Push-up alarm

The surest way to stop going back to sleep is to make the alarm impossible to switch off from bed. Beyond Alarm's exercise missions do just that. The alarm keeps going until you've finished your push-ups, squats or jumping jacks, counted one by one by your phone's front camera. Everything is worked out on the phone, and it's hard to fake.

What it does

Add an exercise mission to any alarm and stopping it is no longer one tap. When the alarm goes off you start the mission, prop the phone up, step back and move. A big counter climbs with each rep, and the alarm stops at your target.

• Three exercises: Push-ups, Squats and Jumping Jacks.
• 3 to 20 reps per mission (5 by default).
• Stack them: up to five missions on one alarm, say 10 squats and then a maths problem. On the free plan, each mission after the second takes one short ad to add.
• On-device and offline: pose detection runs on the phone, and no frame is uploaded anywhere.

The screen coaches you as you go: "Lower your chest", "Push all the way up", "Bend your knees, sit low", "Jump — arms overhead". And if you stop making progress for 20 seconds, the alarm sound comes back.

How it works

Each exercise turns your pose into a single measurement: the elbow angle for push-ups, the knee angle for squats, arm height for jumping jacks. A rep is a full trip from the top position to the bottom and back. Then several checks have to pass before it counts:

1. The core has to be clearly seen. Your shoulders and hips must be tracked with confidence. A face held close to the lens isn't enough. For push-ups the camera has to see your hips, so you can't fake it with a close-up.
2. Each position has to hold. The top and bottom of a rep must last several camera frames in a row. One jittery frame can't flip the count.
3. The joint has to really move. The angle must change by a real amount, not drift a few degrees.
4. The body has to really move. Your body has to travel a real share of its own size during the rep, across the frame or towards the camera. This catches someone standing still and waving an arm. It's measured against your own size on screen, so it works whether the phone is a metre away or across the room.
5. It has to take a human amount of time. A rep that's impossibly fast, or too close to the last one, is treated as noise.

The checks are strict about your core, where a fake fails, and forgiving about wrists and ankles, which are the first things to blur in a dim bedroom.

Beyond Alarm

Beyond Alarm does this part for you: the alarm will not switch off until you have actually moved, and the apps you pick stay locked afterwards.

When to use it

• You sleep through ordinary alarms, or you switch them off without waking up.
• You want movement first thing. Ten squats wake your body up faster than any snooze.
• Pair it with Morning Lockout, so the apps you'd scroll in bed stay shut once you're up.

Set it up

1. Open the Alarm tab and tap + for a new alarm, or tap an alarm to edit it.
2. Under Wake-up mission, tap an empty + box.
3. In the Mission list, choose Push-ups, Squats or Jumping Jacks.
4. Set the number of reps, then tap Preview to try it now.
5. Tap Done, then Save.

When it rings, prop the phone up facing you and step back until "Get your whole body in frame" goes away.

Related

• All wake-up missions
• Wake-up streaks
• QR and barcode alarm
• Push-up alarm app for Android
• Why rep counters count fake reps
• Alarm missions ranked, hardest to fake