XDA Spotlight: Abusive Gym Reminder, an Open-Source App that Yells at you if you don’t Workout

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Do you like being yelled at? Are army training boot camps your idea of a good time? Does being screamed at make you more motivated? Then we have have just the app for you. Say hello to the open-source Abusive Gym Reminder.

This is an an application whose sole purpose is to send you abusive notifications everyday you do NOT go to the gym. Surprisingly, it actually works – just not how I thought the developer intended it.

The Workout Reminder for Masochists

The application is quite simple to use. It starts you off by requesting you to place a marker on Google Maps designating the location of your gym (after the initial setup is complete, you can always return to the settings page and add more gyms if you want.) Next, the application asks you how many days a week you aim to go to the gym. Once you’ve completed the set-up process, the application will begin monitoring your location to see if you are keeping up on your promise to actually go workout.

Abusive Gym Reminder works by using creating a geo-fence around your gym(s) of choice. The location that you chose during setup acts as the center point of the geo-fence. When your device enters the geo-fence, that tells the application that your device (and by extension, you) has arrived at the gym. The application allows you to specify the radius of the geo-fence circle in the settings; I lowered the default down from 200m to 150m because 200m seemed like a bit overkill considering the size of my gym.

When you enter one of the defined geo-fences, the application logs both how many times you enter the area as well as how long you have been present in that area. The application then provides a nice summary of all your historic gym data including your longest gym attendance streaks and the most days you have missed in a row. You can also checkout individual days to see how many times you went to the gym on a given day.

But when you actually miss a gym day is where the real fun begins. As its name implies, the Abusive Gym Reminder will send you a notification with a pre-defined “abusive” message in it that chastises you for neglecting a promised workout. The messages are displayed as notifications and are also displayed in the application’s “Inbox”. You can also send a “Test” message when you start the application for the first time to see an example. I noticed immediately how customized the notification messages seemed, and it definitely gave the application a very polished feel. Apparently, the messages are taken from an internal database of crowd-sourced verbally abusive comments. You can even submit your own insults on the developer’s Github page.

I personally found that the abusive notifications were not too intrusive – only 1 message per day for each day you missed the gym. The notifications are rather humorous, and after checking out the settings I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could even set the level of “Abuse” that I received each day I forgot to workout. Of course, I set it to the most abusive level because if you are going to abuse someone to go workout – I say do it properly. When I thought about this feature in some detail, I recognized that it’s rather cleverly implemented. If, for example, you have kids who are old enough to read, you don’t want your phone displaying a string of profanity as long as your mother’s arm to ruin their innocence.

The settings for the level of abusiveness are as follows:

Passive Aggressive

Abusive

Abusive (Mature)

Pipit, the developer of this application, has a great sense of humor as when you set the application to its most abusive level the screen text changes to match the new “Mature” mode as shown below:

You can also customize when you get the notification which nicely coincides with when you were supposed to go the gym – you know for that ‘kick ’em while they are down’ affect. On a more practical note though, not everyone goes to the gym at the same time so having the message pop up in the morning when you usually go the gym in the evening wouldn’t make sense, but the settings are there so if you want some abuse in the morning to motivate your afternoon or evening gym sessions then Abusive Gym Reminders has got your back.

Hard to Take Seriously

There are a few usability issues that I had with “Abusive Gym Reminder” application though. For instance, you can edit gym data for the current day and specify if it was a gym day or not – however it isn’t immediately obvious how to do so. I accidentally discovered that you need to tap on the circle day icons on the main screen. When you do so, up pops a little box that allows you to change values, however on my test device (the Nexus 6P) – the text is quite small and you have to tap just right to get the values to change. I also noticed that no matter what day I tapped on – be it Wednesday or Thursday – only Friday’s box would show. At the time of writing it was a Friday, which makes sense but was a little confusing at first.

Overall, I enjoyed using this application – but sadly for the wrong reasons. I started missing the gym on purpose and setting up “Fake” gyms in countries that I would not be visiting just so I could see what the next message would say. It was a laugh to see your phone giving you some abusive message and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In a weird way, it made my phone feel like one of those old grandpa characters on television – yelling at the kids to get off the lawn. I ended up setting the application to send the messages before I was supposed to go to the gym, so it kinda worked as a kick in the butt to get myself down to the gym that day, rather than its intended purpose which is to berate me for already missing my workout. But hey, at least it gets you to the gym, right?

I’ll wrap this XDA Spotlight up by saying you should definitely check this application out if you are a serial gym procrastinator. It does indeed give you a little extra push to get yourself to the gym, at least in my experience. If you are big into fitness and you regularly go to the gym already, then this application will probably only serve to give you a chuckle each day. It doesn’t store enough detailed information about your gym visits to be any value to gym rats, but for us mortals who have trouble just getting out of bed on a wet cold day, it could give us just the right amount of motivation to make it to the gym.