How to check your squat form with nothing but your phone

You cannot watch your own squat. That is the whole problem. Mirrors show you one angle at the moment you are least able to judge it, and filming yourself only helps if you sit down afterward and review the footage, which nobody does. The fix is having something watch the reps as they happen and tell you where your knees and hips went.

Set the phone up in about thirty seconds

Put the phone on the floor, leaned against a wall, a water bottle, or a bag. It does not need a tripod or a mount. Step back far enough that your whole body stays in frame at the bottom of the rep, including your head and both feet, and check that nothing crops when you descend.

Angle matters more than distance. A three-quarter view, roughly halfway between straight-on and full profile, gives the clearest read on knees, hips, and ankles at the same time. Straight-on hides how far your hips travel back. Full profile hides one whole side of your body.

Lighting is the last thing worth caring about. Even, front-facing light beats a bright window behind you, which turns you into a silhouette. Wear something that contrasts with the wall or floor. Baggy clothing over the hips and knees makes any pose estimate harder, whether a person or a phone is doing the estimating.

What a clean squat looks like

Feet about shoulder width, toes turned out slightly. The descent starts at the hips, not the knees. Knees track over the toes rather than collapsing inward. Torso angle stays roughly constant instead of folding forward at the bottom. Depth is whatever you can reach without your lower back rounding.

Those are exactly the things you cannot feel reliably while you are doing them, especially past rep six when fatigue quietly changes your mechanics.

How Form Coach scores it

Form Coach watches your body through the camera and draws a live skeleton overlay while you move. It counts the reps for you, so no more losing track at eleven. More importantly it gives you a form score for each rep, calculated from joint angles rather than handed down as one vague number for the whole set.

That per-rep breakdown tells you where your knees, hips, and elbows actually went. When you finish, the summary shows total reps, average form score, and your best and worst rep, which is usually the interesting comparison. Over time, the history calendar and the charts show your form score trend per exercise, your reps per week, and your longest streak.

A score for the whole workout tells you almost nothing, but a score for rep nine tells you exactly when your form started to go.

It works the same way for push-ups, lunges, and planks. Everything runs on the phone. No account, no upload, no subscription, and the camera feed never leaves the device, which also means it works fine in a gym basement with no signal. It is on iPhone and Android.

Start with one set of ten and just watch the numbers. The first session is usually a small surprise, and the second one is where you start fixing something. When you are ready to add a second movement, the other apps we make follow the same idea: do the work on the device, and show the person the real number.