A push-up leaderboard nobody can fake

A leaderboard is only as trustworthy as its weakest input, and in most fitness apps that input is a text field. If the ranking is built on 'I did 200 push-ups today', the top of the board selects for whoever is least bothered about lying, and everyone below it quietly stops caring. The problem is not that people are dishonest. It is that a system with no verification leaves honesty unrewarded.

The fix is not a stricter honour code. It is making the number machine-produced. Because Workout Samurai counts your push-ups with the camera rather than asking you for a total, the leaderboard has something to rank that you did not type. That single decision is what lets a workout game have competitive stakes at all: a season standing is a claim about work you did, and the claim can be checked.

1. 1The session is server-issued. A ranked set starts by asking the server for a session, which is why there is no offline ranked play. The server knows when it began.
2. 2The device counts. On-device pose detection counts each rep, generously. It will not silently drop reps you actually did.
3. 3The count is submitted with metadata. Duration and validity signals travel with the number so it can be checked in context. No video, image or frame is ever sent.
4. 4The server scores strictly. Physically impossible input is rejected outright. Suspicious sessions still count but are flagged for human review.
5. 5Results can be reversed. Progress, ranks and rewards obtained in breach of the fair-play rules can be adjusted, withheld or reversed.

Clans are asynchronous by design. Nobody has to be online at the same time, there is no lobby to fill and no session to miss. You do your set when you can, and it lands in the clan's totals. That is the only model that survives contact with real adult schedules across several time zones.

• A shared vault the clan funds together, from reps its members actually did.
• A town hall the clan upgrades collectively as the vault grows.
• A weekly clan boss that the whole roster fights, described in the next section.
• Clans never disband. If a leader leaves, leadership passes to the longest-tenured member rather than the clan collapsing.
• Creating and joining a clan is free. Clan features are part of the free game, not a subscription tier.

That last point matters more than it looks. A social system behind a paywall fragments the player base and makes the leaderboard less honest, not more. If half the roster cannot take part in the thing the clan is built around, the clan stops being a reason to show up.

Once a week the clan gets a shared fight. The clan boss has one health bar for the whole roster, and every member's verified push-ups take a piece out of it. Nobody has to be awake at the same time as anyone else, which is the point: a member in Seoul chips away in the morning, a member in Lisbon finishes the job that evening, and the damage is cumulative either way.

It changes what a clan feels like. Solo, a hard set is just a number going up. In a raid week, the set you almost skipped is the one that finished the boss, and the difference between a clan that clears it and a clan that does not is usually three people doing an ordinary amount of work rather than one person doing a heroic amount.

Dōjō Premium allows raid runs to go back to back. It buys tempo, not damage, and it never touches where the clan or its members finish on the board. The full breakdown is on Dōjō Premium.

Everyone begins a season Unranked and places into a division from there. Seasons are scored on verified reps accumulated over the season, so they measure consistent work rather than one heroic afternoon. At the end of a season the standings soft-reset and rewards pay out in cosmetics, never in rank and never as a head start on the next season.

The thresholds between divisions are held server-side and are not published, here or anywhere else. That is deliberate. A published cut-off turns a season into an arithmetic problem to be gamed on the last night, and it would have to move every season anyway as the population changes. What is fixed is the ordering and what the ordering measures.

There are two ladders in the game and they answer different questions. A samurai title is your standing overall: it comes from your level, which comes from lifetime XP, and reps are worth 10 XP each before any bonuses. A division is your standing this season. One is a career record, the other is a snapshot of recent work, and they move independently.

Treat that last column as a floor and nothing more. It is the fewest lifetime reps that could reach the title if reps were your only source of XP, and clearing campaign levels pays XP on top, so real players arrive earlier than the table suggests. Levels and titles explains the maths, and the samurai rank calculator will do it on your own numbers.

So a Hatamoto sitting in Silver is not a contradiction. It describes somebody with years of verified work behind them who has not trained much this season. Equally, a new player in Gold is somebody who has been relentless for three weeks. Neither ladder can be bought, in either direction.

The usual office push-up challenge dies for one of two reasons: somebody has to collect everyone's numbers in a spreadsheet, or somebody obviously inflates theirs and the rest lose interest. Both are counting problems. A clan removes the spreadsheet, and server-side validation removes the argument.

Because it is asynchronous and needs no equipment, a group can run a challenge from four offices, three time zones and one living room floor. All anyone needs is a phone they can stand upright and somewhere to put their hands. Download it on iOS or Android, agree on a clan name, and let the weekly boss do the organising nobody wants to do.