The alarm that makes you do push-ups

A push-up alarm does not stop until the front camera has counted the reps you set. You put the phone on the floor, you get down, and the alarm keeps screaming until the counter hits your target. It is the most physically committing dismissal task on any alarm app, and it has one specific advantage over every other mission: you cannot do a push-up from bed. By the time rep one is done, you are on the floor, and the argument about whether to get up is already over.

In Risly it is one of four missions, alongside a camera scan, chained math and a shake. There is no snooze button behind any of them, because there is no snooze button in the app at all.

How the counting works

You prop the phone against something on the floor, or lay it flat, and get into position. The front camera tracks your body and counts a rep when you complete the full range of motion. It runs entirely on-device — no frames are uploaded, nothing is stored after the mission ends, and no server ever sees your floor. That is not a marketing line, it is the only acceptable design for an app that points a camera at you in your bedroom at 6am, and you should demand it of any app that does this.

It is not a fitness tracker and it does not pretend to be. It counts reps well enough to know you did the work; it will not tell you about your form and it is not logging your training. It is a lock, and your body is the key.

How many reps to set

The failure mode here is not laziness, it is enthusiasm. People set thirty reps the night they install the app, hate their lives on Thursday, and uninstall. Set eight. Eight is enough to be on the floor and breathing, which is the entire mechanism. The rest is vanity.

Does exercise actually cure the grogginess?

Here is where we are going to be less exciting than the fitness internet. Christopher Hilditch and Andrew McHill’s 2019 review of sleep-inertia countermeasures in *Nature and Science of Sleep* looked at the evidence for caffeine, light, sound and physical activity — and found the evidence base thin across the board. Nobody has run a proper trial of push-ups against a normal alarm. Anyone who tells you exercise is a proven cure for sleep inertia is going beyond what has been shown.

What we will defend is narrower and true. You cannot do eight push-ups while asleep. The mission takes time, it takes sustained effort, it cannot be run on autopilot, and it ends with you standing in the middle of the room with your heart rate up. Whether that "cures sleep inertia" in a laboratory sense is genuinely unknown. Whether it gets you out of bed is not in dispute.

What actually happens on the floor at 6:40am

The first rep is the worst thing that has ever happened to you. The second one is somehow worse. Around rep five something switches: your breathing changes, your heart rate is up, and the alarm stops being an emergency and starts being background noise you are working through. By rep eight you are irritated rather than desperate, and irritation is a fully awake emotion. Nobody in sleep inertia is capable of being properly annoyed.

Then the alarm stops, and you are standing in the middle of your bedroom, warm, out of breath, at 6:41am. There is no version of that scene that ends with you getting back into bed. Compare it with the standard morning, where you are horizontal, warm, in the dark, and the only action required to end the noise is a thumb. The mission is not doing anything mystical. It is changing the position of your body, and the position of your body is most of the argument.

When to pick a different mission

• Any shoulder, wrist or back problem. Do not negotiate with an alarm app about this. Use the camera scan instead.
• A shared bedroom. Doing push-ups next to a sleeping partner at 6:40am is a relationship event, not a mission.
• A very small bedroom. The camera needs to see you. If there is no floor, there is no mission.
• If your real problem is dismissing the alarm in your sleep, the scan beats push-ups, because it forces you out of the room. Bed is the problem. Distance is the answer.

The part that has to work first

No mission matters if the alarm does not ring. Most third-party alarm apps can be suppressed by a Focus or killed in the background — which is why their support pages ask you to disable silent mode and Do Not Disturb before you trust them with your morning. Risly is built on AlarmKit (iOS 26 and later), so the alarm is scheduled by the system and fires like the Clock app’s: through silent mode, through Focus, through Do Not Disturb, and even if the app was force-quit. See the anti-snooze page for the mechanics, or the full mission list.

One honest caveat, and it is the same one we put on every page: Risly is iOS-only, iOS 26 or later, and it is deliberately unpleasant. If you want to be eased into the day, buy a sunrise lamp. If you want to be on the floor doing push-ups eleven seconds after your alarm goes off, this is the app.