GET FIT
OR GET REPPED

REPPED is a fitness game you play against another person, live, for 30 seconds at a time. You point your phone or laptop camera at yourself, you get matched with someone else who is doing the same, and the software decides which exercise you are both about to do. Then you do as many honest repetitions as you can while an AI counts them and judges whether each one was real.

There is no equipment. There is no subscription. There is nothing to install. The whole thing runs in a browser tab, and a single battle takes less time than deciding what to watch next.

Because the reason most people do not train is not that training is hard. It is that training is a decision, and decisions lose to tiredness. A forty-minute session has to be scheduled, travelled to and recovered from, and every one of those steps is a place to quietly give up.

Half a minute has none of them. It is short enough that refusing to do it sounds silly out loud, which is the only real test a habit ever has to pass. Some days it is all the training that happens, and that is still infinitely more than the zero it replaced. Most days it is the thing that gets you started.

People perform better on simple physical tasks when somebody else is watching and the result is going to be compared. It is one of the oldest findings in psychology and everybody has felt it — the extra repetitions that appear in a pickup game and never appear alone in a bedroom.

A score you generate on your own can always be renegotiated afterwards: you were tired, the floor was awkward, it was not a proper attempt. A score generated against somebody else, in the same thirty seconds, cannot be. Knowing that before you start is the entire mechanism, and it works even though the rating is worth nothing and nobody you know is watching.

Nothing is recorded and nothing is uploaded. The model that counts your repetitions runs inside your own browser: it reads where your joints are, several times a second, and throws the frame away. Your camera feed goes directly to your opponent so they can see who they are fighting, and it stops there.

There is no recording to delete afterwards, ours or anyone else's, because there was never one made. Spectators watching a battle receive rep counts and scores — numbers, not pictures. For a product whose whole premise is pointing a camera at yourself at home, that is not a feature so much as the minimum price of being allowed to exist.

Beginners, mostly — which is unusual for something competitive, and it is on purpose. The queue pairs you with whoever has been waiting longest, not with somebody at your rating, so a first battle can land against anyone. What keeps that from mattering is the rating maths: losing to somebody far better costs you almost nothing, and beating them pays a lot.

You do not need to be able to do a push-up to start. You need a room with space to lie down in and half a minute you were going to spend on your phone anyway.