HoldOut: a free hold timer with a ghost line and a medal at the end

01  What it is

HoldOut is a stopwatch with exactly one job: time how long you can hold a bodyweight position right now, and then tell you whether that beat your last attempt. You pick one of seven holds — plank, wall sit, dead hang, hollow hold, superman, glute bridge or side plank — the screen becomes a giant count-up clock, and you tap the slab under it to start. When you cannot hold any longer, you tap anywhere to stop. No account, no download, nothing to configure, and the whole thing runs in a browser tab.

What separates it from the stopwatch already on your phone is what happens when you drop. A phone timer hands you a number you have to remember. HoldOut keeps it: your best time for each hold is stored in your own browser and put back onto the clock face the next time you try that hold, as a faint marker sitting at the time to beat. Cross it and the app stamps a personal-best medal card — the thing you screenshot, or send to the person you are calling out.

Every hold also has its own page, so someone who only ever does wall sits can open the wall-sit page and land directly in that clock with the right record already loaded, no picking required. Those pages describe one timer each, which makes them a sensible entry point if you came hunting for a single hold rather than the whole set.

02  The ghost line is the whole design

Most timers count down to a number somebody else chose. HoldOut counts up, and the only target on the board is one you set yourself. Before your first attempt at a given hold there is nothing to chase at all — the marker simply reads FIRST HOLD, and whatever you do becomes the record. After that it reads BEAT 4:32, and the moment your clock passes that mark the label flips to PB! and stays flipped for the rest of the attempt.

That flip is the piece of design everything else hangs off. A count-up clock has no end, so nothing tells you when to stop except your own arms — and that is the honest part of the format. The time you record is where you actually dropped, not the moment you theoretically passed your old best. Cross your record and hold three more seconds and you have a record of those three seconds: nothing is rounded up, and there is no way to log a hold you did not do.

It also means the app has no opinion about whether your time is any good. There are no ranks, no targets, no recommended hold durations and no bonus for hitting a number. A four-minute plank and a forty-second hollow hold are simply two records, each measured against itself, on the day it was set.

03  One tap to start, tap anywhere to drop

The clock is built for a person who is shaking. While a hold is running the entire stage — the numerals, the margins, all the space around them — is one large drop target, so you are never trying to hit a small button with a trembling arm. There is also a persistent Drop slab at the bottom of the screen, and if you are at a keyboard, Space or Enter stops the clock too. Starting is deliberately the harder action: a single Hold slab sits beneath a clock reading zero, so a phone left face-up on the floor cannot burn a run on its own.

The face itself is oversized split-flap numerals on a matte concrete backdrop, turning over one whole second at a time. Below ten minutes it reads like 4:32; from ten minutes on it grows to five characters (10:04) and scales itself down so it never spills off a narrow phone in portrait. A screen-reader timer exposes the same elapsed time as words — "4 minutes 32 seconds" — and the flip animation honours your reduced-motion setting.

One control is genuinely easy to miss. On the ready screen, beside Hold, sits a small haptic-cue toggle, off by default. Switch it on and the device gives a short pulse on each whole second while you hold, so you can feel the clock instead of watching it. It fires only where the browser supports vibration — Android does, iOS Safari does not — and where it is unsupported the toggle stays quiet rather than pretending to work.

04  What is actually on the medal

Dropping a hold opens a result screen built around one artefact: a stamped medal card. It carries a PERSONAL BEST plate when you have beaten your old time — or a calmer logged variant when you have not — the name of the hold, the date stamped in the style of a mint mark, and your time as by far the largest thing on it. Beneath that sits a small bar chart of your recent attempts for that hold, up to the last dozen, with the personal best notched in the accent colour. So the card shows not just today's number but the run of numbers that produced it.

The card is built to be sent, and it says so: baked into it is a callout reading "BEAT 4:32 →", addressed to whoever receives it. On a phone, Share opens the system share sheet with the line already written. On a desktop, Copy link puts the challenge and the link on your clipboard. Download PNG rasterises the card to an image file if you would rather post it somewhere a link will not render. None of the three asks for an account.

Open somebody else's link and you see their medal, drawn on your screen from the data in the URL itself, with no sign-in on your end and no round trip needed for the card to appear. All they get from you is the hold, the time, the date and the personal-best stamp — a shared card carries no attempt history. Underneath it sits one button reading "Start your own — beat 4:32", which drops you into the picker. A link that has expired or been truncated gets a plain record-not-found message with the same invitation attached, rather than a dead end.

05  Where the records live, and what this app will not do

Everything you record stays on your device. Best times and the last twelve attempts per hold live in your browser's local storage, and nothing is tied to an account because there is no account. Two consequences are worth knowing before you start. Your records do not travel between devices — a plank record set on your phone is not on your laptop. And clearing your browsing data clears them, the same way it clears a saved form.

The app also does not coach, which is a scope decision rather than an oversight. It will not tell you how to brace, how long you ought to be able to hold, or whether your hips were sagging. There is no form or technique guidance anywhere in it, no training plan, no rep targets, no calorie or heart-rate maths, and no reminders or notifications to pull you back. A stopwatch can time a hold, but it cannot see you, so it has no business judging whether the hold counted. You are the only judge of that, and the app says as much in its own footer: it is for fun, not fitness or medical advice.

What is left once you strip the rest away is small and honest. A clock. A marker showing the time to beat. A card that proves you beat it. If you want a training programme, this is the wrong tool, and it does not pretend otherwise. If you want to know whether the number went up since last week, that is precisely what it does.

06  Questions people ask

Is HoldOut free, and is there anything to install?

Free, and nothing to install. It is an ad-supported page that runs in your browser — no app store, no account, no email address, no paywall on any part of it. Advertising appears only on the hold picker and below the result, never over a running clock.

How long should I be able to hold a plank?

HoldOut will not answer that, on purpose. It has no targets, no benchmarks and no recommended hold times, and the only number it knows is your own last attempt at that hold. It times a hold you have already decided to do; it has no view on how long that should be.

Where are my records stored, and do they sync between my phone and my laptop?

In your own browser, on your own device. There is no account, so nothing syncs: a record set on your phone will not appear on your laptop, and clearing your browsing data erases every record you have. The trade is that nothing about your holds ever leaves the device you did them on.

Can I share a result with someone who has never used the app?

Yes, and they need no account to see it. The link opens their copy of the medal — the hold, the time, the date and the personal-best stamp — with a button inviting them to beat it. That card is redrawn from the link itself, so it appears even when the app's server side is unavailable; only the initial page load needs the network.

Why does it say I outlasted 62% of plank holds? Is there a leaderboard?

There is no leaderboard and nothing to climb — no ranking, no names, no seasons. That line compares your time against the spread of times other people have logged for the same hold, and the small "holds logged today" counter beside it is a shared tally rather than a scoreboard. Both are flavour rather than the point, and both simply do not appear when they cannot be worked out honestly. Neither one changes the medal.

Is this fitness or medical advice?

No. It is a stopwatch and an entertainment challenge. It gives no form correction, no technique guidance, no training plan and no health metrics, and it cannot tell whether a hold you logged was performed well. Whether an activity suits you, and how long to keep going, is a decision only you can make — stop the moment something feels wrong, and talk to a qualified professional if you are in any doubt.

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