Introduction to FiVi My Workouts

In this new age of Web 2.0 and social media paradigm changers, user generated content and the ability to find information that is specific to you is all the rage…but limitations on technology have made it difficult to provide this for working out and training.  The reason being is that there are so many variables that can go into a workout, the logic needed to build something that would allow anyone to create a workout, that can be shared, logged with a few clicks, and shared is mind boggling.  Until now that is and we at FiVi.com feel very confident that we have designed by far the most powerful logging and tracking tool for fitness and activity in the world.  It’s a bold statement, but keep reading and I’ll explain why I feel so comfortable making that assertion and then continue reading to see some of my predictions.

My Workout Book

This page is part of your profile in FiVi.com.  Here you can keep a list of all the workouts you’ve created or added to your collection.  It’s just like My Routes, except instead of a collection of maps that you can log, each profile card opens up to a Workout that you can log with just a few clicks.  We encourage you to share your Workout Book with friends and to borrow best practices from each other.  You can skim through your workouts and search by level or via tags.  Click a workout and a preview shows a description and link to whomever is the author.

Workout Creation Wizard

The most powerful workout modeler in just four easy steps.

Step 1: Give your workout a name, description, and add some tags so that people who are searching for new workouts can find it and share your workout with others.

Step 2: Define the goal of the workout.  Most workouts will be covered by option 1 where each exercise listed has it’s own target and goal that you measure.  But with the recent trend in cross-functional training and circuit training, we’ve added 2 more options.  Select option 2 if your workout entails doing a loop of all the exercises you have listed in a pre-defined amount of time.  For example: 5 pull ups, 5 push ups, 5 sit ups – do this loop as many times as you can in 15 mins.  Select option 3 if it’s the other way around.  For example: 5 pull ups, 5 push ups, 5 sit ups – do 10 loops of this in as little time as possible.

Step 3: Now add exercises.  The best way to describe how to do this is via a video tutorial…so click here.  But if you can’t do a video now, you can add as many exercises as you want to this workout.  If you can’t find the exercise you are looking for from the drop down menu, then just “add a new exercise” and associate it with the most similar exercise.  Your new exercise is saved to your profile so you can add it to other workouts you create.  And to show you how powerful this modeling tool is look at a sample of the different variables you can specify: time, reps, distance, weight, % of max, % of body weight, laps, rest period, and there’s more.  Finally, if there are any pictures you want to add for each exercise, that’s easy too.

Step 4: Now just set who can see this workout.  You can either share it with the world, your network, or just one person.

Log a Workout

When you or anyone opens up the URL for a workout created in FiVi, they are taken to the Log Workout view.  Here they’ll see a form where each exercise is pre-populated with the targets (reps, weight, time, etc) defined when the workout was created.  Users can tweak the values with exactly what they did, skip the exercises they didn’t do, and add any exercise that they may have done not listed in the original workout (we encourage creativity).  Some exercises will require input before you can log the workout, like enter how many reps you did @90% of max.  But once all the fields are filled just hit “Log workout” and everything has been saved to your profile.  Just like that!

Open Source Workout Collaboration

I predict that this is going to bring about a new revolution in fitness.  Today, most workouts are in journals, notebooks, posts on blogs, magazines, etc.  But for the first time ever, with this new FiVi capability each workout is a living breathing entity that can be emailed, posted on blogs, listed on Twitter, exchanged via FiVi, and wherever a URL can go so can your workout.  A few clicks and it’s logged, safely and securely on our servers.  People now have a way to share workouts, compare notes, and actually measure the outcome all online all digitally.  May the most innovative workouts be rewarded for the most downloads and happiest user community.

Cooling Glove that is More Effective that Steroids?

I’ve said time and time again, that we are entering a new era of fitness and health technology that should bring in unheralded results and achievement.  I came across this article in the SF Chronicle written by Julian Guthrie, a staff writer about a new cooling device that is bringing about some very interesting results.  In summary this cooling glove has it’s roots in medical treatments but it was quickly found to help high performance athletes in very dramatic ways.  Essentially:

The Glove works by cooling the body from inside out, rather than conventional approaches that cool from outside in. The device creates an airtight seal around the wrist, pulls blood into the palm of the hand and cools it before returning it to the heart and to overheated muscles and organs. The palm is the ideal place for rapid cooling because blood flow increases to the hands (and feet and face) as body temperature rises.

“These are natural mammalian radiators,” said Dennis Grahn, who invented the device with Stanford colleague Craig Heller.

Grahn and Heller also found that cooling overheated muscles dramatically improved physical performance, allowing athletes to work out harder and longer, and hold on to their gains.

“We learned that you can actually reverse that muscle fatigue in a short amount of time,” Heller said. “And if you cool muscles during rest, you get a much greater recovery than if you rested without cooling.”

original article

San Francisco 49er Marcus Hudson uses the Glove on the sidelines Sunday at Candlestick Park.

The device was so promising that a number of the Standford football players started using it and eventually it was adopted by some NFL teams for use during training and games.  Supposedly, an assistant named Vinh Cao who regularly would do pull ups as part of a normal fitness routine was able to increase the number of pull ups from 100 to 616!

Very exciting, the technology is being developed by a company called Avacore and since this article was last published, the military was looking to develop applications to help fight heat exhausting…a very real danger for troops operating in hot climates.

Definitely an exciting application to watch as we continue to finds ways to push the envelope of athletic achievement.

Best Practices for Online Logging of Exercises and Workouts

Logging a workout or an active lifestyle has clear benefits for all walks of life and fitness objectives.  It forces you to get organized, spot trends to fix or benefit from, it also helps you define reasonable goals that in their achievement perpetuate a positive cycle.  Everyone’s logging strategy can be a little different but there are few best practices worth considering to really help you tailor your logging strategy to fully suit your needs.

Logging application needs to be flexible:

online journal vs. spreadsheet

The biggest tradeoff between most online tools and the home excel spreadsheet/notebook, is the flexibility factor.  In non-techie language, the more flexible the tool needs to be the more complicated the architecture that supports it has to be.  For example there are very few sites that allow you to log both outdoor and indoor workouts with the same level of efficacy.  For example, think of all the variables that go into defining a circuit training based workout: reps, loops, time, weight % of max, % of weight, rest period, total loop time, etc.  Most sites can only allow you to track a few variables which is why most people still use an excel spreadsheet or an actual notebook.

be wary of sites that are too specialized

Most sites use advertising as a revenue model, so they tend to be interested in attracting a niche demographic or sport.  That coupled with the technological hurdle mentioned above, you tend to see that few sites are able to cater to someone who is interested in cross-training, multi-sports, or just leading an active lifestyle in general.  Another part of the problem is that the content required to maintain a vibrant community needs to be abundant, recent, and credible.  This is not an easy task.  So the solution is either to put in a technology platform that supports user generated content or hire a massive editorial staff.

framework has to be in place

On the other hand, the downside of having too much flexibility is that it can make a site too difficult to use because there is so much going on.  From a human factors perspective, an information framework needs to be in place that is intuitive and repeatable.  The ideal online tool has obvious places where logs, free form journal entries, applications, information, etc all reside.  It’s a time commitment to learn how a new site works and once a user learns to do something, it should be repeated as many times as possible.

With FiVi we’ve learned all too well that you can’t build and institutionalize every possible piece of functionality on your site.  Hence the importance of what I like to call “free form” journaling.  The idea is that it should be as easy as writing in notebook in free hand.  Blogging is great for this and with the smart use of tags, you can now organize your journal entries in a way that is logical for you.

No matter how hard you try, you shouldn’t be able to lose it:

Now I know I’m not the only person to have had a hard drive crash or you changed your work computer but forgot to transfer all of your files.  Whatever the reason is…online is nice in the sense you can always access it (assuming it is as flexible as a spreadsheet of course).  But of course you should be able to download and take your data with you.  It is yours after all.  I’ll be the first person to say we don’t have that on FiVi.com – but I promise we will as this is something I definitely believe in.

Sharing is caring and more importantly very motivating

Believe it or not, logging is not only just for you.  Like many things in life, it helps to get outside perspectives.  I share routes with my friends because I get bored of running in the same places.  Also when I picked up cycling, I didn’t know where the popular routes for cyclists were in my area.  Same goes for workouts.  I like to see what workouts my friends are doing and then tell them what they are doing wrong (just kidding ).  In all seriousness of course, I don’t think that I know everything and I’m always on the lookout to try new stuff and so should you.  But the most important thing is that if you do work with a professional, a log may be one of the most valuable tools you use.  A good trainer that is motivated to get you results should encourage you to keep a journal not only as a means to track and evaluate progress but to further instill positive energy and the sense of accomplishment.

It doesn’t have to be an exact science

In developing FiVi, one customer’s insight completely blew me out of the water and I’m sure that they were not the only ones to feel this way.  This talented runner told me that she didn’t want to start logging because she was afraid she would get too compulsive about it and want to log everything exactly.  Ok, so I would never ask you to do anything that would cause so much consternation but I will say that the real benefit is not tied to nailing the micro-fractional details of what you do.  In biology there are always so many variables that affect what happens to our bodies (sleep, temperature, hormones, mood, genetics, etc) that to log to the smallest minutiae is a classic example of diminishing returns.  But on a macro scale, logs tell us a lot.  How many miles did you log last month?  On average how many days do you rest?  On average what are your times when the temperature is above 75 degrees.  These are the questions you want to answer not within each individual workout but over time and this information in the proper hands can really net some results.

Missed Us? We’ve Been Working on Awesome Stuff

Our most ardent supporters may have noticed that we’ve been quiet as of late.  But we’ve been here, we didn’t go anywhere – we were just heads down on some really cool new features to add to FiVi.com as we kick it into high gear for the busy resolution laden winter season.  We are so excited because we’ve finally gotten to the point where we can comfortably say we are the most sophisticated platform for logging, tracking, and collaborating on your active lifestyle.  Here is a summary of what’s recently come out:

1. My Media – now you can upload pictures and tag them to share with friends.  You can thumb through each one or just play the slide show.

2. My Workout Book – THIS IS HUGE.  This is our crowning achievement to date.  FiVi.com now boasts the most powerful workout modeling tool (aka wizard) on the web.  With FiVi, you can now build any workout you can imagine.  Whether your workout entails loops, super sets, pyramids, etc – you can build it and they will come.  Yes, you can now share these workouts.  It’s just like youtube.  Send links to your workouts to friends, colleagues, clients, or club members.  Open the link, adjust the variables, and save your log to your FiVi profile.  Our goal was to make the most fluid platform to develop and collaborate on workout design….I call it Open Source for fitness development!  Make sure to check out the tutorials and get your workouts uploaded to FiVi.  No more walking around with a scrapbook of workouts collected over the years.  Keep them all online where you can share them and organize them in your Workout Book.

3. FiVi Calendar – how nice would it be if you could have a calendar that not only showed you past logs visually as well as served as a planning tool.  Now you have one.  Each time you log a workout, you see the link posted to your Calendar.  Not only that, but you can also embed routes you’ve created and saved to your FiVi profile so that anyone who has access to your calendar can see where you run, bike, hike, etc.  Finally, we know that calendars are of no use if you don’t have recurring events.  Having to enter something in every week doesn’t make your life easier – so we added it.  Use FiVi Calendars to manage your own fitness regimen or use it to organize your running club or social club with directions or team routes.

We Need You:

We are still a start up and constantly improving, fixing, listening to feedback, and implementing feedback.  We hope you’ll sign up as it’s free and get to know the powerful features we’re developing.  There is always room for improvement and we would great appreciate any ideas on how to improve our site for your use.  You’ll see that we’re not building another site just to feed you advertising and that we house some very talented developers – so if you can dream it, we may just build it.  Check us out and please spread the word.

Coming Soon!!!

Facebook and Twitter Integration, User Generated Videos, iPhone Application, and FiVi Pro Accounts