First of all you need to do some work, so choose your favourite exercise and do some reps! Once you're done click the New Exercise Type button.
Enter a name for the exercise you’ve just done and specify how many reps you did. Or if you chose exercise that involves holding a position then change the Measured By dropdown to “Time (seconds)” and enter the number of seconds in the field below. Once you’re done click Log Exercise.
Your exercise will now show up under Recently added activity. Whilst you’re in the mood, why not repeat the exercise you’ve just done? This time once you’re done, click the new button that’s appeared for your exercise.
You’ll notice that the button defaults to logging the same number of reps that you did first time round, so if you do a different number just click the Edit link after you’ve recorded the exercise.
If you want to change the default number of reps then just tick the Update default tickbox and this in turn will update the button once you click on Update Exercise.
Training Ticks gives you tools to understand your natural cadence (steps per minute) and target improvement, as well as measure your interval training. If you haven’t already, start by importing your runs using Connect With Strava.
Now click on any of your running activities to open up more detail including the cadence data. You can do this from under Recently added activity, or hop along to Analysis & Goals from the menu at the top to navigate by week.
The first time you open an activity in Training Ticks it will connect to Strava again to retrieve more detailed cadence data, and present you with 2 charts to visualise how much time you spent at any given cadence (in steps per minute), and how much time you spent in total above any given cadence.
Cadence analysis gives you a great way to measure your interval training, where you'll typically see two peaks on the left chart - one for intervals and another for your normal/recovery pace. From the chart on the right you can easily see how much time you spent doing intervals and at what cadence.
If you make your way to Analysis & Goals from the menu at the top you can see your cumulative cadence stats across each week by clicking on the tab for Time Spent Above Cadence. Note that you must have viewed the activities for that week first in order to process the cadence data.
You might be wondering why the charts are all in a rather dull dark grey! You can fix that easily by going to Manage Exercises from the top menu and then clicking on the Exercise Categories tab. Choose your favourite colour from those available, and type in "Run", then click the Save Changes button.
Now go back to the Analysis & Goals page, or one of your activities, and admire the much prettier graphs!
Exercise categories enable you to customise the Training Ticks user interface for the way that you think about your training. So for example I might want to classify Calf raises and Press ups in the screenshot above as "Strength" exercises, and Calf stretch as a "Stretch" exercise. Training Ticks doesn't prescribe any categories by default, which means that until you set up any categories everything will have a rather dull and grey look. Let's change that!
Go to the menu at the top and select Manage Exercises. The first tab it loads up enables you to edit the exercises types themselves, so click on the next tab along for Exercise Categories.
Training Ticks currently allows you to set up to 8 categories - 4 based on filled colours and 4 based on an outline border. For this example I've decided to use the solid blue category for "Strength" and the outine blue category for "Stretch".
Any exercises you've created up to now will remain uncategorised until we edit them, so hop back to the Exercise Types tab and click the Edit link next to each of your exercises.
Now that you're using categories you'll see a drop down menu allowing you to choose the relevant one for each exercise, so set this to the value you want and click Update Exercise Type.
Once you've updated your exercise types, return to the home page and check out the buttons that should now be colour-coded according to the changes you've just made. Next time you log a New Exercise Type the category option will be available immediately.
The same colour-coding scheme will be used across the rest of the Training Ticks user interface, so for example if you pop along to the Analysis & Goals page you'll see the charts now use your category colours, as does the summary for your weekly activity.
Start by going to the Analysis & Goals page from the menu at the top. Since you don't have any goals set up yet let's go the cadence chart and set a goal from there, so click on the Time Spent Above Cadence tab.
In this section you can click into the charts to set yourself goals for the week on specific metrics. In this example I want to spend more time running at a higher cadence, so I'm going to set a goal for my total time spent above 168 steps per minute, by clicking on the bar within the chart.
The form that pops up defaults to "This Week" (although I could set the goal for next week if I prefer). For my goal here I want to get up to 90 minutes at 168. If I'd clicked on the wrong bar in the previous step I can also change the cadence for this goal. Click Set Goal once you're happy.
You'll be returned to the Goal Progress tab which shows how you're doing so far against all your goals for the week. You can set as many as you like.
Go back to the Time Spent Above Cadence tab where you'll now see the goal target plotted on the cadence chart. You can also see a graph showing your historic weekly trend for the cadence you're targeting.
If you've been using Strava for a while you probably will have lots of activities that Training Ticks hasn't processed the cadence data for yet. So to make your historic chart accurate you may need to click the link to backfill your cadence data. This feature still needs to be refined a little so will take a few minutes if you have lots of activities.