Guide

How to film your lifts with your phone.

Ask five lifters where to put the phone for a form check and you get five answers. Here is the setup that works for a coach, a form-check thread, and the camera in Loopform AI. It takes five seconds and needs nothing you don't already own.

A phone propped upright against the leg of a wooden dining chair on a living-room floor — The whole setup: a phone leaning on a chair leg. A dumbbell, a water bottle or a shoe does the same job.

The six rules

Knee height

Prop the phone upright, screen facing you, at about knee height. Not on the floor, which stretches your legs and hides your hips, and not on a bench, which flattens your depth.

Face the right way

Squats: face the camera, so it can see both knees and whether they drift in. Push-ups, planks, lunges, hinges and presses: side-on, so it can see depth and the line of your body. The table below has each one.

Two to three metres back

Six to ten feet. Close enough to read the joints, far enough that you stay in frame at the top and the bottom.

Whole body in frame

Head and feet both visible, with a little room above and below. If you have to choose, be too far rather than too close.

Light in front of you

Face the window or the light. A window behind you turns you into a silhouette and no coach, human or camera, can see a knee through that.

Film the last working set

Form breaks when you are tired. The warm-up tells nobody anything; the last set tells the whole story.

Where the phone goes, movement by movement

These are the exact setups the coach in Loopform AI asks for, and they work just as well for a video you send to a human.

Movement	Phone	You
Squat, goblet squat, box squat	Knee height, 6 to 8 feet back	Facing the camera, feet in frame
Push-up, plank	On the floor, propped up a little, 6 to 8 feet away	Side-on, head to feet in frame
Lunge, step-up	Knee height, 6 to 8 feet back	Side-on, with room to step
Hinge, deadlift, Romanian deadlift	Hip height, 6 to 8 feet back	Side-on, head to feet in frame
Overhead press	Chest height, 8 to 10 feet back	Side-on, with room above your head

What it looks like when it is right

A woman standing side-on in a living room, whole body in frame, seen from a phone at knee height — At home: head to feet in frame, the phone at knee height two metres away. Seen from the side here so you can judge the depth yourself; the coach asks you to face it for squats.

The same woman at the bottom of a squat to a chair, still fully in frame — At the bottom she is still in frame. That is what the distance buys you.

A woman at the bottom of a bodyweight squat beside a bench in an ordinary gym, filmed from the floor — In the gym: the same distance and height, the phone propped against a dumbbell.

A man doing incline push-ups with his hands on a gym bench, side-on, whole body in frame — Push-ups and planks: phone on the floor, side-on. The body line is the whole point.

Small things that matter

Portrait, not landscape. A standing body is tall. Portrait fits it with room to spare and is what every phone coach app expects.
Lean it, don't hold it. A friend's hands drift. A chair leg doesn't.
Mirrors. Point the camera away from a mirror wall if you can; two of you confuse a camera coach and a form-check thread alike.
Barbell lifts. On a deadlift, stand so the bar is on the far side of you from the camera, so the plates don't hide your hips. On a barbell squat, facing the camera, the bar is behind your head and out of the way.
A quick check. Before the set, glance at the screen: can you see your head and your feet? Then forget the phone exists.

Why this is the setup Loopform AI asks for

The app watches you through the phone camera, counts your reps and says what it sees out loud while you lift. It reads the same things a coach reads from the side: how deep you go, whether your knees drift in, whether your back holds its line. So the coach's first instruction is the same as this guide's: prop your phone up, a couple of metres back, and face it the way the movement needs. The coach tells you, out loud, when you are in frame. For what it watches on each movement, see the form-check guide; for how a rep is counted and what makes a camera miss, see Can an app count my reps?

Video never leaves your phone unless you choose to share a clip. Rep counting and form cues are free, with or without a subscription.

Join the iPhone beta See how the coach works

Android arrives in January.