A plank timer you can read mid-hold

Twenty seconds into a 30-second plank, a lifter testing Yield noticed something about his own eyes. "My sight grew dim, and I was keeping my eyes focused on the seconds counting down," he said after the session. "I was wishing the numbers were huge."

The hold timer worked. It counted down, and it buzzed at the target. It just wasn't readable at the one moment it mattered: the last few seconds of a hard hold, from the floor, with your face a couple of feet from the phone.

The problem with most hold timers

Most workout apps treat a plank like any other set. The countdown sits in a row of normal-sized text, next to a normal-sized button. That's fine for logging a set of curls. It isn't fine when your arms are shaking and you're trying to decide whether you can last five more seconds.

Stopping is its own problem. If ending the hold means finding a small button, you either stop looking at the time or you fumble for the button and lose the last seconds. And if the timer stops at zero, a strong hold that went past the target gets recorded as the target.

What Yield does instead

The seconds fill the screen

When you start a hold, the countdown takes over the whole screen: black background, one very large number in the middle. You can read it from the floor at arm's length. The phone stays awake for the whole hold.

The colour tells you how far through you are

The number starts bright green and moves through yellow to a dark red as you near your target. It changes a little every second rather than jumping between three colours, so you get a sense of where you are without reading anything. It also gets darker as it goes, so someone who can't tell red from green still sees the change.

A tap anywhere pauses. It never throws the hold away

Tap anywhere on the screen and the hold pauses. Paused time doesn't count as time held. From there you get two large buttons: Resume, or End Hold. We made a tap pause rather than stop on purpose. A shaking arm that brushes the screen shouldn't end a hold you've worked for.

Once paused, only those two buttons do anything, so a stray tap can't restart the countdown.

It keeps counting past the target

When you reach your target, the phone buzzes once and the number switches to +1, +2, +3. You decide when to stop, and every extra second is recorded. If your target was 30 seconds and you held for 37, your log says 37.

What happens after the hold

Your next target adjusts to what you did.

The rest after a hold is shorter than after a heavy lift. Read how Yield's rest timer works.

When you finish all your planned holds, your coach checks in the same way it does after any other exercise, using your actual times, such as 20 and 23 seconds. That includes when a plank is the last thing you do and you tap Finish straight away.

Try it

Yield Strength is a training app with an AI coach that plans each session from your history. It's in beta on TestFlight. Read what makes it different, or join the waitlist to try it.