Inside the New RuckWell Update: Smarter Features for Better Training

0:00 App updates usually mean cosmetic changes or features you'll never use. This one's different. The latest RuckWell update changes how ruckers can train, recover, and make smarter decisions between sessions. That's what we're breaking down today. In today's episode, Chris Hayes, the founder and developer of RuckWell, is back on the podcast to talk us through the recently released RuckWell app update, which dropped last Friday. This is a practical breakdown of what's changed, why it matters, and how ruckers should actually use the new metrics that are provided performance, and health. During our conversation, we dig into the update, covering the redesigned training experience, customizable alerts, the new map features, route navigation, recovery scores, heart rate analytics, and more. You're listening to the Rucker's Edge podcast, a show all about rucking that is designed to help you improve your rucking routine, lose weight, and ultimately gain your strength and energy back.

0:50 Each episode dives into the science, stories, and strategies behind rucking. You'll learn from top ruckers, coaches, nutrition experts, and performance specialists who break down what it takes to train smarter, recover faster, and stay ready for the next challenge. So whether you're new to rucking or an experienced rucker that's already logged hundreds of miles, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Spencer. Thanks for listening in. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Hayes. Chris, welcome back to the Rucker's Edge podcast. It's good to have you here again. Thanks for being back. I've been keeping up with your Instagram and I saw that you just did the JFK 50 mile race. Congratulations, man. So what was that experience like? Thanks. Yeah, it was kind of a crazy race, to be honest.

1:34 Just a little bit of background on the race itself. It's it was a 16 mile beginning on the Appalachian Trail. So there was a. good amount of elevation there right at the jump and after that it kind of leveled out and we did basically a marathon on like this canal trail so relatively flat and then it ended with some rolling hills and some decent elevation again at least you know for being 40 some miles in but yeah the whole the whole thing was was really good um you know i did it with my brother and we've been And signing up for these events that push us past our comfort zone, let's say. Nice. For the last few years or so, we've done, you know, high rocks, all the GVF stuff. I tried my hand at one triathlon, which I probably won't do again, at least for a while. Yeah. But it's good to try stuff like that. Yeah. Oh, gosh. I did one triathlon back when I was just out of high school. And I quickly learned how bad of a swimmer I am. Last one out the water. Not a good situation. But man, congrats.

2:44 So what was a moment during that race that hit you harder than you maybe expected it to? So it's interesting all of the psychological games that you play on yourself mostly during these races. For me, it kind of hit at the marathon distance point, so 26 miles. So we had the 16 miles on the Appalachian Trail and then about 10 or so into the middle portion. And I think hitting that marathon distance, psychologically, my brain was like, OK, you just ran a marathon. You know, that's roughly twice the distance of your training runs already. And it's about the halfway point of the whole 50 miler. Wrapping that all, it was a few minutes where I was, you know, kind of wrestling with that a little bit.

3:32 Sure. Like kind of knowing that you still have, you know. so much further to go for the rest of the race. But that's awesome though. Congrats again. In your training for that, did you do any rucking? Yeah, for sure. No matter what I sign up for, rucking is always part of the routine. You know, depending on what I'm doing, I may shift more towards other workout types like running or if it's more focused on high rock specifically, I'll be doing stuff for that. But rucking I always use to keep, you know, a certain amount of cardio. Before we started recording, you had mentioned that you kind of come from a military family. Do you mind providing some information on that for the listener? Yeah, so my dad was in the Navy, and his dad was in the Army. But my dad really appreciated all of the historical sites, the battlegrounds. And I live on the East Coast, so as we were traveling for vacations and things, my dad would always look for different battlefields on our route. But we went to stuff like Gettysburg a lot. And I think growing up, I didn't really have a great appreciation for it. But getting into rucking the last several years and through GORUCK, where they have that kind of historical teaching as part of their events, that really opened my eyes and gave me an appreciation for my family's history in that. And my dad passed about 15 years ago. So it's kind of after the fact that I'm able to kind of see it for what it was. Yeah, I understand that. And I think

5:03 earlier you had mentioned you had done some GBF events. What kind of events did you do? So most of the events I've done were through the Sterling series, which is their mountain events in North Carolina. Did you do those with your brother, too? I did. Yeah. So my brother actually was. uh in florida i believe on vacation and he ended up doing a gbf um event of some sort down there but he came back and told me about it and was like oh we should check this out because this was kind of post covid post garrick involvement and so yeah we found the ones that were semi -local to us which happened to be north carolina we did several of those and then i also Did one called Operation Tab, which was in Virginia.

5:56 Very different than the mountain events. Operation Tab was a 80 pound ruck for 12 miles. And the time limit for that was either three hours or two and a half if you wanted to go for the gold tags. But I came in at two hours and 25 or 26 minutes. Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. 80 pounds for 12 miles. Yeah, that sounds very difficult to do. Any lessons learned from those events that might help other ruckers? Yeah, so going through GBF and then some of the things I talked about trying afterwards, I learned that you can be really adaptable to different events or, you know, different missions, quote unquote, having a variety of interests in these things. Once you learn what you want to do, you can tailor your training for that thing or for that event.

6:55 I mentioned high rocks. That's a lot of different strength movements and running combined. The GBF mountain ones need a lot of strength as you're going uphill. Operation Tab was a different beast altogether, requiring strength and endurance to do that under time. I mean, 80 pounds, 12 miles versus, what, 35 pounds for those 24 -hour events in Green Beret Fitness? Is that usually what it is? About that, yeah. There's certainly different training philosophies involved with those different events. So one of the main things I'm excited to talk to you about today is the update that you have coming to the Rockwell app.

7:37 And I did see a couple weeks back, or maybe it was months ago now, I'm starting to lose track of my time here now that it's the holidays and things are starting to blend in, but it's now available on Android. Is that right? Yeah, I released that probably a month or two ago. I also forget exactly when. Now that it's on Android, it sounds like you've kind of spent more time improving it and you have an update coming to the Apple version. And I have some questions and I definitely want to dig into some of the new features. But you've mentioned to me before we started recording that you're going to always be committed to having a free version of the app. I kind of wanted to talk to you about that. So why does that matter to you? the life path that I'm on. And so I wanted to provide something useful for that community. And I think being just a good community citizen is important to me. And, you know, having the opportunity to give everybody a tool to improve their lives, I think is really valuable. And honestly, you know, it's also a good launching pad for anything else that comes down the road. That's great.

8:53 I think that says a lot about the character of yourself and that you've built this tool and you want to help people prove their fitness in their lives. That's excellent. And so with this new update or this new version, you have a subscription where that, I guess, provides the user a lot more features. And I kind of want to discuss those. But the first thing I noticed when I opened up the beta version that you've let me play around with is that it looks a lot different. Can you walk us through the changes in the user experience when you open the app for the first time? For the first time, what you'll see is hopefully a new onboarding flow. which I asked a few questions basically just to kind of get to know your experience level and kind of your preferences. So I'll be asking like, why do you rock? Which could be like general fitness or weight loss, that kind of thing. What type of rock do you like to use?

9:49 Like, is it a standard go rock or is it like a hunting pack or a weight vest, that kind of thing. And what that allows me to do is actually create a set of activity loads within the app. Allow you to start your fitness, your workout quickly. So one of the really cool things that I noticed almost immediately was that there are these new like customized activities that you can kind of create. And it takes maybe a little bit of time to set up, but I think it is going to save a lot of time in the future. If you're switching between, you know, lighter rucks versus heavier rucks. I think that's a really good added feature. I really like that. I also saw that you have. Some new alerts, maybe. I don't know if I just didn't notice them in the past, but like when I rock, I start thinking about other things and not necessarily about the work that I'm doing. So those alerts kind of pull me back into it and it looks like they are customizable now. Can you talk about those a little bit? Yeah, so the alerts I had before were just for your splits. They'll be a mile or kilometer splits.

10:51 Now you can actually customize it. You can keep it the same as the splits if you want, but you could. You use a different distance or you can use a time -based alert, which may be helpful to keep you out of your funk. You can also do your pace alerts and your heart rate zone alerts as well. So how do you recommend users use the alerts? I guess, like, how do you use them? Do you typically still like to use distance alerts or do you use your heart rate alerts? Yeah, honestly, most of the time I keep it on the default, just mile split alert. Yeah. Unless I'm in a particular training cycle where I care about keeping in zone two, which definitely happens from time to time. But that's when I'll turn on the heart rate zone alert. So if you want to stay in zone two, would you set the alert for like, hey, you're now in zone three. So, you know, to like pull it back or you set it for heart rate zone one.

11:44 So, you know, go a little harder. Is that sort of what you would do? So you specify the zone that you want to be in, and then it will give you dynamic alerts for if you're once you get into the zone or if you're drifting out of it, it'll warn you. Oh, cool. Sort of like bumpers in a bowling alley. It's like, hey, you're kind of going a little too high or a little too fast. So slow your pace down a little bit. Cool. All right. Well, I'm definitely going to change my alerts to that because I have been struggling to stay within zone two. It's funny, like I'll get back thinking at the end of my rock. Yeah, I was definitely in zone two for at least half of that. I was in like zone four for like 80 percent of it. So that's a great feature. I'm going to start using that. Let's move on to the new maps and navigation. A previous guest on the show, Klinkar, who does a lot of GPF events, he was talking about how he puts maps onto his watch and it will kind of help him keep track.

12:35 But I like having, I like looking at a map or a screen. So having this feature is going to be helpful for me. So how should someone prepping for like an event on a trail start to use Ruckwell's maps and navigation features? Yes, all of the GBF events I did in North Carolina all required a certain level of navigation. And I like to joke with my brother that sometimes we can be bad at it. But typically what we do is load up the map on our phone and our watch. At the time, my brother had an Apple Watch. I think now he's using a Garmin. But we had another app, basically a running app that allows you to put in your track and we use that to track the ruck. So basically you can look at your watch and it'll point you in the right direction. And it'll also tell you like if you're going off path, it'll warning and say, hey, you should probably look at your map and figure it out. More with Chris in just a moment, including a rundown on all the new data fields included in the new update to RuckWell.

13:46 But I want to take a quick break to say thanks again for listening to the podcast. Please text this episode with a fellow rucker that might find it interesting or a friend that could benefit from rucking. Sharing this episode will help the show grow and help more people improve their health and lives. Okay, back to it. Let's talk about the home screen intelligence. This is really cool. So when you first open the app, like I mentioned, it looks completely different. You have all kinds of different features available to view there. And I really like the quick start. Like if you already have a customizable workout, you just hit the button. You can just start going really quickly. But like I mentioned, there's a bunch of metrics on the home screen. What are some of the more important metrics that you have provided on the home screen? So the home screen.

14:30 I'm made to be glanceable information. So typically when I load it up, you know, there's a few scores on there I'll just get a glance at and then kind of use that as information on what to do next. So the recovery score is tracking things like your sleep, your heart rate. It does include your recent strain to say like. how hard can I go today kind of thing. And I mentioned the strain, there's a ruck load metric in there, which is a recent look at your workouts to say like, how hard have I been going? Okay. And if you've been going really hard, you're going to have a high ruck load and maybe you should back off a little bit. On the other hand, if you've been slacking, you'll see a pretty low ruck load, which will tell you that you should probably pick it up. go after it yeah but what's what's interesting for that ruck load is it accounts not only your ruck workouts but your other workout types like running or weight lifting will all contribute to that but the mobility and recovery tools can actually contribute positively to that ruck load so it'll lower it a little bit okay so it gives you an overall perspective cool What information does the heart rate zone analytics provide? What should we do with that, I guess?

15:51 So if you're in a training block where you want to be mindful of your heart rate, what it does is it aggregates your heart rate over the course of the week. And it'll say, hey, you've been spending this much time in this zone. And typically what you'll do if you're paying attention to it is you want to try and be in zone two. And then just touching like zone five for certain workouts. Gotcha. If someone only checks one number a day, just like a quick glance, what do you think the more important metric would be? Would it be the recovery like you mentioned earlier? If you had to pick one, then yeah, I guess the recovery. Yeah. But there's like there's a whole lane that's going to be providing users such valuable information to help with their training. So what do you hope the home screen?

16:42 becomes for athletes so i have uh future plans for it which i won't get into now but really i want it to be the the hub for like your current workout or your current kind of training week so i view most of my workout and recovery details by the week so you can see on there there's also aggregations for how much distance that I cover, how much elevation, ruck work, all that stuff by the week. And that allows you to kind of get the picture spread over the week instead of just focusing on like one day at a time. Gotcha. One of the other features that I really like, if you go to the home screen, you can press on a button. It brings you up to the workout goals and it looks like you can set your own targets and you can select a route. And this is really cool. So what inspired you to set this up, this feature up? So it's pretty common that the rucking community will provide kind of standards that you want to try and hit. So one of them is being the 12 mile ruck march, right? That's a pretty common challenge that people will take on. So I wanted a way to basically set that as your target within your workout. And so. I have the goal section where you could put distance or duration or calories, if that's your thing, as

18:14 like your workout target. And it'll give you a view within your workout to say, here's your progress towards that. Are you using any of these targets for your own training when you were doing the JFK 50? Occasionally I'll do duration if I know I only have a certain amount of time to work out. And sometimes distance if... There's a particular distance target that I want to hit, but most of the time I don't. So it looks like Rockwell is really developing into something. It was already a useful tool, but with these added features, I feel like it's going to provide a lot of benefits to people kind of developing their own training plans. What problems would you be excited to maybe solve in the future?

18:57 My next phase of development will probably be to get the Android app kind of on par with this iOS update. Cool. But beyond that, I've got a long list of features that'll probably take me at least a couple of years to work through. And what you'll see is diving more into the wellness space, but also the other pillars of the ruck wall system, which the pillars are rucking, strength, training, nutrition, mobility, and optimization. So I'll be adding features that align more to those over time. I'm still curious, how long did it take you? I guess I can go back and look in the app store to see it. But how long did it take you from the previous version that you had to this revamp? How long did it take you to code all that and develop it? I have experiments that I work on from time to time. So even if I'm working on something, I'll usually be experimenting with a different feature. knowing full well that it is likely not usable until I actually dive deep on it. So for example, when I was doing the Android app, my focus was that, but on the side, I'll be like, I wonder if I could do this thing in iOS, you know, that kind of thing. So I think my last version of the iOS app was in July. Okay. So after that, I shifted to the Android app, but always had stuff kind of in the background.

20:27 Cool. Yeah, I'm always curious because I don't know the first thing about what goes into developing an app, but I'm sure it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. Okay, so it's currently out in the App Store now. So if someone updates it today, what should they do first? Well, first, subscribe to the free trial, of course. Beyond that, take a look at... The workout screen and the different options we were talking about, there's more items in there than what we've touched on. So take a look and reach out to me on social media if you have questions or comments. Is that the best place to get feedback, just reaching out on social media? Yeah, you could probably do that. If you have something perhaps more long -winded, email might be better. Cool. And what email address should they use? Support at ruckwild .com. Good deal. Chris, congrats again on launching the update to RuckWell. And thank you for creating such an amazing tool. I said this last time you were on, but it's really nice to see someone looking out for the community and developing a tool like this that people can use to track their rucks, share it with people, motivate other people, and continue on their path of improving their fitness and their health. So thanks for that. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it, Chris. Of course. Thanks for having me. All right, that wraps up my conversation with Chris Hayes. You can connect with Chris at ruckwell .com or on Instagram at ruck underscore well.

21:53 And I'll drop those links in the show notes for you. If you want to reach out to me, head on over to theruckersedge .com or on Instagram at theruckersedgepot. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to follow or subscribe to The Rucker's Edge so that you're notified of all the new episodes. And you're not going to want to miss next week's episode because we're talking with Dr. Ryan Peebles, a physical therapist that specializes in back pain, and he provides really good insight into back pain management and prevention. All right, that's it for today. Thanks again for listening to this week's episode of The Rutgers Edge.