stored so you can copy and paste that information into a new workout later. You'll see the data displayed at the top of the workout entry forms. Noscrolls will store your five most recent text messages. After that, the oldest ones will disappear. If you want to clear all of your text message history, go to "profile" and click "Clear SMS message list".

As usual, we'd love to hear your questions and comments. Will this feature be useful to you?

There is now a way to reset your password if you forgot it. The only catch is that you have to have your correct email address in your profile. The email address is not required to create an account, but if you didn't put one, it won't be possible to reset your password. You have been warned. :)

Noscrolls now has Facebook support. Once you connect your Facebook account, you can log in without a password, invite your friends to try Noscrolls, and post workout results to your Facebook wall. If you use Facebook and Noscrolls, you can use also discuss noscrolls and write reviews from the noscrolls app page.

Here are some questions I received from user and my answers to them.

• No Chelsea? I poked around trying to build an every-minute-on-the-minute thing, but didn't really find one.

Chelsea is tricky to do. It didn't seem to fit into any of the templates that I have so far. I don't think I've ever seen that workout come up since I've been doing CrossFit. To some extent this is a balancing act. There are so many possible ways to structure workouts. If you try to support absolutely every possibility you end up with something very complicated and hard to use. That's why I axed Chelsea. I'll have to take a look at it again and see if I can come up with something.

• I recommend adding abmat sit-ups to the exercise lists

On the abmat situps, I took the attitude that all non-ghd sit-ups are created equal. I haven't actually used an abmat, but I have used a towel and I can't tell that much difference with or without. Again the simplicity-vs-complexity tradeoff comes up. I've tried to strike a balance with the exercises I have. You haven't convinced me on this one yet. Are abmat situps significantly different from floor or towel situps? I'm going to tend to push back on user requests in this area. But if you make a good case, I'll certainly be willing to add exercises (sandbag exercises, farmer-s carry, and waiter's walk for instance are probably ones I would consider adding right now).

• I got an error message about something not being a valid integer... I think it was fixed when I added a 0 to the "seconds" field on the AMRAP workout total time field.

I'm aware that the error messages aren't very informative. That's at the top of our list of things to do after we get a few more important features done.

• It might be worth making a special FGB inputter, with the option of entering individual rounds' and events' scores.

There are two ways to add individual rep counts to FGB. If you don't check "Rxd", it will give you an expanded view and you can customize the details of the workout (including adding reps). Instead of leaving "Rxd" unchecked, you can also submit the workout, then go back and edit it to add individual rep counts. You can't add round totals though. That gets difficult to manage. This is one place where I made a compromise for simplicity. The "Reps Score" template was specifically designed for FGB. You just have to add individual rep counts later.

• I don't see an immediately obvious way to input the 4x800 run, resting as needed.

There are two ways you could do a 4 x 800m run with variable rest. First, you could do it as a time score workout where you put 4 rounds of two exercises, run and rest. Then just add up your times for the each run and put the total in the total time. If you do this, you might want to make some notes about it in the comments section. The other possibility would be to use a custom workout. Put 4 separate 800m run items and the time for each one. The Custom Workout form is designed to be the place you go when none of the other templates work. It's the ultimate in flexibility, but since it has no round structure it takes longer to enter repetitive information.