Stay Athletech

Inspiration

Coming into a stressful college environment filled with rigorous classes and social drama, we realized how easy it was to neglect physical health and forget the importance of staying active. However, going to the gym for the first time was daunting and confusing, especially to a new learner with no idea where to start. Often, when we tried to look up good workouts, we were bombarded with complicated workout routines and personal fitness ads trying to sell their complex course. We decided to make a website that could provide users, particularly new gym-goers, with customized workouts, focused on being especially quick, simple, and easy to understand.

What it does

The website allows users to select what areas of the body they want to target for their workout (arms, chest, back, or legs) and then creates a simple workout of around 3-5 exercises that would work those specific areas.

How we built it

We started by brainstorming the app concept and basic ideas on a whiteboard before beginning the coding. To code, we created a team GitHub repo and each worked on different aspects of the website, implementing HTML and CSS for the frontend design and mainly Javascript for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenges were mostly on the technical side, since we are all relatively new to coding and haven’t made an “real” projects of this scale yet. Because of this, our original idea was a bit too ambitious, as we had plans for a huge physical health app that tracked past workouts, and could give suggestions for weight targets based on past performance. Even attempting to get the starting website built required a ton of youtube tutorials and talking our problems through with each other, but in the end we were still able to create a functional site. Also, we had a hard time scaling the website, so you may have to zoom in or out of the webpage to see everything (Ctrl + and Ctrl -).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the fact that we were able to make a fully functioning product that looks pretty clean and polished. None of us have really done projects this scale before, we have just worked on simple classes or programs in class, so seeing the full process of making a website from scratch was incredibly rewarding.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development, especially the coding concerning HTML and CSS. Additionally, we learned a lot about the process of learning through tutorials and videos, as well as how to translate knowledge from one programming language to another (since most of our experience has been in Python or pure Java).

What's next for Stay Athletech

Although we were limited by the time constraints and our programming experience, we still have many more ideas and hopes for our future. One idea we initially wanted to implement was allowing users to log past workouts. With this, users could actually review their performance and see their growth in real time. Additionally, we want to eventually allow users keep track of the amount of weight they use for different exercises, so website can recommend the sets/reps amount in addition to the exercise suggestions. This would ensure that gym-goers keep improving and getting stronger, while still staying safe and not going beyond their means.