One year of strength training to test an edge case
I'm dogfooding my favorite training app (I am biased: I've made it myself for meself).
Since the very first version I've been using it four days a week for a specific kettlebell training program (Kettlebell Maximorum). Initially it was designed to replace scraps of paper and pen marks that I had to count after the workout to know how many reps I'd done. The Couch app was just that: put in the number of reps, hit Enter, go lift, come back to the laptop, put in the number... The total is shown automatically at the top -- don't forget to write it down in the paper log.
I have been doing this program for about a year now, with a pair of 32 kg cast-iron kettlebells. I was getting stronger and more muscular. My Couch app was getting fancier: more features, a better UI, animations, even heart rate monitoring through a Bluetooth connection to my Whoop (not an ad -- I actually don't recommend Whoop anymore).
The edge case
The program runs for 12 weeks, with the number of sets increasing in this wavy pattern (we don't do progressive overload in this house!).
This week I've started a new 12-week cycle, after a week of not touching kettlebells at all. Just looking at them while they're looking at me.
Today was the second training session -- clean and press + front squats with two kettlebells. The number of reps per set: 1. Yeah, it starts easy.
The thing is... it's time-bound. 30 minutes. And it's hard to accumulate a lot of sets and reps doing 1 rep at a time for 30 minutes.
The first time I did this, I managed 22 reps in total.
Today I did 32 reps: 32 of clean and press + 32 of front squats.
The thing is... it kinda broke my app.
As you can see, those 1s start to overflow and stop aligning with the vertical bars below. The bars were coded to shrink when they stop fitting, cause I'd hit that edge case quite early. But numbers... there was never a problem with numbers not fitting.
The slowest QA in the West
So it took me one year to get strong enough to hit this edge case and see where I'd missed the mark as the developer (and the designer).
I find it kinda funny. And satisfying.
This training session only happens once per a 12-week cycle. And even then I had to get really fit to reach such numbers.
Now, I have a choice to make: I can just get heavier kettlebells and start with a smaller number of sets. Or fix the damn bug. I might do both, cause... why not?