Swimming is an excellent health and fitness activity. Swimming combines the benefits of cardio vascular exercise with a zero impact full body. The problem with swimming however is that it can be repetitive and quite boring. While a runner or cyclist can vary their exercise route every day, a swimmer is confined to a swimming pool often swimming mindlessly swimming length after length.
Swimplan.com was designed to make swimming interesting and fun by allowing a swimmer to produce individualised swimming workouts. A Swimplan workout is comprised of 4 components – Warm Up, Build Up, Core and Warm Down. Swimplan takes a number of variables including workout duration, pool length, preferred strokes, equipment but most importantly a swimmers ability and produces a tailor made workout with target times tuned to the individual swimmer. No two Swimplan workouts are alike.
Swimplan was (and continues to be) developed and maintained by Gumboot. One challenging aspect to the development of the system was efficiently implementing the workout generation algorithm to execute within "web-time". The term web-time can best be described as the maximum amount of time a person is prepared to wait for a response after initiating an action in their webbrowser by typically clicking a button or a link. We've all experienced the frustration of a slow loading web page; if a website cannot respond to a user request within web-time then the user becomes frustrated, questions whether they actually initiated the click in the first place (sometimes prompting additional attempts) and ultimately loses interest in the service. The task of creating personalised swim workouts is non-trivial and Swimplan must accomplish this is in no more than 2-3 seconds. The system developed by Gumboot meets this target.
More than 110,000 swimmers from around the world have used Swimplan to make their trips to the pool a lot more engaging.
Duration of engagement – ongoing