A camera sit-up counter does not watch your knees, your hands or your neck. It watches how far your torso has rotated up off the floor — and, in Pushup RPG, it measures that against a floor line it learns from you at the start of the set rather than against the room. That one design choice is why a wedge, a mattress or a sloped floor does not break the count.
Disclosure, up front: pushup.quest is published by the makers of Pushup RPG, a free camera counter on iPhone and Android. The thresholds below are our own, because they are the ones we can state exactly. Sit-ups arrived in version 2.4.1.
What the camera measures
Pose detection gives an estimated position for your shoulders and hips several times a second. The detector builds a line between them and measures the angle that line has swung away from where you were lying. Everything else is rules on top of that angle.
| Gate | Threshold | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Range | Your torso must reach 55° of lift | The bar for a rep. Roughly, coming up far enough that the movement is a sit-up rather than a crunch. |
| How it is judged | The third-highest reading of the rep, not the best one | One lucky frame cannot carry a rep — you have to actually spend time up there. |
| Coming back down | Back to 22° or less, held briefly | Reps that stop half-way down do not separate, so they do not both count. |
| Spacing | 0.6 seconds minimum between reps | A hard ceiling of 100 sit-ups per minute. |
| Hips anchored | Hips must stay within 0.65 torso lengths of where they started | The anti-cheat: it stops your whole body sliding up the floor instead of folding. |
| Torso travelled | Shoulders must move at least 0.35 torso lengths | Rocking your head and neck is not a sit-up. |
The six-second rule is not what you would guess
A rep has six seconds to complete. What happens at six seconds is the part people get wrong: the detector does not throw the rep away. It judges it on the spot with everything it has. If you had already passed 55°, it counts — you simply did not come back down, and the app tells you to. Only a rep that ran out of time without ever reaching 55° is refused.
Where to put the phone
Side-on, standing up, roughly level with your waist. The app says this out loud if it cannot find you: "I can't see you. Stand the phone up at your side, level with your waist."
One honest limitation worth knowing. The check that you are lying down and properly in frame happens when the detector first gets ready — it is not re-run on every rep. So the app is not verifying your posture rep by rep, and we would rather say that than let you assume a stricter guarantee than exists.
The thresholds are not calibrated, and we will say so
The 55° figure is a considered starting point, not a validated one. Our own source calls it the single highest-value number in the file and flags it as unmeasured — meaning nobody has yet tested it against a set of sit-ups judged by a human and confirmed the agreement rate.
We publish the number because it is more useful to you than a vague claim, and we publish this caveat with it because a threshold that has not been measured is not the same as one that has. If it turns out to be wrong, it will change.
What sit-ups do and do not do in the game
This is the part most likely to disappoint you, so it goes here rather than in the footnotes. Sit-ups are a solo training mode. They do not fight the campaign, they never earn XP, gold or loot for the work itself, they do not reach any leaderboard, and they are not written to Apple Health. Only pushups and squats drive the game.
What they do is keep your daily streak alive, and the streak is shared across every movement — so a sit-up-only day still counts as a day trained, and if that day happens to cross a streak milestone, the milestone pays out normally. They are free, with nothing behind a membership.
If you are looking for the game itself
Pushups and squats are the ones that fight. The squat detector works on a completely different principle — knee angle rather than trunk rotation — which we go through in count squats with your phone camera. If you would rather compare what is on the market first, best apps that count squats lays out the four counting methods.
Sit-ups are hard on the lower back for some people. Discomfort in the neck usually means you are pulling with your arms; sharp lower-back pain is a reason to stop and see a clinician rather than something to train through.
