Fitness and technology have gone hand in hand since the invention of the scale. When people set goals, they want to be able to track them. Fitness goals are especially quantifiable: inches lost, miles run, pounds lifted. There are scores of gadgets and apps you can use to track every aspect of your journey to health. However, the Tech-Savvy Singer understands that not everyone can afford new toys, nor do all of her readers use smart phones. So we’re going to cover an option that everyone who bothers reading this column can access: websites. Here are a few that have come across my desk recently that I hope you’ll enjoy.
MyFitnessPal.com
This site was recommended to me by a new mom trying to lose her baby weight, so I figured she should know. It’s mostly known as a food diary/calorie counter, but has features for exercise as well. Like many fitness sites, you enter your current weight and weight-loss goals, and it calculates how many calories you should be consuming and burning. It’s handy that it breaks nutrition down into carbs, fat, and protein, and supposedly it can conform to different popular diet plans (Atkins, South Beach, etc.), but I couldn’t figure out how to change that setting. (Didn’t think they’d have a “vegetarian high-protein” option anyway.)
The diet tracking is pretty great. The database contains everything I’ve eaten so far today, from my Field Roast Smoked Apple Sage Vegan Sausage to my grande soy caramel macchiato (Yeah, I go to Starbucks. I live in the suburbs now; it’s what you do. Wanna fight about it?). Because I have a lot of experience with dieting and technology, I was meticulous enough to add the olive oil I cooked my sausage in. I thought there should have been some sort of prompt or separate field to add preparation ingredients, such as oil and salt.
The exercise section was quite disappointing to me. The site’s list of exercises did not contain a single exercise I did today, from aerial acrobatics (closest I could find was “Gymnastics, general”) to any of the weightlifting exercises I did. The only thing I found that I did today was walking, and that was just to get my caramel macchiato, but I’m glad they gave me an extra 120 calories to burn for it.
So I’d say if you’re the average dieter/exerciser, counting calories and walking on the elliptical, this website has it all. It has all the tools you need and is social media connected. However, if you’re a serious gym rat, look elsewhere.
LiveStrong.com
Another of my nerdy-healthy friends pointed me toward LiveStrong.com—yeah, the Lance Armstrong thing. It’s a much flashier website than MyFitnessPal, with well thought-out graphics and inspiring articles.
The food section is more customizable, too. Not only can you choose what meal you ate each food item at, but you can enter what time you ate. It makes me giggle that after you’ve entered each item, instead of “Enter” or “Go,” the button you click reads, “I ate this.” It really brought on the guilt when I had to type in the half bag of trail mix I downed before the gym. Yes, I ate it . . . OK?
Exciting for me, a tap water junkie, you can add how many glasses of water you’ve drunk. But I was disappointed to see that you can change your nutritional intake goals only if you pay for a premium package, so I’m just going to have to put up with this thing telling me 102 grams of protein is too much. Come on, Lance.
Surprisingly, the fitness catalogue was even more pathetic than MyFitnessPal’s. Not only did it not let me enter “Turkish Get-Up,” but it doesn’t seem to know what bench presses and deadlifts are. So “Weight lifting—free weights or machine, moderate” it is. I guess this website is only interested in your cardio. If you have fitness goals besides losing weight, this isn’t the site for you.
Fitocracy.com
After those non-gym-rat-friendly sites, I was excited to log into Fitocracy.com. This is really a website for gym-goers, not just calorie-burners. In fact, there is nowhere on this site to enter what you ate for lunch or calculate how many calories you burned. They do, however, have a very thorough exercise catalogue and methods of recording. For example, if you lifted a different amount of weight on your second set than your first, there’s a way to enter that (not the case on MyFitnessPal).
Fitocracy is not a weight-loss site. It is a program that aims to treat fitness as a competitive game. You earn points for logging workouts and completing “quests,” power up to higher levels, unlock new challenges, and rank yourself against your friends. Not only do they make things fun by making working out into a game, but they also have a sense of humor. Instructions for the Barbell Glute Bridge (a lying pelvic lift) ended in “If people are watching, be sure to make low grunts while thrusting” and one of the quests suggested to me was titled “Oh hai abs!” Socially, Fitocracy takes a Twitter-like approach, where you can follow who you want (based on computerized suggestions, tags, or finding people you know in real life), and they can choose whether or not to follow you back (as opposed to a Facebook-like approach, where friendship has to be mutual).
The site is still in beta and requires an invite to join. This is probably for the best, as there seem to still be a few bugs to work out. For example, being able to enter your workout by “routines” instead of exercise-per-exercise sounds like a great time saver, but that option didn’t seem to be operable when I tried it. And while they have a thorough exercise database, there were some weird holes (they had “pole dancing” but not “gymnastics”). But my main concern is for people who already know what they want out of a workout. The site’s competitive strategy could lead to overtraining, and participating in their challenges might lead you to do exercises that are not beneficial to you. If you are a power lifter, you might not find it helpful to add barbell glute bridges to your workout. In fact, it could waste gluteal energy that you need for your squats.
So if you are a gym rat looking for a good way to track your workouts, I think this is one of the best tools on the market. If you’re a newbie who’s looking for motivation and workout ideas, this is a good place for you. If you already have a smart game plan when you walk in the gym, though, don’t get caught up in the competition and get thrown off track.
MapMyFitness.com
You may know this tool as “MapMyRun” or “MapMyRide,” or perhaps through one of its lesser-known siblings, “MapMyWalk,” “MapMyHike,” or “MapMyTri.” This site has been around for years. I used to use “MapMyRun” regularly back when I was a marathoner. It’s come a long way since then, with lots of bells and whistles added. Like the other sites, you enter the duration of your workout and how far you traveled, and it is social media connected.
The main draw here, though, as you can guess from the title, is mapping. You can trace your ride or “tri” along a Google map, and the website will calculate the distance for you. Not only that, but you can add markers to designate where bathrooms are along the way, areas that are scenic, tricky climbs, pavement quality, and many more tips to share with other users or to save for yourself for next time. This is a perfect website for those who use the great outdoors as their gym, even if it’s just a walk to Starbucks.
There are many other options out there, and there are always new ones cropping up. You could keep surfing all day trying to find the perfect site for you. But I’d rather you just pick one and get to the gym!
