Help & tips
Everything worth knowing about running a workout off this clock — including the two or three things phones do that will otherwise surprise you.
Getting started
Open the clock, pick a workout, hit Start. You get five seconds of amber "get ready", then the session runs: red for work, teal for rest, green when it's done. The background colour is the phase — you can read it from the far end of the gym without reading a number.
Tap anywhere to pause. The pause screen has Resume, Restart and End workout, and the sound switches. The bar along the bottom shows what's coming next, and the arrow on it skips ahead. The row of plates above it is your round progress.
The phone's back button or gesture pauses the clock first; a second press ends the session. From any other screen it takes you home rather than out of the app.
Installing it
It's a website until you add it to your home screen, and an app afterwards: full-screen, no browser bars, works offline.
iPhone and iPad
- Open the clock in Safari.
- Tap the Share button.
- Choose Add to Home Screen.
Android
- Open the clock in Chrome.
- Open the ⋮ menu.
- Choose Install app. Chrome often offers this on its own.
On iPhone the installed app keeps its own storage, separate from Safari's. If you added workouts in Safari before installing, they won't follow you across — set up sync and they will. (On Android the installed app and Chrome share one storage, so nothing is lost.)
Sound
Silent mode (iPhone)
If you hear nothing on an iPhone, check that it isn't on silent. iOS mutes this kind of audio whenever the phone is in Silent Mode — the ringer switch on older iPhones, Control Center on the ones with an Action button — and no website can detect that or override it.
That's a deliberate trade: the timer asks the system for audio that mixes with whatever else is playing, so your music keeps going underneath the beeps instead of being paused or ducked between every round. The cost of mixing is obeying Silent Mode.
Voice announcements
Off until you switch them on — the switch is on each workout's page, and on the pause screen. Each interval is then called as it begins — "Work", "Rest", or the exercise name you typed. If you called an interval "Wall balls", the clock says wall balls.
A rest that leads into a different exercise names it — "Rest … next up is … wall balls" — so a Tabata of burpees just says "Rest", while a circuit calls each station before you get there. It only fits when the rest is long enough for the words to land before the countdown beeps, about five seconds and up; shorter rests keep "Rest" alone.
Time calls
A second switch next to the first, separate because numbers without the phase words is a real combination when a group is working off one screen. During work intervals the clock counts up in milestones — "thirty", "one minute", "one thirty", every half minute to five minutes and every minute to ten — and counts in with "ten" and "five" near the end. The count-up stops fifteen seconds before the end to leave room for the countdown, so intervals under 45 seconds get the countdown only.
The two vocabularies never overlap on purpose, so a spoken number is never ambiguous: a milestone always means time served, and "ten" or "five" always means time left. On a three-minute plank shared by ten people, everyone can hear their own goal go past without anyone looking at the screen.
Bluetooth speakers
Beeps and announcements travel together, so connecting a speaker moves the whole clock to it — not half of it, with the rest coming out of a phone in someone's pocket. The one exception is the browser's own voice, which fills in for an exercise name that hasn't been prepared yet (see Offline) — that one the phone may keep to itself.
Building a workout
A workout is blocks (Warm-up, Main, Finisher) of sets (8 rounds of 20/10) of intervals (work seconds, rest seconds, and an optional exercise name). Most gym formats are just numbers in that shape:
- Tabata — one set, 8 rounds, 20 s work and 10 s rest.
- EMOM — one interval of 60 s, as many rounds as you want.
- AMRAP — one long interval, with the rep scheme written in the workout's description.
- Circuits — one named interval per station, and a rest after the set.
Rest between rounds is the last interval's own rest — it fires at the end of every round. Rest after the whole set is separate. Trailing rest is trimmed, so a session always ends on effort rather than on a countdown nobody is watching.
Presets are read-only. Copy opens a duplicate in the editor, and saving lands you on the new workout's page, with Start and Share right there.
Sync across devices
Optional, and there's no email or password. Claim a handle and the server gives you a sync code; enter both on another device and your workouts follow you. Edit on a laptop, run on a phone.
Write the sync code down. It's the only key to the account, and nobody can post it back to you — there's no email address on file to send it to.
Presets never sync, and the app works completely without an account.
Offline
Once installed, every preset runs with no network at all. The timer, the beeps, the phase words and all the spoken numbers are stored on the device.
The one exception is an exercise name you typed yourself: its audio is prepared when you save the workout, add it from a code or open its page while online, and cached from then on — and retried each time you open or start it, in case it didn't arrive. Open a new workout once with a connection and it's yours for good; until then the clock falls back to your browser's own voice rather than going quiet.
When something's wrong
The beeps stopped mid-workout
Another app — usually a music app — took over the phone's audio. The clock notices and shows "Beeps muted"; tap the screen once and it rebuilds its audio and carries on. The countdown itself never stopped.
I hear nothing at all on an iPhone
The phone is on silent. See Sound above.
The screen keeps going dark
The clock asks the phone to stay awake while a session runs. If the browser refuses — some do in low-power mode — plug the phone in, or raise the screen timeout in system settings.
I reloaded and lost my session
You shouldn't have: a running session is saved with a wall-clock anchor and restored on load, so a reload or a phone restart drops you back into the clock where it genuinely is by then, not where it was when you left.
A code says no shared workout was found
Either whoever shared it deleted the code, or a character was misread. Codes avoid the ambiguous characters — no O or 0, no I, L or 1 — so ask for it again. If a workout you added reports that its code isn't shared any more, your copy stays yours to keep.