Tidy Round · iPhone & Apple Watch
You need a chair and a wall. Put the phone down — it tells you what's next, thirty seconds at a time.
What it is
It isn't ours. It was published in 2013 by Brett Klika and Chris Jordan in ACSM's Health & Fitness Journal — a circuit that does the work of resistance training and cardio at once, in the time you'd spend deciding whether to go to the gym. We wrote a timer for it, and tried to make it disappear while you use it.
A total-body move raises your heart rate first; upper, lower, and core alternate after that, so one region recovers while the next works. The app won't let you shuffle them — shuffling makes it a different workout.
The protocol assumes roughly an 8 out of 10. If you can hold a conversation through it, you're doing something else.
Not the ceiling. One circuit is a real workout; you can run one, two, or three. We'll never tell you which to pick.
How it runs
iPhone
A 250-point countdown you can read across the room, a contour drawing of each move, and a firm handoff between them. Face-down is the intended posture.
Apple Watch
The whole circuit from your wrist with the phone off or absent — a haptic at every change, three taps counting you into each finish, and the session saved to your Move and Exercise rings.
A wrist-safe circuit is built in, too: lower-body and core only, with your hands open and relaxed — no push-ups, dips, or pressing — for anyone keeping weight off their wrists.
The shape of it
No account, no subscription, no analytics. The phone and the watch each run their own session and quietly sync the finished ones over your own iCloud — never a live countdown, because syncing that would only make it worse. The phone keeps the whole record; the watch keeps the last couple of months. Nothing goes anywhere else, because there's nowhere else for it to go.
When it's ready
It's in testing now. Leave your email and I'll let you know when Tidy Round is out — nothing else, ever.
✓ You're on the list — one note when it ships, nothing in between.
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