A menu-bar squat coach for Mac · 100% on-device
DeskSquat watches your webcam entirely on your Mac to know when you've sat too long, get you on your feet, and count your squats with you — set by set, through the workday. No cloud. No account. Not one byte leaves your machine.
What it does
DeskSquat knows when you're in the chair. Continuous sitting time accumulates quietly in your menu bar — no start button, no manual tracking, ever.
Sat past your limit? A native macOS notification taps you on the shoulder — and keeps re-nudging every few minutes until you actually get up. Getting up and stepping away counts as a break, automatically.
No stepping back, no reframing: DeskSquat counts squats from your shoulders dropping and rising, so your normal desk setup just works. Walking past, leaning in, or slumping into your chair don't count — only real down-and-up reps do.
Pick a daily goal — say, 100 squats in sets of 10 — and DeskSquat spreads the sets across your workday and calls each one at the right time. Stand up on your own and it slips into squat mode automatically.
Sitting & breaks
Squats are the medicine, but sitting is the disease — so DeskSquat measures it. Time in the chair accumulates on its own. Stand up and step away, and it's logged as a break, automatically. Your whole day lands on one timeline — every sit, every break, every set — and a stats page keeps the history: squats per day, desk time against your target, and a monthly ring calendar.
Why squats, of all things?
If you sit for a living, the question isn't "what's the best workout" — it's "what's the best movement you'll actually do, every hour, in office clothes, in the space between your chair and your desk." The research answer is squats.
Your glutes and quads are the largest muscle groups you own — and the body's biggest consumers of blood glucose. A chair takes exactly those muscles offline for hours at a stretch. A squat is the shortest path to switching them back on.
Studies that interrupt sitting with brief "exercise snacks" — chair stands, squats, one-minute efforts — consistently improve post-meal glucose and insulin response, even in people who already work out. The damage of 8 hours of sitting isn't undone by one gym session; it's undone hourly.
Working muscle pulls glucose from the blood through a contraction-driven pathway that works independently of insulin — which is why brief squat breaks measurably blunt the glucose spike of the lunch you just ate, and why they help even when insulin sensitivity is poor.
Sources: Gao et al. 2024, Enhanced muscle activity during interrupted sitting improves glycemic control, Scand J Med Sci Sports · Interrupting prolonged sitting with repeated chair stands or short walks reduces postprandial insulinemia, J Appl Physiol (2020) · Walking or body-weight squat "activity snacks" increase dietary amino acid utilization for muscle protein synthesis during prolonged sitting, J Appl Physiol (2022). DeskSquat is a coaching tool, not medical advice.
Privacy is the whole point
An always-on camera app is only acceptable if it is provably private. DeskSquat's pose model is compiled to WebAssembly and bundled inside the app — frames are analyzed in memory at ~5 fps and immediately discarded.
Google's MediaPipe pose model ships compiled into the bundle. No CDN, no model download, no server-side inference. It works with Wi-Fi off.
Point Little Snitch or a proxy at DeskSquat and watch: nothing. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash uploads, no "anonymous usage data."
Only aggregate numbers — minutes sat, breaks, squat reps — saved to a local file you can open, read, and delete anytime.
Pricing
Secure checkout by Stripe · Cards, Apple Pay & Google Pay · Priced in your local currency at checkout · Terms
Pay with card, Apple Pay or Google Pay — your license key lands in your inbox within seconds. Download the app, paste the key, done. No account, no subscription. And if it doesn't fit your desk or your webcam, the 30-day guarantee has you covered.
Download for macOS ↓
Requires macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon).
Windows version is in development — included free with your license when it ships.
Questions
No, categorically. Frames are analyzed in memory by an on-device pose model at ~5 fps and immediately discarded. No video or image is ever written to disk, and the app makes zero network requests at runtime — verify it with Little Snitch or lsof.
DeskSquat deliberately runs pose detection at a low ~5 fps, which keeps CPU usage light. It's designed to sit in your menu bar all day.
After checkout, Stripe emails you a license key within seconds. Paste it into DeskSquat's settings — activation is verified offline with a cryptographic signature, so there's no account and no license server pinging home.
There's no free trial — instead you get a 30-day money-back guarantee. If DeskSquat doesn't fit your desk, your webcam, or your habits, reply to your receipt email within 30 days and you'll get a full refund, no questions asked. Details in the refund policy.
It's in development on the same codebase. Buy now and the Windows build is included free with your license when it ships.