Introducing a series of posts written by a real doctor who's here to answer your questions about fitness, health, and everything in between.
Please send your questions to:
askthedoc@friendfit.com
With the modern means of transportation, communication, and work we find ourselves less and less active compared to our ancestors. They would walk, ride a horse, work all day on the farm or in a factory performing manual labor. Today's cars, TVs, iPhones, computers, even Facebook all work together to nudge us towards an unhealthy level of inactivity.
People that sit for more than 23 hours a week, which is just about anyone with a desk job, have higher chances of getting heart disease. Besides scheduling in some time at the gym, here are three ways you can add exercise to your regular day:
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Park farther away. When you park your car at work, the mall, and at the grocery store, park far away from the entrance. You'll not only get some shopping done, but you'll get some extra walking distance. It was observed that factory workers who parked their cars far from the entrance of the building worked better and felt healthier.
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Lift weights during the commercials. Leave some weights next to your couch or easy chair. While you watch your favorite shows, use the commercial break to do some curls or leg lifts.
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Take the stairs. Instead of using the elevator to go up one floor, use the stairs. For every ten steps up, you burn approx. 10 calories. Going down 10 steps sheds 5 calories. Let's say each day you burn an extra 30 calories taking the stairs. In one week you'll burn 210 calories, and 10,680 in one year. That means you can burn 3 pounds of fat (~3,500 Calories) each year by just taking the stairs. Not only will you feel better and contribute to your weight loss, but next time you feel like eating a donut you might think twice about how many steps it will take to burn it off.
We’ve been busy working on the FriendFit iPhone app, but there were a few web updates that were just asking to happen.
Weekly & Monthly Fitness Blog Stats
Many of you have asked for monthly and weekly stats, and we listened! You can now view fitness blogs in one of three views: Weekly, Monthly, and All (which just shows the last 10 posts). View a summary showing the total number of posts, mileage, time, and calories burned for that week or month. You can use the arrows to move backwards and forwards in time. Just click the selected view in the menu below the green Fitness Blog tab. View your fitness blog now!
Track Effort & Motivation
We also worked to simplify the “Log a new activity” page and decided that it was finally time for the couch potato to retire. In its place, we now have color-coded dots to quickly keep track of how you felt during your activity. On the fitness blog post, you can see a single dot in the color chosen.
Sorted Route Lists
Our last update gave you the ability to rename routes, and now you can sort your route list by one of 3 options: date created, name, and distance. Just visit your route list and see for yourself.
That’s all for now! We’ll post some iPhone app screenshots soon.
We’ve just released another quick update to the site!
New Fitness Activities!
We’ve added 13 new fitness activities (and one new category), including:
- Land Activities: Horseback Riding, Camping, Frisbee
- Water Activities: Kayaking, Canoeing
- Gym & Studio: Boxing, Gym Workout (for recording trips to the gym)
- Racket Sports: Ping Pong (aka Table Tennis), Squash, Racquetball
- Team Sports: Kickball, Field Hockey, Rugby, Ultimate Frisbee
Automatic Facebook posting
After encountering some issues with our last release, we’ve now added automatic posting to Facebook when you post a new activity. You can choose which posts go to Facebook by checking or un-checking the “Share on Facebook” checkbox on the new activity page.
As always, please contact us if you run into any issues.
We’ve just released an update to the site! After releasing calorie tracking a couple of weeks ago, we realized that those of you who use metric units (like kilometers and kilograms) might measure your food energy in calories. So just visit your settings page and choose your preference.
Facebook working much better
As many of you may have noticed, we’ve had some Facebook account issues. This mostly happened because of Facebook’s new data tools and some bugs still needed to be worked out.
Calorie calculator
We saw many calorie calculators on the web when building our calorie tracking, and decided to build our own tool! Check out FriendFit’s calorie calculator to quickly estimate energy burned in your fitness activities.
Other Updates
- Embedded routes can now have miles or kilometers chosen by default
- New Twitter landing page explaining how we share fitness activities
We’re happy to announce some new features we’ve just released!
Burned calories
A lot of you (especially personal trainers) have asked for calorie tracking and now it’s here! For each activity you do, we compute how many calories (or kJ) you burn. We calculate the calories based on the activity type, your speed (for running, biking, walking, etc), and your current weight.
To start tracking calories, save your weight information in the “Calories/kJ burned” section next time you log an activity. Once your weight is saved, we’ll use it for future actvitiy posts. Also, your weight is kept private and other users will only see the number of calories (or kJ) burned. If you need to change your weight, simply click “update”, enter the new weight, and click “save”.
If you use any social networks like Facebook or Twitter to post your fitness activities, calorie or kJ information is now shown in your post.
Heart-rate data
If you use a GPS device with a heart rate monitor, we now compute and show the average heart rate in your fitness blog post.
Here’s a sample of what your fitness blog data now looks like.
Other updates
- Route lists have been redesigned so you can see a quick preview, print, embed, or rename the route. Just click the arrow to open the extra route information.
- Once again it’s possible to rename your routes after saving them. We know this is going to make some of our users very happy!
- Fitness blog posts that use a route now let you see a route preview, route print and embed, just like the route list
We have a lot more planned for the website including planning group activities. You’ll see more fun and exciting updates in the near future. As always, please send us a message if you run into any issues or to let us know what you think of the new improvements. That’s all for now!
We’re happy to share a few new features we just released. So many of you have been asking for better leaderboards and now they’re here! You can see who’s got the most mileage or logged time, sorted by any single sport and also for all sports combined. Leaders can be viewed by week, month, year, and all-time.
Twitter auto-posting
In addition to new leaderboards, we’re now much more Twitter-friendly. When logging a new activity, you can now automatically tweet it, too! Just click “Log an Activity” and click the checkbox next to the Twitter logo. When you click the box, a new window will open to take you through the authentication process. On the Twitter site, you must click “Allow” to let us post to your account. You’ll also find twitter information in your user profile.
We also added a checkbox so you can choose which activities you want to post to Facebook.
We hope you like these improvements and they make your FriendFit experience more fun, useful and easy. Enjoy the new features and as always, we’d love to hear from you. Send us a message if you run into any issues or want to share your ideas.
