This is a website of pet projects, here to be shared with whomever finds them interesting or useful.
Muscle Memo was a programming project I started when I was learning to program, in 2019. The initial version appeared on my personal website, arnifannar.com, then as The Workout Calculator.
The original Workout Calculator logo.
That web service was mainly for my personal use, for registering the workout I was doing and then the program would produce heatmaps of the corresponding muscle engagement, which would help me balance my workout between muscles. In the backend, the different roles of different muscles in different exercises were converted into numerical values to be added together for the whole workout session. The software would also give warnings when any particular joint was at risk of being overworked.
For the next version of the software, I got into using the 3d animation software Blender and made displays of all the 200+ exercises and exercise variations in the system. In 2024, Muscle Memo was launched on the website MuscleMemo.com. Other changes from the original Workout Calculator included that the new version was set-based, so the heatmap made from performed exercises was affected differently basing on the number of sets for each exercise. Future workouts could also be added into the calendar, but they would automatically come out as planned instead of performed (but could then later be changed to performed.
| Work in progress in Blender. | Results |
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In 2025, a feature was added, so that the user could see graphs of the weights used in the previous times that an exercise had been performed. Shortly later, the registration for new users in Muscle Memo was closed, and a new version of the site would appear to unregistered visitors, that of The Muscle Memo Protocol, which would be a demonstration of an updated version of the underlying standard that connected exercises to muscle engagement. The idea was that the new standard could be implemented in other workout computer programs.
In 2025, I had finished writing my novel, Explaining Fiction to your AI, and wanted to feature that on the website, as well. I took MuscleMemo.com down and moved all the content to a new website, NySyn.is.
