Film a lift and read your bar path

Bar Trace turns a video of your lift into a line showing where the bar travelled, plus a grade and the things worth fixing. You can film inside the app or bring in a clip you already have.

Record or import a clip

1. Open the Bar Trace tab.
2. Tap Record to film, or Import to pick a clip from your phone’s video picker (your photo library on iPhone).
3. When recording, you can flip between the back and front cameras, pinch to zoom, and use the rotate button if the phone is lying flat or leaning on a plate. The front camera preview looks mirrored, but the saved clip is not.
4. While a take is running, the close button is greyed out. Tap Stop first, so the clip is kept and analysed.

Trim the clip

If you filmed yourself walking to the bar and back, trim the clip so only the lift is analysed. Drag the two handles to the stretch you want. The video file itself is never cut, so nothing is lost. Skipping the trim analyses the whole clip, which just takes longer.

Mark the plate

Drag the circle over the plate nearest the camera and size it to match. This tells the app what to follow and gives it a sense of scale. The app often suggests a circle for you, so check it sits on the plate and adjust if not.

Tip

If the trace fails, the app takes you back to the circle. Most failures are a circle that sat slightly off the plate, so nudge it and try again.

Read the result

The bar path is traced on your phone (on iPhone with Apple’s built-in vision tools, on Android with its own on-device analysis). From the top of the result screen down you get:

1. Your video with the traced path.
2. Whether the lift would count, shown as three referee-style lights (for the snatch, clean, and their variations).
3. A technique grade, with a bar for each part of the lift.
4. What to fix first, with drills that address it.
5. Speed, phase and position details. Tap a row or drag the graph to jump to that moment in the video.

Once you have two or more lifts of the same type, numbers are compared with your own average. If something could not be read, the card says why.

Share, compare and manage

• Share makes a vertical clip with the trace and stats on it.
• Compare overlays two analyses (Pro). Once you pick the first clip, only clips of the same exercise are listed, so you can never compare two different lifts.
• Re-analyze and Delete are in the menu on the result screen.

Note

Free users can run three analyses a month. Pro removes the limit. A failed trace does not count against it.