Slow Burn

"I love sports. It’s really enjoyable to feel every muscle of your body and feel that every part is charged with energy throughout the day after morning exercise. However, as time went by, I began to realize that keeping up with the load becomes more difficult – things that you could easily do while you were young became impossible. My limit was gradually going down until I heard about the “Slow Burn” methodology by Fred Hahn.

The point is very simple: instead of tiring yourself with excessive loads on one muscle group performed within a short interval with breaks between sets, it's better to split the load on a series of sets with a small number of easily performed exercises each for different muscle groups. For example, instead of 5 sets of 30 pushups and 5 sets of 30 squats with breaks, it is better to do 30 approaches with 5 pushups and 5 squats in each set. There is no need to do the breaks between the sets then because sugar is not burned off immediately as at high loads. It leads to monotonic load that energizes your body for the whole day and brings much joy rather than stress. Then you simply increase the number of sets to reach your former limits in total. In general, it’s like cooking on a slow fire: you can either overroast your food immediately or gradually develop a perfect flavor.

It is a wonderful method but there is one unobvious problem you face when you start using this method. It is a need to count your sets. If you have 10, 20, 30 or more sets it’s very easy to lose count because you tend to think of something else while doing your exercises. As a result you can either do more sets or less, which is even worse.

Fortunately, I am not only a sport enthusiast, I also work as a programmer and I am a member of OkToGames team of like-minded developers. Our team has developed this simple app that utterly solved the above problem for me. Basically the app just counts the sets for you. There is no need to remember your current set because the set number is displayed with a large font. To move to the next set, you just need to tap the screen of your device. In addition, the app keeps track of statistics: time of set, average, minimum, maximum, total time, etc.

Well, that's all. Enjoy the app and reach higher heights. If you notice any flaws in the app or you have any ideas for improving it, feel free to email me!"

Alexander Aplemakh