As a com­pa­ny we’ve always trust­ed the opin­ion of our users, your feed­back has allowed us to move for­ward and add new fea­tures in each release of our app. The most com­mon area of user feed­back so far relates to addi­tion­al options for the pro­gram­ming of exercises.

The orig­i­nal aim for Rehab Guru was to pro­vide a sim­ple list of exer­cis­es that would replace the stick­man draw­ing. How­ev­er, our soft­ware has been embraced by a num­ber of elite sports teams, large prac­tices and pri­vate clin­ics that require more in-depth instruc­tions, com­plex para­me­ters and the abil­i­ty to pre­scribe con­cur­rent pro­grams. We believe it would be fool­ish to try and solve this prob­lem our­selves, our apps are a prod­uct of col­lab­o­ra­tion with our amaz­ing com­mu­ni­ty of ther­a­pists and exer­cise pro­fes­sion­als, this is an open invi­ta­tion to have your say in the future of Rehab Guru.

The aim of this post is to open up the sub­ject of pro­gram­ming to you and offer a forum (using the com­ments sec­tion below) for you to sug­gest solu­tions to the advanced pro­gram­ming issue. We’ll facil­i­tate the con­ver­sa­tion with our own thoughts and expe­ri­ences, how­ev­er, you’re the experts work­ing in this field day in day out, we real­ly val­ue your opin­ion. If we work as a com­mu­ni­ty, togeth­er we can pro­duce fea­tures that will tru­ly improve your work­flow and patient out­comes. We have list­ed some of our ini­tial thoughts and hope they can be used to spark some dis­cus­sion about how we move forwards.

If we work as a com­mu­ni­ty, togeth­er we can pro­duce fea­tures that will tru­ly improve your work­flow and patient outcomes

CALENDAR BASED APPROACH

One school of thought is to map an exer­cise pro­gram against a cal­en­dar, so the patient can adhere to a date based exer­cise rou­tine. This approach could pro­vide you (the ther­a­pist) an inter­face where you can apply the exer­cise col­lec­tion over a pre­de­fined date peri­od. For exam­ple; you would set a pro­gram start date and dura­tion thus pro­vid­ing you with a cal­en­dar grid to add exer­cis­es to. There is some con­cern over this method as a two week pro­gramme would have 14 indi­vid­ual box­es to fill. Whilst we would offer func­tions to ​‘apply to all days’ and ​‘add exer­cise to select­ed days’ etc there is still the wor­ry that this fine degree of con­trol could be a bur­den. Would you like this degree of con­trol and date based prescriptions?

CONCURRENT PROGRAM APPROACH

This pro­pos­al encour­ages the use of small­er col­lec­tions of exer­cis­es to be fol­lowed in iso­la­tion at dif­fer­ent times of the day or week. For exam­ple, a patient could be pre­scribed 3 sep­a­rate pro­grammes; 1 for strength, 1 for flex­i­bil­i­ty and anoth­er for sports spe­cif­ic train­ing. Our con­cern with this method is the frag­men­ta­tion of pro­grammes, two pro­grammes on alter­nate days may not be that com­plex, how­ev­er adding more pro­grammes could require an instruc­tion man­u­al so the patient knows pro­gram to fol­low and when it should be fol­lowed. This is our most com­mon request, we’d love to hear how you envis­age it working.

MACROCYCLE, MESOCYCLE MICROCYCLE (BELLS AND WHISTLES) APPROACH

We’ve been tempt­ed to swal­low the whole of Matveyev and Bompa’s research and pro­vide every con­ceiv­able option for pro­gram­ming and peri­odi­s­a­tion, how­ev­er it’s like­ly to bring with it a seri­ous increase in the com­plex­i­ty of our apps. For many users this many options and set­tings could be over­whelm­ing, we like to keep our user inter­face as sim­ple as pos­si­ble and this approach could be a lit­tle overkill, but we could be wrong, what do you think to the bells and whis­tles approach?

BLENDED APPROACH

One like­ly out­come is for us to remain flex­i­ble in our imple­men­ta­tion of each of the above meth­ods, start­ing with the most request­ed fea­ture. Fol­low­ing this, we will fol­low the ​‘pro­gres­sive enhance­ment’ method­ol­o­gy that we use with all aspects of our apps, let­ting our com­mu­ni­ty dri­ve our fea­ture development.

SUMMARY

We can cre­ate any­thing our user’s desire, how­ev­er we would like to get it right first time so your assis­tance (as always) is great­ly appre­ci­at­ed. In our mis­sion of cre­at­ing the best exer­cise pre­scrip­tion soft­ware on the mar­ket, please give as much infor­ma­tion in the com­ments sec­tion below and we’ll get work­ing on it as soon as possible.

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