Lockin

Build → a daily full-body bodyweight circuit

A full-body bodyweight circuit, every day, with money on the line.

All four bodyweight exercises in one Lockin contract — pushups, squats, crunches, leg raises. Spread reps across the day; on-device pose detection counts each one. Hit every per-exercise target before your deadline and your stake returns. Miss any and it funds charity.

Suggested starting contract

$5/day against missing your daily target of 150 total reps across pushups, squats, crunches, and leg raises.

Why willpower fails to start this

A single-exercise daily target works until it doesn't. Most people who lock in 100 pushups a day plateau somewhere around week three for a predictable reason: the movement pattern stops being a stimulus and starts being a chore. The neural adaptation curve flattens, the boredom curve steepens, and the contract starts to feel like a tax on the same hour of the same day. Pavel Tsatsouline anticipated this in "The Naked Warrior" (Dragon Door, 2003) when he prescribed not one exercise but a rotating roster — his canonical example was a five-exercise daily practice, drilled in submaximal sets across the day. The point was never the pushup. The point was a distributed pattern of high-quality movement reps across the major patterns the body actually uses: a horizontal push, a squat, a hip-hinge or trunk-flexion pattern, and a hip-flexion or anti-extension pattern. Charles Atlas's mail-order Dynamic Tension programs, which sold to millions of American men starting in the 1920s, were built on the same logic — daily multi-exercise bodyweight sequences performed without equipment. The strength-science literature confirms why a circuit holds up better than a single lift over a multi-week horizon. Brad Schoenfeld's 2016 and 2017 meta-analyses on training volume and frequency consistently find that total weekly volume distributed across muscle groups is the dominant variable for hypertrophy and strength adaptation in non-elite trainees. Eric Helms, PhD, co-founder of MASS (Monthly Applications in Strength Sport), makes the same argument in his frequency-distribution work: more patterns trained submaximally across more days outperforms a single pattern hammered to failure. Stuart McGill, Professor Emeritus of Spine Biomechanics at the University of Waterloo, has spent four decades arguing for whole-body movement programming over isolation, on the grounds that distributed loading across multiple movement patterns spares the spine and joints from the cumulative micro-trauma of repetitive single-pattern volume. The institutional precedent is strong. The US Marine Corps' Daily 7 and the British Royal Marines' bodyweight standards both prescribe multi-exercise daily protocols, not single-exercise grinds. None of those organizations stumbled into multi-exercise programming by accident. The behavioral failure mode is the one most habit-design literature underestimates: a contract that hits the same exercise every day creates predictability, and predictability erodes the felt cost of skipping. A circuit changes the texture of each session. Pushups before coffee, squats before lunch, crunches and leg raises after dinner — the day is no longer "the pushup day," it is a sequence of small varied movement bursts. Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory (Econometrica, 1979) supplies the missing motivational layer: a $5 stake is felt as roughly $10 of aversion pressure at the moment a skip is being rationalized, and that pressure is what turns "I'll do crunches tomorrow" into "I'll do crunches now." A rotating multi-exercise contract gives loss aversion something it can actually attach to — four targets, each closeable in five minutes, all of them required for the day to clear.

How Lockin verifies it

Lockin verifies bodyweight reps using on-device pose detection. You lay your phone face-up on the floor below you and select the Workout Pose challenge type before starting a set. The front camera feeds into a real-time pose-estimation model that runs locally on the device — no video is uploaded or stored. The model tracks key body landmarks and registers a valid rep only when the relevant joint angles cross specific thresholds. Pushups require an elbow angle below 100 degrees at the bottom and above 150 degrees at the top. Squats require a knee angle below 100 degrees at the bottom and above 160 degrees at the top. Crunches require a shoulder-hip-knee midpoint angle below 100 degrees at the top and above 140 degrees at the bottom. Leg raises require the same midpoint angle below 110 degrees at the top and above 160 degrees at the bottom. Partial reps and sloppy reps do not count. A single Lockin workout-pose contract supports all four exercises in one challenge. When you build the contract, you add each exercise to the workouts list and configure its sets and reps independently — sets from one to ten per exercise, reps per set from a fixed list that includes 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, and 30. Each set is started by selecting the exercise from the challenge screen and running it through the camera-tracked session. The app accumulates per-exercise totals against per-exercise targets. The day clears only when every per-exercise target has been met before the deadline. If three exercises are complete and one is short, the day forfeits.

Set up a a daily full-body bodyweight circuit contract in 5 minutes

  1. 1

    Install Lockin

    Free download on the App Store and Google Play. Account creation takes under a minute using email or Apple/Google sign-in.

  2. 2

    Choose the Workout Pose challenge type

    Select Workout Pose from the challenge picker. This activates the on-device pose-detection engine that handles rep counting for all four supported bodyweight exercises in a single contract.

  3. 3

    Add each exercise and configure its sets and reps

    Inside the workout configuration step, add pushups, squats, crunches, and leg raises to the workouts list one at a time. For each exercise, pick the number of sets (one to ten) and reps per set from 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, or 30. A balanced starting circuit is 5 sets of 10 pushups, 5 sets of 10 squats, 3 sets of 10 crunches, and 2 sets of 10 leg raises — totaling 50 + 50 + 30 + 20 = 150 reps per day across the four exercises. Each exercise is tracked independently against its own per-exercise daily target.

  4. 4

    Set your daily deadline

    By default the deadline is end-of-day — 23:59 in your local timezone — so all four exercise targets need to be logged before midnight. Tap Set deadline in the wizard to pick an earlier time on a 24-hour picker; 9:00pm is a strong default for the circuit because it forces the last leg-raise set out of the bedtime zone. The deadline is a single contract-wide cutoff — you cannot set different deadlines per exercise. Tighter deadlines unlock higher Locks and XP rewards. The deadline is set once during contract creation and applies to every scheduled day for the life of the contract — it cannot be edited mid-contract.

  5. 5

    Set your stake and choose your charity

    The default stake is $5 per day — enough that skipping the last twenty leg raises at 9pm feels like an actual cost, not a rounding error. Then select from Lockin's vetted charity list across categories including climate, mental health, animal welfare, and digital literacy; if any single per-exercise target is missed, your stake funds that cause. Lockin charges a small platform fee to cover payment processing and operations.

  6. 6

    Plan your circuit blocks before day one

    Decide in advance when each exercise block will happen across the day. A workable structure is pushups at the start of the day, squats before lunch, crunches mid-afternoon, and leg raises after dinner — four short camera-tracked sessions, each closing one of the four targets. Tsatsouline's grease-the-groove logic only works if the blocks are scheduled into existing routines, not left to whichever moment feels right.

  7. 7

    Confirm and lock in

    Your stake is held securely by Stripe. The contract starts at midnight in your local timezone. Each day, complete every per-exercise target through camera-tracked sessions before your deadline for the day to clear. Workout-pose contracts beyond the first free contract require a Lockin Premium subscription.

From Lockin's data

In the Lockin beta, workout-pose users who configured multi-exercise circuits — three or four exercises in a single contract — showed stronger week-three and week-four retention than users on single-exercise contracts at comparable total daily volume. The pattern is consistent with what Tsatsouline, Schoenfeld, and Helms have argued from different angles: distributing volume across several movement patterns produces more sustainable daily compliance than hammering a single pattern, because each individual block stays short, varied, and hard to rationalize away.

"I had been doing 100 pushups a day with Lockin for two months and I could feel myself starting to phone it in. I rebuilt the contract as 50 pushups, 50 squats, 30 crunches, 20 leg raises, same $5 stake, 9pm deadline. Each block is five minutes, none of them are hard alone, and now my whole body is in the contract instead of just my chest. I have not missed a day in three weeks."

— Anonymous beta user, bodyweight circuit, 7 weeks active across two contracts

Common questions

Can I really configure all four exercises in one Lockin contract? +

Yes. The workout-pose challenge supports a workouts list that holds multiple exercises in a single contract — pushups, squats, crunches, and leg raises are the four currently supported bodyweight movements. During the configuration step you add each exercise individually and set its own sets and reps per set, drawn from the standard options of one to ten sets and 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, or 30 reps per set. Each exercise then has its own per-exercise daily target, and the app tracks completions against each one separately. You do not have to create four separate contracts to run a circuit — one contract covers the whole circuit and one stake covers the whole day.

Can I set different deadlines for different exercises — say, pushups in the morning and crunches at night? +

No. A workout-pose contract has one deadline that applies to the entire circuit. Whatever time you pick during contract creation — end-of-day by default, or any earlier time on a 24-hour picker — is the cutoff by which all four per-exercise targets must be hit. You can absolutely sequence the exercises across the day in whatever order you prefer, with pushups at 7am and leg raises at 8:55pm if that fits your routine, but the day's pass/fail check happens once at the deadline against every per-exercise target simultaneously. The deadline is also locked in at creation and cannot be edited mid-contract — that immutability is what makes it function as a precommitment rather than a movable goalpost.

What happens if I hit my pushup and squat targets but fall short on crunches by the deadline? +

The day forfeits. A workout-pose circuit is structured as an all-or-nothing daily check — every per-exercise target must be met for the day to clear. If you finish pushups, squats, and leg raises but stop short of your crunch target by your deadline, the day registers as a miss and your stake for that day funds the charity you chose at contract creation. This is intentional. The whole point of running a circuit in a single contract is that the four exercises share one accountability layer; if any single exercise could be optionally skipped, the contract structure would degrade into a per-exercise mood check. Practically, the safest approach is to schedule the smallest target last, so the easiest block becomes the deadline-buffer block — twenty leg raises at 8:50pm against a 9:00pm cutoff is a one-minute rescue.

Where does the forfeited money actually go? +

Forfeited stakes go to a registered charity from Lockin's vetted list. You choose the charity from categories including climate, mental health, animal welfare, and digital literacy when you set up the contract. The bulk of your stake funds the charity you chose. Lockin charges a small platform fee to cover payment processing and operations. Refer to the transparency page inside the app for charity-by-charity tallies.

Do I have to do each exercise in one block or can I split each one across the day? +

Each exercise can be split across as many camera-tracked sessions as you want. The app accumulates per-exercise totals across every session in the day. So a 50-pushup target can be five sets of 10 spread between 7am and 6pm, a 50-squat target can be two sets of 25 done before lunch, and a 30-crunch target can be one block of three sets of 10 in the evening. Tsatsouline's grease-the-groove logic actively favors this distributed structure: small submaximal sets across the day reinforce the motor pattern without producing fatigue, and they reduce the perceived cost of any individual session to the point where avoidance behavior drops off. Reps performed without the camera-tracked session running do not count toward your contract — only on-device verified reps register against your per-exercise targets.

Is the workout-pose challenge available on the free tier? +

The first workout-pose contract is available without a subscription. Subsequent workout-pose contracts require a Lockin Premium subscription, which also unlocks unlimited contracts across the other proof types, advanced analytics, and additional features. The free first contract is enough to run a full 20-day or 30-day circuit and judge whether the structure works for you before committing to a subscription.

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Author

The Lockin Team — Lockin Editorial

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