gtFtr

Looking through the results after my workout I decided to add a couple more parameters to the Elliptical tracker. Luckily with the parser it's fairly simple.

You can now record average speed and watts for your workout.

Average speed can have a unit of either mph or kph (as always spaces between numbers and parameters)

In the past couple of days I've had conversations about the risks and impact of people "gaming" gtFtr to try and appear to be fitter than they actually are.

To my mind there's a flaw in the reasoning... who would lie about their workout results?

But there probably are folks who'd use the anonymity of the Internet to make claims about their prowess... though I'm not sure who they'd be impressing or fooling.

Sending a message

@gtFtr Situps 20 sets 50 reps

when you're actually built like the Jeff Albertson ... no-one will take you that seriously. For that lie to work you must be sure that no-one you know in real life follows you on Twitter, never post your picture online and certainly never follow it with a twitter about your 6 Twinkie lunch.

At the end of the day who are you gaming if the goal is to get healthy?

If you claim something that you can't do ironically it may, because of the public nature of the Twitter timeline and gtFtr, actually introduce a hidden motivator to work towards that goal that you've been claiming as fact in case you are exposed?

Who knows. It'll be interesting to see how many supermen start visiting gtFtr and posting their results..

It's all very well to exercise heaps ever day, but what if you're idea of a healthy lunch in a fast food burger and fries with a coke and an apple pie on the side?

Well you'll probably end up with some muscle tone but the fat won't go away (or worse you'll have something important fail on you)

But it's hard to know what's okay to eat that still tastes okay but isn't too bad for you.

I'm going through that process at the moment, and found a great article over at Yahoo! Health entitled "127 Foods That Fight Fat" that makes interesting reading.

While most of it resonated with me, there was a section on "diet" drinks... while the real thing is sweetened with sugar (or it's evil cousin High Fructose Corn Syrup - avoid that particular creature if you can) most of the diet products are laced with aspartame or similar "artificial" or chemically modified sweeteners which according to some folks can do you more harm than sugar (it's a personal choice but since swearing off non natural foods as much as possible I've noticed general well being improvements).

The important thing is not too get too hung up with an eating regimen any more than you would an exercise program. Sure you'll have days where another 50 pushups are too much, and there will be days when you're out with friends and a steak and fries is what you really want. Just don't go overboard and over the next few days try to compensate - a few more raw veggies, some more water, a few more reps...

It's all about balance and a long term view

Everyone wants to get fit and look their best, right?

I was inspired down this path by turning 40, getting slower, needing one more notch on my belt... all good motivations but it's hard to find something simple, repeatable and easy to fit around work and the rest of your life - especially if you travel.

While the title seems pretty miraculous with a bit of effort it might just pay off. I think I'm going to have to up my efforts from 3 sets of 12 situps if I want to get anywhere ;)

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a real life example must be worth much more...

If you want to see my calorie consumption on the Elliptical from when I started running the code (instead of just sending myself Twits that didn't go anywhere) it's available for the world to see...

If you're brave enough to share your information, check out the trackers we currently record and get Twitting.

Note: to see the graphs you will need Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 installed. It does mean you'll need a PC (Windows XP SP2 or greater) or a Mac (OSX 10.4.8 or greater) - IE, Firefox and Safari all work. I've not been able to test with Moonlight yet (it's too scary. I like simple 'click here' installers!).

A couple of people have commented that not everything that's in the messages they send to gtFtr is making it into the graphs.

Well, leaving aside some of the more ambitious plans we have to develop this there's a simple reason for that.

With the system we're currently recording data broken down into three classifications:

• Trackers. These are the exercises or activities that you can record. For instance Elliptical or Calories are trackers. They are always the first thing on a message to tell gtFtr what to do with it
• Measures. These are the actual values. The miles covered, the calories burnt or consumed, the number of sets or reps for a particular exercise.
• Filters. These currently don't appear on the graphs but they are things like CB or FB (Calorie or Fat Burner) programs on the Elliptical or Snack or Dinner on Calories. Once we get a little further on we'll start offering these as a way to filter the results for a particular tracker.

Hope that clears it up a bit. If there are any other questions please leave a comment here or just ask

It's good to have a goal of losing weight, or doing more reps on the bench press or situps, but if you're still eating more than your body needs to support the level of exercise then you're not going to fix things up.

To help with that goal gtFtr now lets you track calories as well. Simply send a message like this to Twitter

@gtFtr Calories 200 Snack # Naughty chocolate muffin

The value should be the calories consumed and you can optionally follow it with either Snack, BFast, Lunch or Dinner. You can use the comment (following the #) to justify the indulgence if you want to.

One of the goals of getting fitter for some is losing weight. Isn't it nice to watch that line go down over time (with the occasional leveling off around the holidays!)

gtFtr now tracks your weight as well. Simply send a message like this via Twitter

@gtFtr Weight 290.7 Lbs

the portion after the number can be Lbs or Kgs (sorry, no Stones yet). If using Lbs please use a decimal not ounces (if anyone has a scale that forces pounds and ounces let us know and we'll look at resolving that issue)

As I was curious about other programs on my Elliptical I tried the Calorie Burner this evening. Out it hurt! But it also meant I had to add a new option to the program parameter so as well as FB (for Fat Burner) you can now use CB (for Calorie Burner) and Heart (for Heart Zone Training)

The good thing was it showed it's working as planned to add new parameters. The bad thing is that I have to work out a couple more kinks in the parameter options because there are some other things I want to track that don't quite fit into the plan... more on the soon I hope ;)

Because Twitter always returns the time as UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) we try and align things better with the user by querying their profile and grabbing the offset that they've entered and adding (or subtracting) it to get the correct local time.

This means if you're away from home and exercising you might want to change your profile time-zone to correctly match where-ever you are.

If gtFtr also starts reporting things happening at the wrong time... check your time-zone setting.

Also be aware that if you restrict your profile/messages to only your friends, and you've not made gtFtr one of your friends then we won't be able to see your time-zone setting and will have to use UTC.

Of course, there has to be a better solution for those one-day trips or when you want to catch up and enter yesterdays workout...

If you prefix the workout information with the date and time (at the moment format is quite strict mm/dd/yy hh:mm:ss - the :ss are optional, sorry about the US format... it's on the list of things to look at) then it will record the exercise as having happened then as opposed to the timestamp on the Twitter message

@gtFtr 12/14/07 10:30 Situps 3 sets 12 reps # a nice mid-morning workout

as always spaces and formatting are important.