What is Gainzville?

There are as many different ways to train for a sport or goal as there are people, and the aim of GV is to offer a platform to organize and analyze those training activities. Rather than providing a limited set of exercises to choose from, Gainzville tries to provide a limited set of building blocks which users can use to express whatever it is that they like to do.

In GV we call all the exercises and other things you might want to record activities. Things like a run, some push-ups, or even waking up in the morning - whatever it is that you'd like to keep track of. Say I went for a run then did some stretching afterward. I can first search to see if someone has already created the activity I'm looking for - run, for example, already exists in the database. But if my quad stretches are nowhere to be found, I simply create a new activity and give it a name like "Quadriceps Stretch".

What else would I like to record about my activity? Probably how far I ran, or what kind of quadriceps stretch I did. These kind of details are what we call facets - think of them as descriptions of your activity. Just like activities, I can search the existing database, or create my own. I can use the existing "duration" facet for my run, and then create a new facet called "position" for my quadriceps stretch. What I want to record is which sort of quadriceps stretch I was doing - standing up, lying face down, or lying face up. One way I could express this is a set of options: standing, prone, or supine. These are standard terms in physical training but if you want to call the positions "lying down" or "downward jaguar", the choice is yours.

Now that I've created my "position" facet, I can reuse it wherever I want. It's by reusing facets that Gainzville gets an idea of what it is you're up to - rather than just a random string of letters, "supine" is a property that any exercise using "position" shares. If you want to see how often you stretch standing versus supine, or set a goal of doing more supine quad stretches, facets give you the power to do so.