If you follow a track in btwb, whether that’s a program you subscribe to or your gym’s daily programming, you’ve probably noticed most days don’t give you just one workout. They give you a few.
Say a typical day has a Performance version, a Fitness version, and a scaled or no equipment option. You’re not supposed to do all three. You just pick the one that fits you that day. The app didn’t really get that, though. It stacked every version on top of the next, so your home screen turned into a long scroll that made it look like you had a monster day ahead of you.
That’s what Variations fixes.
The problem
Here’s how the old home screen worked. If a track posted five workouts for the day, you saw five workouts stacked vertically. Programs like CrossFit Linchpin have options daily, so they turned into a real scroll. New members would take one look and think “wait, am I supposed to do all of this?”
But those five workouts were usually the same workout written five different ways. Different loads, different movements, different scaling. The app just had no idea they were related, so it treated each one as its own separate thing to do.
How it works
Now, when a bunch of workouts are versions of each other, the app bundles them into one card instead of stacking them.
You can tell a workout has variations by two things on the card:
- A little icon with a number, like “1 / 3”, that tells you how many versions there are and which one you’re looking at.
- A row of dots underneath, kind of like flipping through photos in a gallery.
To jump between versions, tap the counter or just swipe left and right on the card. The versions you’re skipping stay out of your way, but they’re always one swipe away if you want them.
Quick actions on every card
Each workout card now carries its own row of buttons along the bottom, so whatever you want to do next is right there:
- Log drops you straight into logging your result for that workout.
- Start fires up Tempus, our built in timer, so you can run the workout live.
- Coaches Notes pulls up the notes your coach attached to the workout, right from the home screen. This one’s built for coaches and admins, and it only appears when there are actually notes to read, so members aren’t left staring at an empty button.
- Details opens the full workout details screen, which we’ll get to next.
There’s also a small results count on the actual button that shows how many people have logged the workout. Tap it and you jump right to the results for that version. Best part: all of this lives on each individual version, so whichever variation you’ve swiped to, the buttons act on that exact workout.
Tapping into the details
Hit Details on any card and you land on the workout’s redesigned details screen. Everything is sorted into five tabs that stick to the top as you scroll, so they’re always within reach. You can tap straight to the one you want or swipe sideways between them, and the Log and Start buttons stay pinned to the bottom the whole time. Here’s what’s waiting in each one.
Details
This is the workout itself, and how to do it. You get the workout brief video, the full description, and movement demos baked right in. Tap any movement name or GIF and a panel slides up with a quick demo, so you can check the standard or remind yourself what a movement looks like before you start. If the workout has scaled levels, a slider lets you flip between them to find the right fit, and your previous result shows up here too if you’ve done this one before. Your coach’s notes and athlete instructions are one tap away in the Notes button at the bottom.
We also redesigned Workout Levels to give users more context around workout performance, making it easier to visualize what specific results might mean. New Fitness, Advanced, Elite, and Competitor categories provide a quick high-level view, while the +/- controls make it easy to explore specific scores/levels within each category.
Discuss
The social corner. This is where the comments live, so you can talk the workout through with your gym, ask how to scale a movement, or talk a little trash before the WOD. Tag someone and they get a notification, and replies come back to you, so a question doesn’t just disappear into the void.
History
Your story with this exact workout. Up top is a snapshot of your totals, and below that a graph plots your past attempts so you can see at a glance whether you’re trending in the right direction. It’s the kind of history view that used to live only on the web, now right in your pocket on the workout you’re about to do.
Results
The day’s feed. Every logged result for the workout lands here, so you can scroll through what everyone else did, see how they scaled it, and cheer people on. You can follow someone right from their result to keep up with them going forward. This is also exactly where that little results count on the home screen card drops you when you tap it.
Leaderboard
Where it gets competitive. Every result, ranked. Filter by Rx or modified and by gender to see the board that’s relevant to you, and the count updates live as you narrow things down. Tap any entry and you go straight into that person’s full workout session to see exactly how they put up that number.
Jumping between variations
Those grouped variations from the home screen? They follow you in here. Whenever a workout is part of a group, a switcher icon shows up in the top right corner of the details screen. Tap it and a menu lists every version in the group. Pick one and you go straight to it, no backing out to the home screen to hunt down a different card. So if you start reading the Performance details and decide today’s actually a Fitness day, you switch right there.
What it looks like in practice
Picture a day with five versions posted: Performance, Fitness, Elements, Dumbbell Only, and No Equipment. That used to be five cards in a row down your screen. Now it’s one card with a “1 / 5” counter. Swipe through, find the version that matches your gear and how you’re feeling, and get to work.
For coaches and programmers
If you’re the one programming workouts in btwb, here’s the good news: the grouping mostly happens on its own.
Every workout you plan quietly gets tagged with a group ID. Build a workout from scratch and it gets its own fresh ID, so it stands alone. *Note: you can also edit the group ID to whatever you want.
But when you use the Create Variant flow in Plan to spin up an alternate version of a workout, that new one picks up the same group ID as the workout you started from. That shared ID is what tells the app these belong together and should show up as one card. Also, the order you set on the Plan page is the order they’ll appear in the group inside of the app.
It even covers the weird cases. Make a variant of a variant and it still traces back to the same original workout, so the whole family stays together instead of breaking into separate cards.
What that means for you: keep programming exactly how you already do. Post your Performance workout, then spin up your Fitness and Scaled versions as variants. Your members just see one clean card with all the options tucked inside.
What’s next
Variations spent some time in beta, and the feedback we got was a big help. You told us where it felt rough, so we went back and smoothed out the switching animations, cleaned up long workout names in the switcher, and fixed the layout when versions are different lengths. With those changes in, it’s ready to go. Variations is now live via app version 10.5.163.
It’s also just the first piece of a bigger refresh of how workouts show up in the app. A little further out, we’re looking at color coding for workout levels so you can tell Performance, Fitness, and Elements apart at a glance.
For now though, the gist is simple. Your home screen finally works the way you always thought about your training. A few versions, one card, and you just pick the one you’re actually doing today.
Following a program in btwb? Open the app, go to your home screen, and look for the “1 / X” counter on any day with more than one version. Swipe through and pick your workout.