BeastieHow the counting
actually works
No magic and no honor system: a pose model, a state machine, and a set of thresholds a human judge would recognise. All of it runs on your phone, which is why the video never needs to go anywhere.
Camera in, verdict out.
Four stages, one phone.
The camera sees you
Prop the phone and the frame check starts: whole body visible, enough light, phone steady. Beastie won’t start counting until it can genuinely see you — a counter that guesses is a counter that lies.
A pose model maps your body
On every frame, a neural network running on the phone itself finds the key points of your body — shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, ankles — and the skeleton you see drawn over the picture is exactly what the model sees. White means a clean segment; orange means the limb that broke form.
A state machine tracks the rep
Each exercise is a little machine: ready, descending, bottom, ascending, counted. Moving between states takes crossing a real threshold — elbow angle for push-ups, knee angle for squats — with deliberate tolerance bands so a wobble at the boundary can’t double-count, and a minimum duration so a twitch can’t count at all.
The verdict is instant, both ways
Reach depth with honest form and the rep banks the moment it happens — the skeleton flashes green, the count ticks, the voice says so. Come up short and the rep is refused with the reason: “chest lower!”, not “failed”. You get the correction mid-set, while it still helps.
A generous counter is a broken counter.
Every counting app faces the same temptation: let the marginal rep through, because the session feels better and the number goes up. Beastie refuses it, on purpose, everywhere. The count is the product — it’s what makes a duel between two phones in two cities mean something, and it’s what makes your own PR worth having. One rule sits under the whole app: if it’s not sure, it doesn’t count.
That strictness is also why only three exercises ship today — push-ups, squats and jumping jacks. They’re the moves a propped phone can judge reliably: whole body visible, big movements, honest angles. More are on the way as they pass the same bar; none will arrive before they do.
Nothing to upload
is the design.
The pose model runs on the handset, so the system never needs your video — and never takes it.
Analysed and discarded
Every frame is processed on the phone and thrown away. No video uploaded, no video stored, no photos kept — there is nothing to leak, because nothing leaves.
Airplane mode counts fine
The whole pipeline is local, so a set counts with no signal at all. Only the score travels, and only when you finish a duel.
Numbers, not footage
Rep counts, form scores, your duel record — what a scoreboard needs. The details are in the privacy policy, which is written to stay boring.
One honest boundary: form feedback exists to score reps fairly — it’s a game-accuracy feature, not coaching and not a health assessment. Beastie is a general fitness product, not medical advice.
See it call your reps.
Sixty seconds from install to your first counted set.
