How does gymConsole work?

Metrics

Metrics are the heart of gymConsole. You can consider everything that is trackable as a metric. Some examples of metrics are:

• your weight
• your daily calory intake
• a set of an exercise in a workout
• your mood
• time spend on a desk

You can really track everything you want.

How to create a new metric in gymConsole?

1. 1. Navigate to 'Metrics' in the main navigation
2. 2. Click 'New metric'
3. 3. The 'new metric form':
   1. 3.1. Name:
      The name of your metric. Choose anything that clearly identifies your metric. Let's say you want to track the progess of your bench press, then 'bench press' would be a good name.
   2. 3.3. Parameters
      

      Parameters define any values that you want to track alongside your metric. For example when you want to track your weight, you obviously need one parameter for that. How you call it is up to you, but for your weight it makes sense to just call it 'weight'.

      If you want to track your bench press, tracking two parameters makes sense. Eg weight and repetitions.

      Some metrics don't need any parameters at all. Let's say you just want to track that you cooked for yourself on a given day. A metric for that could be 'prepared food' without any parameters.

      Add a new parameter by clicking the 'Add parameter button'.

      A parameter needs a name. Choose anything that makes it easy to identify the parameter.

      If you want to can define a display unit for your parameter. It will be used whenever gymConsole displays entries for your metric. For weight it could be 'kg' or 'lbs' and for repetitions it could be 'reps'. It's completely up to you which unit gymConsole shows.

      The most important part of a parameter is the tag. gymCOnsole automatically assigns it to a parameter and you cannot change it yourself. But you will need it in order to define an expression for your metric. You will learn how to do this in the next step.
   3. 3.2.Expression:
      

      The expression describes how you want to track a metric. It's the exact phrase that you have to type into your console in order to save a new metric entry.

      If you defined parameters for your metric, the expression needs to contain every parameter tag to be valid.

      Let's look at the weight example:
      

      The weight metric has one parameter called 'weight' with the tag '[p1]'.

      We want the weight to get logged by typing 'w 75'.

      That means the expression has to look like this:

      w [p1]

      To define an expression do the following:

      Take the phrase that you want to use in order to log an entry.

      Replace all actual values in that phrase with the parameter tag of the matching parameter.

      Done.

      Let's look at the bench press example:

      The bench press metric has two parameters. 'weight' with the tag '[p1]' and 'reps' with the tag '[p2]'

      I want to track a set of bench press like that:

      bp 80x5

      So my expression has to look like that:

      bp [p1]x[p2]

      It's the same as in the previous example. I swapped the actual values with the tags of the according parameter.

   4. 3.4. Is Workout
      You can toggle this checkbox if the metric you're creating is part of a workout (ie a set of an exercise). You should check all metrics that belong to a workout, because if you're doing so, gymConsole will automatically detect if you're currently working out and group the exercises and metrics accordingly. So you don't have to track stuff like workout start date etc. gymConsole is smart enough to understand which metrics belong to one workout.

How to log a metric

The console page is the heart of gymConsole. That's were you will probably spend most of your time as it is the page that let's you actually create log entries.

Let's assume you created a new metric in order to track your calorie intake. You called it 'calories' and gave it the expression 'cal [p1]', where [p1] is the parameter tag for the weight parameter. Whenever you want to track calories now, you just have to navigate to the console page and type:

cal 400

This will create a new log entry for the calories metric with the value 400 for the amount parameter.

So in order to log an entry, you have to write the expression of any metric and replace the parameters with actual values. This transforms logging entries to just taking notes. The purest form of logging. But without loosing the structured form of your metrics.

Built in commands

gymConsole provides some commands for common actions in order to speed up lookups and other actions. During a workout it's quite common to look up the last logs of a certain exercise. So there ist a command to get those without leaving the console.

last exercisename

This will give you the 5 last entries for the specified exercise. This woeks for every metric.

More commands will be comming soon.

The Feed

The feed gives you an overview about all your logged metrics. It can give you a rough overview over what you did (or didn't do) in a particular timeframe. If you want to see only entries of a specific metric, head over to the metrics page and klick the 'Show' button of the particular metric.

Analytics

The analytics page is where you can visualise your logged metrics and discover trends based on your collected data.

Select the metric you want to get insights into and select a parameter if the metric has any.

You can choose between different aggregation types. Aggregation types define how all values for a given timeframe get aggregated.

Let's imagine you want to visualise the progress of your weightloss over 1 year. Then You would choose average as your aggregation type because you want to have an average value for each month and not just the maximum or minimum. Play around with all aggregation types to get a sense for what they are doing.

If you want to set data in relation you can click on 'Add another metric'. This will open another metric selection form. It accepts exactly the same values as the form for the first metric.

If you submit two different metrics, the chart will show you both metrics in relation. This way you can see how one metric affects another.