HOME. Kogonada. 8 Personal Fitness Tools to Get You Ready for Beach Season. If you're planning to hit the beach this summer, now is the time to start working out. That could mean losing weight, bulking up or just supercharging the fitness goals you've been working on all winter long. But if you're just getting started, or picking up after giving up on a past resolution, you'll want to pick a fitness program that will stick. After all, you only have so much time and energy each day — you'll want to be as efficient as possible. A personalized fitness program will cater to your body's unique needs. There are lots of exercises that can be done at home or on your own, and many don't require an expensive personal trainer.
Alternatively, group fitness classes or wandering through the gym for an hour can sometimes make you feel like you're working out, but without the desired results. If you're looking to maximize the time in your week to the best workout for your body, check out the tools below that offer workouts customized to your personal plan and preferences. 1. 2. Fitocracy's First App Makes Fitness Tracking Competitive.
Instead of just tracking your workouts, a new iPhone app called Fitocracy lets you compete against other users and friends. The startup has been running a browser-based social fitness contest without a native mobile component since February 2011. Its 250,000 registered users earn points by logging fitness activities in order to “level up,” earn badges or rank on a leaderboard — all with the option to join activity-specific groups and follow friends' progress. Users also earn extra points for completing specific groups of fitness tasks or “quests.” The “Paperboy” quest, for instance, suggests this: “Take a ride around your neighborhood.
If you hit a trashcan make sure you sprint away from that lady with the knife and rabid dog.” That’s 20 minutes of biking and 0.5 miles of sprinting, according to Fitocracy. Fitocracy's user experience, however, has been hampered by requiring users to log activities — whether crunches, kayaking or hula hooping — at their browsers.
Overcoming the User Engagement Crisis with Gamification. Denis Duvauchelle is CEO and co-founder of Twoodo, helping your team organize itself using simple #hashtags. People today are bombarded with information, ads, offers, messages, videos, articles, tools, websites. It’s extremely difficult to get their attention. Even worse, once you have their attention it’s often more difficult to retain it. This holds true both for consumers and employees across almost all fields and industries. What is gamification? In its simplest sense, gamification is showing users how to do something and rewarding them for doing it right or figuring out the problem.
Rewards in gamification normally tap into our psychological need to feel successful and accomplished. Gamification has been extremely successful in online learning, such as languages. But this is a very advanced example – their entire service is based on gamification. The gamification process must show users in a logical and bite-sized way how to learn to use your product correctly.
Peer Influence Key in Quitting Smoking | The Partnership at Drugfree.org. Smokers are more likely to quit if they have friends, family members, or coworkers who did, researchers say. CNN reported May 21 that researcher Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and colleagues also found that smokers tend to quit in groups, and that those who don't join the crowd tend to find themselves increasingly socially isolated.
Researchers found, for example, that when one spouse quits smoking, the other partner is 67 percent less likely to smoke. When a friend quits, the odds of the smoking continuing their addiction drops by 36 percent, about the same rate of influence found for siblings and coworkers. Even friends of friends can influence smoking behavior, suggesting a cascade effect, the researchers said. “Your smoking behavior depends upon not just the smoking behavior of the people you know but also the people who they know,” said Christakis. Fitness Trackers Are Useless Without Real-Time, Personalized Analysis.
No one has arms long enough to wear all of the activity-tracking wristbands currently on sale or awaiting release. These devices count your steps, measure your sleep and some even monitor your heart rate. But do you know how this information immediately applies to your lifestyle, or what you should do with it? The services behind these trackers need to invest in immediacy by providing useful information, ideally in real time, so we can optimize our wealth of data into action. For example, activity monitors commonly use an embedded accelerometer to measure how much a user tosses and turns in the night. Theoretically, that translates into the amount of time he spends awake, sleeping lightly or sleeping deeply.
James Park, chief executive of Fitbit, told me the results compare well to data from sleep laboratories. However, sleep is not yet well understood. Travis Bogard, vice president of product management and strategy at Jawbone, says, The same problem applies to heart rate. McGrath adds, “ Forget the Gym: This Service Charges Less the More You Workout. The fitness chain business model, as is widely known, relies on you not working out. A gym sells more memberships than it can comfortably handle, based on the assumption that most of its members won't show up. But what if there were a gym where you paid less per month the more you worked out? That's kind of the concept behind Fitmob, a website and iOS app that launched Thursday, except that Fitmob shuns gym locations in favor of outdoor classes and indoor spaces rented by the hour.
Anyone can sign up to run a class, which gets a star rating and reviews from participants. Here's the key point: the first time you work out with Fitmob in a given week, you pay $15. "We want to put the economics of fitness back in the hands of the people," Raj Kapoor, Fitmob CEO, told Mashable. There are some 250,000 certified fitness trainers in the U.S., according to Kapoor, and most are under-utilized. Content-matrix.jpg (JPEG Image, 1541x1200 pixels) - Scaled (53%) Elite Athlete Workouts on Yahoo Sports.
LG Announces its Rival to Nike's FuelBand Gadget. LG has entered the wearable fitness gadget space after it announced the Lifeband Touch, its newest attempt at rivaling the likes of Nike’s FuelBand. The device is worn on the wrist and tracks a range of physical activity — including steps taken, distance covered — as well as calorie consumption. The Lifeband Touch pairs with iOS or Android devices using Bluetooth 4.0, and can be used to accept incoming calls and play/control music. There’s no news on its price or release dates just yet, but the device will be shown off at CES so we’ll bring you more details (including close-up pics) when we have them. LG showcased the Activity Tracker wristband at CES 2013, but it was never released. . ➤ LG announcement in Korean Follow all of our CES 2014 coverage.
89 of the best iOS apps launched in 2013. Nike+ Move In the same month that Nike launched its all-new Fuelband, the sports giant also rolled out its brand new Nike+ Move app, to take advantage of the iPhone 5s’s M7 chip, a motion coprocessor that tracks the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. The Nike+ Move app uses the M7 chip to convert your movement into NikeFuel — a metric created by Nike to tell you how active you are. More specifically, Nike+ Move measures when, where and how you move and lets you compare these stats with your friends or other Nike+ Move users around you. ➤ Nike+ Move Nutrino Nutrino is a virtual personal nutritionist – you tell the app your exercise level and eating habits and it offers up suitable meals. These meals are added to a shopping list, and if you’re in a popular chain restaurant or cafe, the app can offer up recommendations tailored to the menu on offer. ➤ Nutrino Whisk You can save recipes as your favorites, or go straight to the checkout.
. ➤ Whisk Argus ➤ Argus. 10 fitness apps that will reshape your workout. I’ve been hearing quite a bit of entrepreneurial buzz from L.A. recently. The city known for its Hollywood productions and its chiseled, beach bodies is making waves with new technology startups. Watch It Now Entertainment, founded in 2004, is positioning itself to capitalize on the $30 billion a year fitness industry with a full service production house that pumps out hundreds of celebrity workout videos a year. While the site’s design isn’t much to look at, its client roster is: Brooke Burke, Sting and Trudie Styler, Tara Stiles, Deepak Chopra, Brooklyn Decker, George St Pierre and Carmen Electra are just a few. In an email cross-fire, we caught up with WIN’s Founder and President Darren Capik, who says he always finds time for a workout so that his body remains healthy and invigorated. Six days a week, he’s either cycling, spinning or doing CrossFit. “Varying my routine helps to strengthen my body.
SixPack App Authentic Yoga Lose It! While not the most elegantly designed app, Lose It! Fitbit’s latest iOS app update will monitor your fitness activity using your iPhone 5s. 30 December '13, 11:37pm Follow Fitbit has released an iOS app update that will enable users to monitor their activity right from their iOS device, no longer necessarily requiring the purchase of its hardware. Called Mobile Tracker, the feature is likely a competitor to what Nike’s Move iOS app offers. It’s also only available to those with iPhone 5S devices, since it’ll be using the built-in M7 chip installed on it. Extending itself away from the hardware space, Fitbit is giving users greater flexibility without having to spend nearly $100 on its wearable wristband. Of course, now that Fitbit is no longer device-dependent, it can focus on gathering more data and developing new features based on its curation. ➤ Fitbit for iOS Photo credit: Ilia Yefimovic/Getty Images.
Label the world for calorie burn - Rate stairs - Get free posters - StepJockey. No Gym Fitness. Guitar Hero Creator Launches Cardio Fitness Game. The line between workout and play grows ever thinner. Nintendo games such as Just Dance and Wii Fit brought movement to the living room with console-enabled games. Now gaming comes to the gym (or home cardio equipment) with Blue Goji, a fitness game from the makers of Guitar Hero. The game element is viewed on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and is familiar — your animated avatar might be in a boat race or boxing competition, but speed or power comes from Goji's fitness tracker, either in your pocket or clipped to your belt. The only other hardware is the two controllers, with two buttons each — these fit on the handles of gym cardio equipment such as ellipticals or bikes, while Blue Goji ships with two foam batons that can be substituted to make holding the controllers easier when walking or running on a treadmill. The app itself is free to download and syncs with the activity tracker via Bluetooth 4.0.
Guitar Hero's parent company was sold in 2006 and the division shut down in 2011.