Ben Mayersohn

Ben Mayersohn

Data scientist. Photographer.
Runner. Seltzer enthusiast.

The Rise NYC

I have developed a companion app for The Rise NYC, a free outdoor fitness group in New York City. This is my first mobile app, and for now it is only available on Android. You can download it here!

I have been working on an iOS version whenever I have the time. It is currently set to private on GitHub, but will be made public once it’s usable!

The Rise NYC currently meets in public locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, at 6:30 AM on weekdays. Though all the workouts happen at the same time, and all fall under the Rise umbrella, they are quite different in nature.

For example:

  • Monday’s workout is a tabata style high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout, which calls for 20 seconds of exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest. This requires a timer and whistle to keep track of time and indicate the start of each section, respectively.
  • On Wednesday, the workout generally contains a deck of cards segment, which assigns an exercise to a suit, and the number of repetitions to the number on the card (face cards are also assigned numerical values).
  • On Thursday, there is a workout in Queens that has a section called Dice. This relies on the roll of a six sided die to select an exercise, which the group does ten of together.

So it is the responsibility of each team member to either bring the necessary props, or to download an app. While there are indeed apps for all of these purposes, this creates a lack of uniformity between days of the week. Furthermore, if the person who normally brings the app is absent, then someone else must decide on an app to download in order to fulfill the task.

Thus, the concept of The Rise NYC app was born! It’s a single app that contains all the tools needed to run any of the Rise workouts happening throughout the week.

Features

The following features are a part of version 1.0:

  • A list of locations, sorted both by days of the week and by borough.
  • Timer, deck of cards, and dice modules within the app. All have presets available, and allow for custom presets to be created.
  • A list of built in exercises.