The Workout Without a Plan

When I first had the idea for AVARON, there were two ways to track a workout in the app.

The first was a planned workout. Athletes could build a session ahead of time by adding the exercises they wanted to do, along with a time or rep count for each. Once the workout was built, they pressed start and the app walked them through it. This worked well for a lacrosse player with a set wall ball routine, or a basketball player with a specific three-point shooting drill.

The second was syncing from a wearable. If an athlete wore a device connected to Apple Health, they could track the session on that device and it would sync to AVARON as soon as they finished. This fit the runner who starts every run on an Apple Watch, or the lifter who tracks every lift on a WHOOP.

We went into beta testing with those two options. Early on, I felt something was missing.

As a lacrosse player, I used to go out to the field with no plan at all. I just wanted to dodge on air and shoot, because it was fun. My sister still does the same thing.

I also remember watching a group of football players at Phillips Exeter throwing passes and running routes, with a couple of them working on pass sets. None of it looked planned.

That was on my mind when I sat down for a customer discovery meeting with a UNH football player who was an active user on our app. His workouts were syncing in from his WHOOP, but he never logged a session in AVARON itself, so I asked how he tracked his training.

"I always track all my workouts on my WHOOP," he said.

I asked him why. He told me he rarely plans his workouts ahead of time. He likes to get out there and practice freely, and WHOOP's activity auto-detection lets him do that.

That's when it clicked. Not every athlete plans a workout in advance, but they still want to record the specific things they worked on. A general "football" entry, which is what most apps and wearables provide, doesn't tell a coach or a teammate much.

So we built Quick Start workouts with retroactive logging. An athlete taps "Start open session," picks their sport, and the session begins. From there, they work on whatever makes sense in that moment.

When they finish, they log exactly what they worked on, for their own record and for the people they choose to share it with.

The work that happens without a plan still counts. Now it has a place on the record.