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About the Muscle Memo protocol
Dev: Arni Fannar Sigurdsson
The Muscle Memo protocol originates from a web service for registering workout sessions, developed by a student of computer science. With the original program, a user-generated list of exercises, performed on a workout day, would be summarized into a heatmap of relative muscle engagement to then be accessed from the user's calendar. This way, lifters could ensure that their workouts were balanced and thus prevent excessive tear to any single muscle. The workout registration form also showed alerts when a particular joint was at risk of being overworked. This could particularly help if the exercises were being registered before they were performed.
The service was available online from 2022 (then, as 'The Workout Calculator'), but later, in 2024, MuscleMemo.com went live, including gifs of all 215 exercises (and exercise variations) available in the system, so that the users wouldn't only have the names of the exercises to go on.
The service relied on the users themselves selecting the exercises from the list and wasn't programmed to give suggestions. The development of the Muscle Memo protocol was a response to this limitation. It was a standard for associating exercises with muscle engagement in the form of percentages. Applications implementing the standard could then offer interactive workout management, where the program would actively suggest exercises to the user, based on goals of balanced workout, with respect to both muscles and joints. Other use cases could include fitness centers that could be compliant with the standard by registering their equipment in a form that had an association with the protocol, so that applications based on it could tailor suggestions of exercises to the availability of equipment in the location in question.
The website, MuscleMemo.com, has since been repurposed to only feature an outlining of the standard, in the form of listed muscle engagement and visuals that now included the simulated heatmap, as well as demonstrating each exercise. As before, all coding, graphics and design have been the solitary effort of the original developer. As of December 1st 2024, the website is yet to be finalized and updates will be made to it incrementally.
