ProSoCHE

Personal development through mindfulness, attention training, and philosophical practice

6-min read

ProsoStride is here

A year ago I started running again. Slowly. Embarrassingly slowly.

I had stopped, somewhere in my forties, the way people in their forties stop most things - gradually, then all at once. I came back not because I had decided to “get fit” again but because my resting heart rate was creeping up, my blood pressure with it, and the thing I was supposed to do for it was the thing I had stopped doing.

The instinct, when you start running again at 51, is to pretend you are still 25. Eight kilometres because eight kilometres used to be easy. Five-minute pace because five-minute pace used to be normal. The result, predictably, was a knee that did not want me to do this anymore and a chest that agreed.

So I switched approach. I had been reading about a Japanese method called Niko-Niko - “smile-pace” - where you go slow enough that you could hold a conversation, and you go consistently. Hiroaki Tanaka’s book sat on my bookshelf for two years before I actually read it. I should have read it sooner.

The premise is uncomfortable: most amateur endurance athletes train too hard. Not too little. Too hard. The polarised-training research suggests serious athletes spend ~80% of their time at low aerobic intensity and ~20% at high. Amateurs invert this - most of our training ends up in the medium-hard middle, which builds neither the aerobic base nor the high-end capacity. The fastest improvement available to most amateur runners, statistically, is running more of their easy runs more easily.

I found that, in practice, “running more of my easy runs more easily” was harder than it sounds. Heart rate lags. Pace fights uphills. Effort is hard to self-judge when you are already breathing. What worked, eventually, was cadence - the rate at which my feet hit the ground. If I held cadence in a tight band (around 175 steps per minute for slow jogging, around 110 for brisk walking), my speed self-regulated to whatever the slope demanded, my form held together, and I stayed under the heart-rate ceiling without thinking about it.

The two apps I tried for this didn’t quite do it. One had a metronome but did not listen to my actual cadence. The other tracked my cadence in retrospect - useful for a Sunday-evening review, useless during the run. Neither knew what Niko-Niko was. Neither respected that I just wanted a small audio cue when I drifted.

So I built ProsoStride.

What it is

It listens to your steps and gives you a quiet audio cue when you drift outside your cadence band. That’s it. That’s the feature.

The cadence band is personalised - to your age, optionally to your height, optionally to whether you want a “moderate” or “vigorous” target - using peer-reviewed research, not vibes. You can override every value. The research is the starting point; you are the editor.

It runs on the iPhone alone. Pop the phone in a pocket or armband, plug in earbuds, walk out the door. If you have an Apple Watch, pair it and you also get heart-rate zones based on Tanaka’s 138-minus-half-your-age formula. There is an interval timer for the days you fancy a structured session.

That is the app. There is no leaderboard. There is no “personal record”. There is no congratulatory animation when you finish. There is no subscription.

What v2.0 ships today

The earlier preview version (1.x) needed an Apple Watch for the core experience. Version 2.0 changes that. The biggest shifts:

The upgrade is free if you bought 1.x. There will be no v3.0 subscription.

Who I built it for

Two kinds of people, really:

  1. People who already know about Niko-Niko or Zone 2 and want a tool that takes the methodology seriously instead of sticking it on a generic running app.
  2. People who do not know any of that yet, but who suspect that whatever fitness tracker they tried last gave up on them. People who want to walk and jog at a pace their body actually likes.

Both of those are me, at different points in the last few years.

What it isn’t

It isn’t a coach. It isn’t a training plan. It isn’t a “transformation” tool. It isn’t going to make you faster at racing.

What it can do, quietly: help you build an aerobic base, lower your resting heart rate, lower your blood pressure if it’s high, sleep better, and lose body fat slowly as a side effect. None of those are guaranteed. All of them are documented effects of consistent low-intensity cardio in middle-aged adults. My own n=1 data lines up with the literature, which surprises me less than I expected it to.

If you want to read the methodology in more depth, the Niko-Niko methods page is the longer version of this story.

Honest disclaimers

What’s next

I have shipped what I personally needed. The next things on my list:

If you have a feature request, drop me a line at hi-stride [at] prosoche.co . I read everything.

The app is on the App Store now: ProsoStride.

ProsoStride is available on the App Store. One purchase. No subscription. No ads.

prosoche.co - @father_bart

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