r/FitnessTrackers

Random idea I’m validating:

What if a fitness app let you select your gym first, and then generated your workout plan only using the machines and equipment actually available there?

So instead of getting a generic “push day” with exercises your gym may not even have, it builds around your real setup.

Would that actually be useful to you, or do you think people would still prefer generic plans / trainers?

Trying to figure out if this solves a real pain or just sounds good on paper.

Hi guys!

I'm developing a new health and fitness app that takes data from Apple Health (such as sleep, heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, etc.) and gives insights on recovery, sleep, stress, nutrition, training load and much more. One of the key features is in-app HRV recording, with PPG technology (using the phone camera).

The main goal of this app is to help athletes understand how their body reacts to training and help them maximise performance and health. Regarding this I want to implement a new feature, but I want to understand if people would like it and if it would be actually useful.

My idea is to create an illness tracking system with the following principles:

• reducing to the minimum the behavioural impact to prevent getting ill (through a series of data insights and AI pieces of advice);
• if the user is in a state of illness, helping him get out of it;

The main idea is to combine objective physiological data (HRV, resting HR, sleep quality, training load, respiratory rate, body temperature), collected with a wearable and through a morning HRV reading, with subjective data such as symptoms, mood and general wellbeing. All the data would then be used to make the user aware of his current health status and most importantly it would be fed to an AI LLM that analyses patterns that previously led to illness in order to avoid it the next time.

I know it would be useful to me since I'm a high level endurance athlete and sometimes making decisions only based on subjective feeling and raw data can be quite hard and misleading. I also liked the idea of logging illness events and see what actually led me there.

Is it a useful feature you would use? I'm open to everything!!

Hey all,

lately I’ve been trying to become a more well-rounded athlete — mostly resistance training and cycling, with some conditioning and mobility mixed in.

At some point I realized something a bit uncomfortable: I actually had no idea how fit I was. Not in a motivational sense - I mean objectively. I had numbers everywhere. 5K times, lifts, FTP, random benchmarks scattered across multiple apps. But none of them answered a simple question:

Is this good for my age or am I just guessing?

Most fitness apps either don’t give you any real benchmarks, or they push you into social feeds that don’t actually tell you how you’re doing — and often leave you more discouraged than motivated.

As a doctor, that felt off. In medicine, we interpret everything against population data and try to stay as objective as possible. A lab value means nothing without context.

My fitness felt like the opposite - lots of data, no reference point. So I started building something.

It’s called Arete. The idea is simple: you input your best results and get scored 0–10 across six performance domains (strength, power, endurance, speed, mobility, coordination), all benchmarked against population data for your age and sex.

What surprised me was how different the picture looks when you actually normalize things. Some areas I thought were “fine” really weren’t, and others were stronger than I expected.

I’m still early with it and mostly trying to figure out if this way of looking at fitness makes sense — especially for people who already think in terms of mixed-domain fitness.

You can try it absolutely for free and if you like it, you can either get a full one-time report or continue tracking with Pro subscription.

P.S. iOS app is coming soon — planning to add integrations and automatic data import so you don’t have to input everything manually.

Would really appreciate honest feedback and will be happy to answer any of your questions.

https://www.getarete.eu/

Thanks, Marek 👋

Hello! I'm looking for a fitness watch that is accurate and has stable connection with the phone. I used to have the Fitbit Luxe, but that kept on shutting down regularly for no reason, and so bought the Garmin Venu Sq 2. Currently, the Garmin keeps on disconnecting from my phone... so I'm looking to get a new Fitness Watch. I want it to have accurate measures (My Garmin once said that my heart beat was 160bpm, when I measured it with my hand, and it was actually 90bpm), and a stable connection. Any recommendations? Thank you so much for reading this!