A New App to Track Your Mat Time

At the end of the year last year, I was on a Jiu Jitsu forum and a guy posted his statistics for the year. How many classes he went to, which month he went the most or the least, how many days in a row he went etc. I looked at that and thought “That would be interesting to know.” So I created a spreadsheet so that I could track each time I went to a class.  I had it sum up the numbers at the top so I could see at a glance how many hours I’d spent at the gym

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After I used this for a month, I wanted to see how many hours I’d spent total AND how many hours I’d spent in the current month, so I made a quick change.  Then our gym changed schedules and we no longer had an “Intro” and an “Open” class, just a “Technique” class so I started looking to edit it again.  This time, however, I thought “Why  not just put this in a database so that if I want to at a later date, I could run all sorts of statistics on it.”

So that’s exactly what I did. I created a new website called Mat Time. It can be used to track what classes you go to and when. All that it takes to start using is a Facebook login. Don’t worry though, it will not monitor your feed, nor will it post anything to your wall. It simply uses Facebook to prove that you are who you say you are.

Once you log in, your screen will look like this:

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In the upper right is your name and picture. This will let you know you are logged in.  In the middle of the screen is today’s date. As well as a box asking “What did you do today?”  On the left and right are two sidebars. The one on the left will keep track of the top 4 activities for the current month. The one on the right will keep track of the top 4 activities for the year.

To add a new activity, simply type in the box and hit enter.  It will be added to that day’s activities as well as the two sidebars. If you want to add an activity for a different date, simply click through until you reach that date, and enter what you did.

After you enter some activities, your screen will look like this:

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So on March 27th of this year, I went to a conditioning class, a technique class and a sparring class.  For the month of March, I went to 14 technique classes, 8 conditioning classes, 6 sparring classes and one tournament. The monthly total is 29 classes.  For the year (at that point) I’d done 48 technique classes, 23 sparring classes, 10 conditioning classes and 6 competition training classes. The total for the year is 88 activities (it doesn’t show the 1 tournament I went to, because it’s only showing my top 4 activities.)

There are times you may want to add a note to your training. For example, maybe you’ve been working on a sweep and finally hit it while live rolling. Or maybe you want to note your record for a tournament. To do that, when you’re entering an activity, simply enter a ‘:’, everything to the right of the colon will be considered a note and will show up like this:

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For this activity I entered Tournament: 0-2 Gi & 0-2 NoGi at Sasquatch Open. It added tournament to my list of activities and created a note for that tournament.

So head over to http://track.couchjitsu.com and try it out.