New fitness tracker for muscle building from ex-Tesla engineers

A team of former Tesla engineers is working on a specialized fitness tracker that’s focused on helping you build muscle at the gym.

The Fort wearable from the eponymous San Francisco-based startup is a screenless band that promises to detect reps, sets, and rest periods, saving you the trouble of manually logging your workouts and pilates sessions.

Its companion app will display insights after each workout, including session scores, per-muscle volume breakdowns, proximity to failure, time under tension, rep velocity, rest times, and rep cadence. It’ll also display feedback on your form, like your range of motion and velocity loss.

That goes far beyond what you get with most other wearables, which track your heart rate and aerobic capacity, but can’t tell you anything about your muscular effort or fatigue.

Fort uses an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which includes an accelerometer and gyroscope, as well as a PPG heart rate sensor to track your activity during a workout. Sampling your wrist movement at a high frequency, it identifies which exercise you’re doing, and then logs your reps, check your form and training intensity.

When you’re working on your legs, you can attach the Fort’s charging base to gym equipment like a leg press or cable stack via a built-in magnet, and have it operate as an external motion sensor. That allows you to track reps and sets for a wide range of lower-body movements.

Between these and all the usual cardio training it tracks, Fort says it covers more than 50 different exercises.

As with other fitness devices, Fort tracks sleep stages, stress, heart rate zones, VO2 max, recovery scores, overnight HRV, and all-day activity. The company says you should get seven full days’ of use out of a full charge of its built-in battery.

That could make for a compelling investment for people serious about developing muscle and functional strength across age brackets. Recent studies have shown strength training can help increase longevity and reduce the chance of injury – and a purpose-built tracker could help you stay the course and see real progress.

Fort

The Fort is set to retail at US$319, and you’ll also need an $80 a year subscription for the app – so it’s pretty pricey and it hasn’t even launched yet. The company is currently taking pre-orders at $289 apiece with a year’s subscription included, which makes it a bit more reasonable. You can get it in Silver, Black, or Gold, with a range of different strap options, and expect the first batch of pre-orders to ship in the third quarter of this year.

Source: Fort