What’s new in Gym Buddy 2.4?  07/24/09


Lot’s of new stuff in 2.4.6. 


Assisted Weight Exercises

The biggest thing is support for body-weight and assisted-weight exercises.  First the limitations:  1)  You cannot convert an Exercise to a different type once it has been created, and 2) supersets can only consist of Regular exercises, not body-weight or assisted-weight ones.


So to use a body-weight or assisted-weight exercise, you’ll have to create a new exercise.  See the first screenshot above.  When you hit ‘Save’ you will be prompted to enter the approximate weight to be added to the weight value entered with the set.  That is, if you weigh 200lbs, and enter 50 for the weight of an assisted-weight exercise, Gym Buddy will use 150lbs to calculate your workout volume and one rep max.


For body-weight exercises you will need to enter your best guess as to how much weight you are lifting.  For pull-ups, you are basically lifting your entire weight, but for push-ups maybe only 70%.  Enter a weight value, not a percentage.


This ‘approximate weight’ is stored with the exercise (and can be edited as your weight changes) and gets transferred to the set where it can also be edited for that set only.  Unless you specifically edit it, the approximate weight of a past set will not be changed by editing the approximate weight of the exercise.  That is, changing the approximate weight for the exercise will affect future sets only.


This doesn’t sound like much, but it wasn’t easy to pull off.  If there is another app out there that handles assisted-weight exercises, I would like to know about it.


Workout Groups

You can now organize your Workouts into Groups.  A Group is a set of Workouts that can be selected to be displayed in the Workout tab, as opposed to all your workouts always being displayed.  A Workout may belong to as many Groups as you like, or none at all.


For example, you could name a Group ‘Monday’ for all the workouts you may perform on Mondays, or ‘Cardio’ for all your cardio workouts, or ‘Chest’ for all your chest workouts.  If you don’t have lots of Workouts, it won’t be that useful, but if you do it’s pretty neat.


To create a Group, hit the ‘Groups’ button from the workout tab, then the ‘+’ add button.  You can name it anything you like and even enter a note.  Then hit ‘Edit Workouts’ and select which workouts you want to belong to this group.


Now when you hit the ‘Groups’ button you can select one of the Groups you created, or ‘All Workouts’ to see all your workouts at once.


Workout Toolbar

The aforementioned ‘Groups’ button is in a new toolbar on the workout tab.  See the second screenshot.  It also includes quick access to the Calendar, where you can select a scheduled workout, etc.  Also very cool is the ‘Last’ button which shows you the sets from your last workout day.  If you don’t remember what you did last time at the gym, you now have a quick and easy way to remember.


Further Evolution of Workout Planning

2.4.6 adds the ability to turn off exercises in a Plan.  See the third screenshot.  When creating a Plan, you can either select an exercise and enter the plan text for it, or flip the switch to ‘off’ so it won’t appear in that Plan.  This allows you to have a ‘master’ workout that contains every exercise you might want to perform in that workout, then have several Plans that are each a subset of those exercises.  So if your Workout contains 8 Exercises, you could have one Plan with 6 of those exercises, and another Plan that contains a different set of 7 of those exercises, etc.


You can also sort the exercises in a Plan independently.  Perhaps you don’t need to enter text for each exercise, but you still want to perform a workout in different exercise orders.  Just create a Plan and sort it to the order you want.  Now when you select a Workout, you can also select the order of exercises.


Please be aware of the bugs mentioned above in red.  Also, judging from the feedback I receive, Plans are very confusing.  Once the bug fix gets on the store, I will be adding a page on this website to hopefully explain Plans clearly and show how they can be used to your advantage.  I will tweet it out when it is ready.


New Timer Buttons

The timer buttons now are easier to hit, have a bigger font, and turn red when they are counting down. See the fourth screenshot.


I guess that’s it.  Up next for 2.5?  A new Tools tab with a redesigned and much more adaptable Body Calculator.

What was new in older versions?      1.1      1.2      1.3      1.4     1.5     1.6      1.7      1.8      1.9     2.0     2.1     2.2     2.3

Gym Buddy 2.4 Bug Report   7/26/09


I submitted a fix to Apple today to fix these three issues:


  1. 1) If you entered the Calendar from the History tab with the ‘Colors’ theme active,  and select to view a workout, the wrong background pic is used.  Entering the Calendar from the Workout tab is fine.


  1. 2) If you delete an Exercise that belongs to a workout that contains a plan, the exercise won’t be removed from the plan.  So when the plan tries to find it, it won’t be there and it displays “Error 1” as the name.  For now you can safely ignore this error and when the fix is available these ‘Error 1’s will be removed.  Or you can delete the plan and create a new one.


  1. 3) If you add an exercise to a workout, it won’t be added to the plan.


If you don’t use the planning feature, #2 & 3 won’t affect you, but if you do it could get confusing (as if it wasn’t confusing enough already), so my apologies.


My last update only took 7 days for approval, so hopefully it won’t be long until these are fixed.