Searchable Exercise List & more iOS App Improvements

iOS App: Improved Searchable Exercise List, Progress Graph Creation and more

In last week’s post we walked about the new Customizable Workout, Progress, Diet & Task Menu but didn’t yet go through all the other new features and improvements we have been adding to the FitSW iOS app these past few weeks. The updates include many usability improvements like our improved searchable exercise list. We have also improved the layout of the app and its screens and fixed bugs that will make it easier to use. If you haven’t used the iOS app lately, download the latest version and give it a shot. Here is a little more info on some of the changes we have made:

Improved Searchable Exercise List

We have improved the layout of the exercise list so that the search bar is larger and the display layout makes it easier to find what you need. Check it out:

Improved Progress Graph Entry

We have fixed the rare crash that was occurring on progress graphs, improved the layout so you can see more Assessments and also made it easier to quickly enter in your clients progress. Just click “Done” to quickly move to the next Assessment field entry.

Improved Progress Graph Data Entry — Its now easier to quickly enter your client’s progress data with our improved layout for the progress entry screen.

Improved Searchable Food List Display

Much like the Improved Searchable Exercise List, we have also improved the food list layout. We have also included Calories, Protein, Carbs, and Fats in the list so you will know before you add the food to your clients meal plan.

Additional Features

Above were must a few of the new features we have added. We have also added features like:

Ability to create repeating Tasks
Clients no longer have to click their name in each menu. They click the Workout menu and they will see all of their workouts right away.
Workout Detail layout improvements
General Usability improvements and bug fixes.

Keep the feedback coming. Our next iOS release will allow you to create supersets through the iOS app.

iOS App: Customized Workout, Progress, Diet, Task Menu

Customized Workout, Progress, Diet, Task Menu

We recently released a new version of the FitSW iOS App with a brand new design and several new features. One of these features is a new tab bar menu which allows you to customize which FitSW fitness features show up on your bottom menu bar. This allows you to quickly access the FitSW tools that you value the most. In the post, we will show you how to create a Customized Workout, Progress, Diet, Task Menu.

More Tab with Diets, Exercise List, Food List and Profile

The default setup for a personal trainer is to have the following items in the bottom menu bar: Clients, Workouts, Progress, Tasks, and More. When you click on the More item, a menu will come up. It will show the following additional items: Diets, Exercise List, Food List, and Profile. If you would like to create a customized Workout, Progress, Diet, Task Menu click the “Edit” button as seen circled in the image below.

Click the Edit button to create a Customized Workout, Progress, Diet, Task Menu — This is what you will see when you click on the More item in the bottom menu bar. Click on the “Edit” button we have highlighted in red in order to create a customized workout, progress, diet, task menu

Selecting Key FitSW Features

Drag the key FitSW fitness features to your bottom menu bar. Arrange in any order to create your own custom bottom menu bar. This allows you to quickly access your most important fitness features. Once you have your menu setup as you prefer, click Done and your own customized menu will be set.

Updating, Customized, Workout, Progress, Diet, Task, More Menu — You can drag the icons you use the most to the bottom menu bar. Rearrange them as you like to create your customized menu bar.

FitSW iOS App: Total Diet Macros Display, Sorting Workouts & more

FitSW iOS App Updates: Total Diet Macros Display, Sorting Workouts & more

We released FitSW iOS app updates this week that include Total Diet Macros Display, the ability to decide the order that “To Be Completed” workouts are displayed, improved searching for when you are adding exercises / foods to workouts / diets, and the ability to automatically email tasks / goals. We also added in several other display and usability improvements as well as bug fixes. Here is a more detailed description of the features that will improve you and your clients personal training experience:

Total Diet Macros Display

You or your personal training clients can see the Total Diet Macros for each diet. The app automatically calculates these real-time as you build diets for your clients.

Sorting Workout Display

In the “To Be Completed” tab of your personal training client’s Workouts, the default ordering is descending by date. This works for most of our users but some users have requested to have the ordering be ascending by date. So we have added the ability for you to set the ordering you would prefer in the profile tab. This setting will also affect Diets and Tasks. You can set your preference and your clients can their own preference if they would like. To change your preference, go to your profile tab, flip the switch shown below and click update.

You can now choose the display order for your workouts, tasks, and events on your profile tab.

Improved Search Boxes for Exercises and Foods

The iOS11 release impacted the display of search boxes for Exercises and Foods. We have now increased the sizes and display of the search boxes to make it easier to search for the right exercises or foods to add to your workouts or diets.

Tasks / Goals Updates

We have now added the ability for personal trainers to add additional notes to each Task or Goal. In addition, we have added an “Email Task” button. This allows you to automatically email your client’s tasks the same way as you can for their workouts or diets.

Usability Improvements, Display Improvements & Bug fixes

We have listened to your feedback to improve the usability and display of the app in addition to fixing any bugs you may have encountered. Please keep the suggestions coming.

Collecting Client Payments as a Personal Trainer using FitSW

UPDATE: Accepting Client Payments is now available for all trainers to use.

Collecting client payments as a Personal Trainer will soon be possible on FitSW.com. You will be able to request payments from your clients on FitSW and your clients will be able to pay you securely with a credit card through our familiar FitSW platform. We are looking for beta testers now for these features and expect to have them fully released by this Spring. If you are interested in being a beta tester, please email us at admin@fitsw.com or respond in the comments section below.

Collecting Client Payments as a Personal Trainer on FitSW — FitSW will enable you to accept secure credit card payments from your clients on our platform.

Credit Card Payments from Clients

Collecting client payments as a Personal Trainer can sometimes be a hassle. Tracking which ones paid, when they paid, how much they paid and how many sessions they have left can all take up a lot of your valuable time. As a personal trainer you should be able to spend most of your work-time doing what you like: personal training!

I’m sure many of you also have clients that prefer to pay via credit card and that can also make things difficult if you don’t have a setup that allows this or if it’s a complicated setup. We have received requests from our personal trainer users to enable them to accept payments through our website. Coming this Spring we will be enabling this feature to allow you to accept and track payments all through our site. This means:

No more complicated setups – this feature will be built into the FitSW website for you to access at anytime.
No more sending clients to a different website. Clients can easily make a secure payment on the FitSW platform they are familiar with.
You can also track all your payments and session information within FitSW

These are just a few details of the Client Payments feature that we are adding. We would love to hear your feedback on what additional features you would like to see.

Creating a Paperless PAR-Q Online using the PAR-Q Creator

New Paperless PAR-Q Online Creator

You can now use FitSW’s Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire (PAR-Q) Creator to enable your clients to quickly fill out a Paperless PAR-Q Online. We know how important it is to screen your clients with the PAR-Q but we also know that it can take up a lot of time. Previously we enabled you to upload hand-filled-out PAR-Q forms to save for each of your clients. Now, we make the process even simpler and quicker. You can do everything online and stored it for you to access at any time. If you’d still like a hard copy, just hit the print button and you can print out the online version. Below is a quick video on it (make sure you choose video quality of 1080p60HD in YouTube so that you can see everything) along with a quick walk-through on how to use the PAR-Q Online creator.

If you do not yet have a FitSW account you can access the online PARQ here: https://www.fitsw.com/onlinePARQ/ to try it out. If you do have an account, follow the steps below.

UPDATE: We have also now added a PAR-Q feature to our iOS App and our Android App. More details here for iOS and here for Android.

Online PAR-Q Creator Walk Through

In your Client List click on the client you would like to fill out a PAR-Q and then in the PAR-Q section click “Have Client Complete”.
When viewing a client, in the PAR-Q section: Click the “Have Client Complete” button to have a link automatically sent to your client where they can easily complete the PAR-Q online.
Your client will receive an email with the link to their online PAR-Q. They can then easily fill it out online.
The clients will see an easy to fill out online form where they can quickly enter their answers.
All the information your client enters will be saved as they go. No need to worry about losing their work or progress if they are interrupted.
You will be able to view your clients PAR-Q online anytime you would like from the Edit Client screen.
View or print your clients filled out PAR-Q anytime by clicking on the “Edit/View” link in the PAR-Q section of the Edit Client screen.
You or your client can quickly print it out by clicking the green “Print” button on the online PAR-Q form. You can even click the Print to .PDF after clicking “Print” which will allow you to save the file on your computer as a PDF.

Simplify and Reduce Paperwork

Having every client fill out a PAR-Q has become much easier with FitSW. Clients can fill out the form online whenever works for them. It’s now also much easier for you to keep track of all these PAR-Q’s without having to worry about uploading documents.

Fitness Tracker Devices Review

Several of our FitSW.com users utilize fitness tracker devices themselves or have clients that use them. We feel that they can be very helpful in providing meaningful fitness data, so we have begun looking into ways to integrate the data from them into our platform. We have been exploring what’s out there and done a lot of research into the features of many of these devices. As we have done this we have come across a few guides that may be helpful to you if you are looking for fitness tracker devices for yourself or to recommend to clients and so we decided to share.

This guide to fitness tracker devices may help identify the best one that addresses your particular needs. Researchers set out to find the devices that offered the most bang for their buck – and this doesn’t necessarily just mean the fitness tracker loaded with the most features. As they point out in their article: “The more sensors and tracking capabilities you cram into a device the size of a wristwatch, the more it’s going to cost you.” And everyone doesn’t need the most extensive specs list – for example, a lot of us can afford to skip out on the GPS component.

So, the researchers took their initial list of 87 fitness trackers and placed them in three sub-categories:

1. Basic fitness trackers
  1. 1. Count steps taken
  1. 1. Calculate distance traveled
  1. Ideal for tracking distance-based workouts (walking, running, etc.)

1. Heart rate monitoring trackers
  1. 1. All of the above + monitoring heart rate
  1. Ideal for those wanting to log calories burned

Heart rate monitoring trackers with GPS
1. 1. All of the above + tracking position by satellite
1. Ideal for those wanting to log distances outsides (cyclists, trail runners, etc.)

The team wanted to ensure they hand-tested top contenders, so they pared down their list by selecting only the most popular and highly reviewed models from the four most renowned fitness manufacturers: Fitbit, Garmin, TomTom, and iFit.

After testing for finalists for their consistency in data collection, style, and partner apps – among other variables – they landed on three recommendations:

1. Best Fitness Tracker Under $100: Garmin Vivofit 3

1. Best Heart Rate Monitoring Fitness Tracker: Fitbit Charge 2

Best Heart Rate Monitoring and GPS Fitness Tracker: Garmin Vívosmart HR+

Check out the full resource here: https://www.reviews.com/fitness-tracker/

New Personal Trainer Scheduling Calendar Released

Back in August, we released a beta version of the new personal trainer scheduling calendar as described here. We also have a demo video of the scheduling calendar. After a few months of your use, feedback, and our improvements we have released this as our main scheduling calendar.

New Personal Trainer Scheduling Calendar Improvements

This new scheduler added several new features over our old calendar including:

Clients can now see their own calendar which can have their workouts, diets, and appointments with trainer on it.
If the trainer enables it, the Client can also see available times on their trainer’s schedule. This enables them to know when they can request an appointment. The trainer can then approve or decline the appointment. It will then be saved on both the client’s and trainer’s calendar.
Day, Week, and month views are available
It is easy to create repeating or recurring appointments at many different intervals. You can specify events to repeat daily, weekly, or every X number of days. Trainers can also specify how long you would like an event to repeat. You can set it to repeat forever, for a month, or not at all. With all these features, it is simple to do things like quickly create a repeating Workout Appointment Every Tuesday and Saturday, Create a Diet Event that repeats every 4 days, etc.

Personal Trainer Scheduling Calendar Updates since the Beta Release

Since the above released in August we have also added several improvements. Here are just a few of those:

Personal Trainers can now specify email schedule reminders for the appointments on their calendar. Client will then automatically receive a notification email a specified number of hours before the appointment / event.
Personal Trainer Scheduling Calendar Reminder Feature
In the Workout Creator, personal trainers can now easily add a workout to the scheduling calendar. All they need to do is just click a checkbox.
Improved calendar resolution – you can schedule personal trainer appointments any time at any 15 minute increment.
Overlapping appointments – You can now create overlapping appointments if you need to.

Personal Trainer Scheduling Calendar Checkbox — Personal Trainers can add a workout to their calendar and their clients calendar at the click of a button.

Give the new calendar a try at https://www.fitsw.com/scheduler and let us know your feedback.

Superset Workout View in Android App

Superset Workout View in Android App – New Android Release

Today, we just released the New FitSW Android App 142 today which includes the main one of Superset Workout View in Android App along with several other new features and improvements. Here are some more details:

1) Superset Workout View in Android app

Now, you and your clients can view workouts with supersets properly in the Android app that were created on fitsw.com. In a future release we will be giving you the ability to add supersets within the Android app but for now you can create them at fitsw.com and view them in both the iOS and Android apps.

2) Facebook Login and Register with Facebook

You and your clients can now login and signup much faster using Facebook Login and Signup with Facebook.

Speed up your login time with Facebook login.

3) Add Workout Screen Improvements

The text inputs on the Workouts tab for Sets, Weights and Reps fields now use a numeric keyboard to make it quicker and easier for you to enter. We have also made it so that the Weights and Reps text fields also accept comma’s so that you can enter multiple weights and reps for a single exercise.

4) View Diet Improvements

In Diet log for your client, we have now enabled decimal places for Quantities of Foods that you enter.

5) Usability improvements and Bug Fixes

We have also improved the sizing of text, fixed bugs and added other usability improvements.

Future FitSW Android App Release Coming Soon

The above changes are in the latest release of our FitSW Android App but we will also be releasing another revision soon. If you have any feedback on the FitSW Android App, please send us an email at admin@fitsw.com so that we can implement those improvements as soon as possible. The same goes for the FitSW iOS App along with our website at https://www.fitsw.com.

Printing Fitness Progress Graphs & Changing Default Assessments

New Progress Graph Features: Printing Fitness Progress Graphs & more

We just released several new features for the Fitness Assessments & Fitness Progress Graph section of FitSW.com that you have been asking for. These new features include the following main additions: Printing Fitness Progress Graphs, Printing Fitness Progress tables, and the ability to set Default Assessments so that every client you add will automatically be setup with the Default Assessments you have defined.

Printing Fitness Progress Graphs - Fitness Graph Example — Fitness Progress Graphs like the one above can now be easily Printed out. This is in addition to both you and your clients being able to view online.

Printing Fitness Progress Graphs and Fitness Progress Tables

You and your clients can view Progress Graphs on FitSW anytime you would like. Some trainers have also requested we provide the ability for you to easily print these out on paper in order to review or share a hard-copy. So we have now added a convenient green “Print” button right next to the “Add Progress” button. When you click this button you will be able to choose what you would like to print and how you would like the data displayed. You can choose if you want to Print Progress Graphs or if you want to Print the data in table form.

The new green Print button allows Printing Fitness Progress Graphs — The new green Print button allows you to print your client’s data in Graph form or in table form.

Printing Fitness Progress Graphs Formatting

The page will then be reformatted to provide the best look for printing and you can then print to a printer, .pdf, or whatever you would like. Here is an example of what the print format will look like:

Here is an example of what the print format will look like for printing in table form.

Printing Fitness Progress Graphs data in table form. — View of Printing Progress Graph Tables.

Setting Default Fitness Assessments

You decide what Assessments you measure for your client’s Fitness Progress Graphs. Set an assessment to measure Body Fat %, Weight, Number of Push-ups, or anything else you would like. You may have noticed that when adding a new client, the default Assessments assigned to those clients is always to measure: Hips, Chest, Biceps, Waist, Body Fat, and Weight. Well, we have now enabled a feature to let you defined these Default Assessments yourself. So whenever you add a new client, they will automatically be setup with the Assessments that you would like. This goes for whether you add the client on the website, FitSW iOS App, or the FitSW Android App. Here is how to do it:

Click on “Assessment List” in the menu at the top of the page.
FitSW will then display a list of your Clients and with “Default” at the top.
Click Default and then set whatever Default Assessments you would like.

Set Default Assessments for your Fitness Progress Graphs. — To set your Default Assessments, click “Assessment List” in the menu at the top. Select “Default” in the list that appears after doing so.

New FitSW iOS App 137 Released – Superset View & more

Today we released the New FitSW iOS App 137 which includes the following features:

Superset Viewing Ability. The new FitSW iOS App allows you and your clients to view Workout Supersets properly on the iOS app. You can create workouts with Supersets FitSW.com but they cannot yet be created in the iOS app. We will be adding the ability to create supersets in the iOS app this month. For now you can create them on the FitSW.com website and you and your clients will be able to view them properly on the iOS app.
New FitSW iOS App 137 Superset View now shows clearly all the info you need for you superset exercises.
Improved Exercise Note Display. In the previous version of the app if there was only one column for an exercise in a workout, it would sometimes overlap with the exercise notes section. We have improved this so that you can now see notes and the single column clearly.
Re-ordering of Sets, Reps, Weights. Based on your feedback, we changed the order in the display of Workout Exercises from the column order being Sets, Weights, Reps to Sets, Reps, Weights. A small change, but hey it made more sense based on the feedback you gave us. Keep the feedback coming!
Shared Clients Now Work. For gym accounts, Shared Fitness Clients (clients that can be shared across multiple trainers) can now be viewed properly on the iOS app.

Next FitSW iOS App Release is Coming

These are the main changes for this release of the FitSW iOS App 137. We do have several additional changes planned for another release at the end of this month. If you have feedback on the FitSW iOS App, send us an email at admin@fitsw.com so that we can get the improvements in as soon as possible. Same for the FitSW Android app and the website version https://www.fitsw.com.