Something not working?
Start here.
Most of it comes down to what the camera can see. These are the things that actually go wrong, in the order they usually happen.
It isn't counting me
Nine times out of ten the camera can't see the joints this movement reads. Start the camera and look at the outline on the picture — it shows you which part of you has to be in frame, and it stays up until your first rep lands.
You do not need your whole body in shot. A squat counts off your head and both shoulders alone, because when it can't see your knees it measures how far your shoulders travel instead. Stepping back to fit your feet in usually makes things worse, not better: further away means every joint is blurrier.
If it still won't count: turn a light on in front of you rather than behind you, and stand so the camera sees you from the side for anything that bends at the knee or elbow. Backlighting is the one thing that beats it — against a bright window you're a silhouette, and a silhouette has no joints.
What each movement needs to see
| Movement | Point the camera | What has to be in frame |
|---|---|---|
| Squat | side or front | Make sure you can see your head and shoulders |
| Sumo squat | side or front | Make sure you can see your head and shoulders |
| Lunge | side | Make sure you can see one leg, hip to ankle |
| Reverse lunge | side | Make sure you can see one leg, hip to ankle |
| Jumping jack | front | Make sure you can see your shoulders and one hand |
| Wall sithold | side | Make sure you can see your hip and knee |
| High knees | side or front | Make sure you can see your shoulder, hip and knee |
| Good morning | side | Make sure you can see your shoulder, hip and knee |
| Push-up | side | Make sure you can see one arm, shoulder to wrist |
| Knee push-up | side | Make sure you can see one arm, shoulder to wrist |
| Sit-up | side | Make sure you can see your shoulder and hip |
| Crunch | side | Make sure you can see your shoulder and hip |
| Glute bridge | side | Make sure you can see yourself from shoulder to knee |
| Hip thrust | side | Make sure you can see yourself from shoulder to knee |
| Plankhold | side | Make sure you can see yourself from shoulder to ankle |
| Side plankhold | side | Make sure you can see yourself from shoulder to ankle |
The camera won't start
If you said no to the camera once, the browser remembers and won't ask again. You have to clear it by hand: in Chrome and Edge, click the icon at the left of the address bar and set Camera to Allow; in Safari it's Settings for This Website; in Firefox it's the padlock, then Clear the blocked permission. Reload afterwards.
If another app has the camera open — a meeting, another tab, a recording app — it may not hand it over. Close the other one first.
The first time you press start, a pose model is downloaded. On a slow connection that can take a few seconds before anything happens.
On a phone
It runs, but it isn't what this is for. The idea is that you prop a laptop somewhere it can see you and then look away at whatever you were watching. A phone propped far enough away to frame you is a phone you can no longer watch anything on.
The demo on the front page is desktop-only for that reason. The counter itself will work if you queue a workout and prop the phone up.
Where your reps live
In this browser, in one key called squat-counter/v1. Your daily totals, your goal, the workout you queued, anything you saved by name, and your voice and beep settings.
Clearing your browsing data deletes all of it, and nobody has a copy — which also means nobody can get it back for you. The same goes for a different browser or a different laptop: those are different boxes, and nothing travels between them yet.
The video is not part of any of this. It never leaves the machine and no frame is kept after it's been measured.
Still stuck
Open an issue on the source repository. It's public, it's where this gets fixed, and a bug filed there with your browser and what you were doing is worth more than one sent anywhere else.
Open an issue