Author Archives: Alex

Today I’d like to give you a sneak peak into something we’ve been working on over the last year or so. TL;DR: See the video below.

It all started with the realization that it’s so much easier to not consume calories than to burn them by exercising — if you are trying to loose or maintain weight.

For instance, if you don’t consume an extra 250 calories of something, you don’t have to:

• Make time for a run
• Change into workout clothes
• Go looking for earbuds (How come they’re never where you last left them?)
• Actually run for 20 minutes
• Shower
• Do your hair again

So many things you don’t have to do just by not consuming extra calories.

I’m not saying we should not exercise. Not at all. Exercise is absolutely needed. It’s good for your heart, your mind, your overall health and you should do it regularly. We make a number of fitness apps that help you exercise. But as a means of loosing or maintaining weight, exercising by itself is not very efficient.

How long does it take me to not eat that 500 calorie bagel and cream cheese ? Zero minutes. How long does it take me to burn the 500 calorie bagel I ate? 40 minutes at a 10 min / mile pace, plus prep and clean up time, that’s at least an hour.

Not very efficient for loosing weight.

It turns out, if your goal is to loose or maintain a certain weight the easiest way to do it is to not consume extra calories.*

Why am I telling you all this? Because it led me to believe that knowing how many calories I consume helps me keep a check on how much food I’m consuming. This ensures I don’t consume too much on a consistent basis.

“But calorie tracking is too time consuming,” you may say.  “I tried it and gave up after a few days.”  Remember this thing I said we’ve been working on? We are making calorie tracking a breeze with Cal & Lorie, your personal calorie tracking assistants.

Here’s how it works:

You text Cal & Lorie what you eat, you can write it out, tell it to Siri, or send a picture. Cal & Lorie will look it up and log the calories for you. It’s as simple as that.

Best of all, it integrates with Fitbit, so you can keep track of your calories burned and consumed all in one place without doing any extra work.

Don’t have Fitbit? No worries, we’ve got you covered. Open the Cal & Lorie app for a detailed view of your meal entries to see if you are staying within your goal.

See Cal & Lorie in action. Watch the video :

Like what you’ve see? Sign up below so we can grant you early access to Cal & Lorie.

Get Cal & Lorie Now

*If you take that to the extreme you’d think starving is the easiest way to loose  weight. But hold on, there’s this thing called metabolism that will rebel if you starve and actually cause you to gain all that weight back. So no starving please. We are just talking about extra calories here.

Guest post by J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. Founder of FitnessTrax, Inc. and creator of the RunningTrax System

Editor’s Note: We are very excited to announce RunningTrax, an app we’ve been working on for the past year in partnership with Dr. J. Gerry Purdy of FitnessTrax, Inc. Most training plans will tell you how far to run in any given workout, but RunningTrax tells you what pace you should run for that distance. Read on to find more about the RunningTrax app and how it will improve your training. To get notified when the app is available for download and try it free for 30 days please sign up here: http://eepurl.com/bknx8b

RunningTrax™ is the first personalized, dynamic running training system that tells every runner exactly what pace they should run – day in and day out.

There are more than 200 million people in the world who regularly run at least three times a week. A few are serious, dedicated runners vying for a top national or age-group ranking. This represents perhaps 1% of the total. These runners typically pay hundreds of dollars a month to get personalized training advice: how fast should they run in each workout.

However, the vast majority of people who run regularly (the other 99%) have not had any easily available and low-cost way to get personalized advice for their workouts. They read an article in a magazine like Runner’s World or online that talks about training advice. It is helpful to some extent. But, the training advice given online or from a book or magazine has one major drawback: it cannot possibly give you personalized advice on what you should do.

Training programs, books and articles can only define a general workout recommendation because it has been impossible – up until now – to define a workout for the millions of runners all at different levels of ability. A training program might say to run three miles. That’s fine, but at what pace should you run? You don’t want to run too slow or too fast. And, what if your neighborhood course is 3.3 miles? How would you adapt the recommendation for a different distance? You can see it’s nearly impossible for someone giving training advice to the public to define a specific, personalized workout for every runner.

This is the problem I set out to solve while working on my Ph.D. at Stanford. In order to define a personalized workout, you need to be able to determine each runner’s level of ability. If you could do that, then you would be able to take a proposed workout distance, time or pace and generate a workout that is personalized to each runner’s level of ability. The hard part is to find a way to determine each runner’s level of ability.

The reason it is hard to determine your level of ability is because of a simple fact of human running performance: there are limits to what each runner can perform. The highest performances are known as world records. World records are very hard to beat because the human has limits – we can’t improve forever. When you take a large number of runners, the top performance might improve a little over decades but the rest of the performances don’t change much.

However, for each and every runner, making improvements at lower levels of performance is clearly easier than at higher levels of performance. Thus, any system to determine physiologic performance cannot be linear, where every unit of speed increase would earn the same unit increase in the runner’s level of ability.

Rather, the system that determines level of ability has to reward every unit of speed increase with a larger unit increase in the runner’s level of ability. We call this kind of improvement non-linear because for every unit improvement, larger rewards are provided.

Think of this another way. I am runner with a certain level of ability. As I improve, it gets harder for me to improve to newer, higher levels of ability. When I start off, it is easy to make improvements. But, as I improve, I will find it harder to achieve further improvements.

In order to correctly model human performance, you have to take this ”limitation effect” into account. A system has to be set up so that it correctly defines the level of ability from beginner to average to world class.

I was able to do that by referencing thousands of performances over the past 100 years and then using a non-linear formula that I created with the help of a math professor at Stanford. I used many hours of computer time to calculate the values used in the non-linear formula. This gave us the basis for the values of the level of ability for the ten most popular distances run from 100 meters through the marathon.

Let me explain a bit more about how the RunningTrax™ system works. RunningTrax™ is a breakthrough system which solves the most persistent problem for all runners, from weekend joggers to world class athletes.

When training, runners need to run hard enough to improve but not too hard or they’ll increase the risk of getting injured. Until RunningTrax™, it has been difficult and expensive for runners to get good advice on how to train. That’s why almost all running websites and apps focus on recording what runners have done rather than telling them what they should do.

The RunningTrax™ mobile app is a quantum leap forward in running training. While it provides all the standard features (including GPS tracking, run logging, music integration, etc.), the new RunningTrax app is the first system to help every runner, regardless of ability, get a personalized recommendation on the proper pace to run for every workout.

The RunningTrax app is just days away from being launched on the Apple App Store. To get a notification when the app is available for download and get a free 30 day trial, add your email here: http://eepurl.com/bknx8b To read more about the RunningTrax app please visit: http://www.runningtrax.com

Typically, it takes a lot of expert time to define appropriate workouts for individual runners. RunningTrax™ is the first to automatically and scientifically determine what a runner should do for any distance, time or pace. In addition, it adjusts to a runner’s changing level of fitness.

iOS 8 is here (or almost here)! Before updating, please take some steps to ensure your training history is safe.

While the vast majority of iOS updates happen without a glitch, sometimes an error happens during the update in which customers end up losing their workout Journal.

Our apps provide an easy way for you to backup your workout Journal via our RunHelper Connect service and ensure you don’t lose your training history. So here is a short guide for how to go about updating your iPhone / iPod touch and minimizing the risk of loosing your workout history.

Note:  If you are already using RunHelper Connect, you are all set as your workouts are automatically backed up (unless you manually turned auto backup off).

1) Backup your workout Journal with RunHelper Connect

Backup your Journal to RunHelper Connect

1. Open your app
2. Tap on the Connect tab
3. Tap on the Join Now button and create your RunHelper Connect account. All users get a 30-day free trial!
4. Tap on the Journal tab and then on the “Backup Now” button

2) Backup your iPhone / iPod touch with iTunes or iCloud

1. See this article which describes various options on backing up your device.

3) You are now ready to install the new iOS!

If the iOS update process goes wrong and you end up with a blank Journal screen fear not! You can easily restore your Journal right from the app. Here are the steps to follow.

Restore Workouts

1. Tap on the Journal tab
2. Tap on the arrow button at the top right corner of the app
3. Select “Restore Workouts”
4. Select workouts to restore and tap the Restore button

In addition to backing up your data RunHelper Connect offers a lot more features like:

• Access to RunHelper Connect Website
• Workout Summary emails
• Weekly progress emails
• Ability to see all your workouts from all of your Bluefin apps at one place.
• User Forums

One of the reasons we developed RunHelper Connect is to enable our customers to connect with each other and share their running experience with the community. We are thrilled to announce that we have added Forums to our apps where you can do, just that.

To access the forums tap on the Connect tab in your app, then tap on the Forums button. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a screenshot that introduces the Forums and how to use them:

Example Forum Post

See you at the Forums!

The wait is over! Download the 5-Minute Stretch app and put an extra spring in your step. Stretching is a cinch with the 5-Minute Stretch app. Open the app, select a routine, and let the app guide you through the stretching session.

Why Stretch with an app?

The app will show you how to perform each stretching exercise, tell you when to switch to the next one, and let you know when you’ve completed the stretching session. It’s like having a coach right next to you. The 5-Minute Stretch app has 18 stretches specifically chosen for walkers/runners, targeting key muscle groups used while working out.

WHAT YOU’LL GET WITH OUR STRETCH APP:

• Beautiful animations show you exactly how to perform each exercise.
• Pre-workout and post-workout stretching sessions.
• Dynamic and static stretching exercises.
• 5-minute sessions with 10 stretches each.
• Integrated with all our training apps.
• Shuffle exercises to avoid getting bored.
• Add multiple rounds to extend your stretching session.
• Alerts tell you when to switch exercises.

I’m happy to announce that we are adding three new GPS tracking apps to our suite of mobile apps: Run Tracker Pro, Cycle Tracker Pro and Walk Tracker Pro.

Since the beginning we have been focusing on developing running apps based on training plans, but we’ve always had customers ask us about having non-training plan based apps as well. When our long time partner Peaksware approached us with the possibility of acquiring their suite of GPS tracking apps we jumped at the opportunity. Adding a Cycling app to our offering and more choices for non-plan based tracking apps is something we’ve always wanted to do.

I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome all Tracker Pro users  to the Bluefin family. Other than a few logo changes you won’t notice anything different about the apps now. In the future we plan on adding new features and continue making the apps one of the best GPS trackers on the market.

Here’s a link to the press release announcing the purchase.

When running some of us want to be able to see our stats at all times. Are we slowing down? Are we running faster than usual? The biggest change in this update is the Workout screen.

Here’s a highlight of the new features we are introducing with version 3.3.3

Workout Screen gets a small face-lift

We’ve heard from a number of you that the GPS values on the workout screen are a bit hard to read while working out. We are happy to announce that we have fixed that with this update. The Workout screen now sports larger values that are easier to see with just a glance while in the middle of a run.

In order to accomodate larger pace and distance values we have redesigned the music/volume/sharing tabs into a smaller bottom bar that lets you easily control your music and alerts volume, and lock the screen.

Larger Distance and Pace values. Slimmer bottom bar gives you access to Music, Volume, and Locked View.

Another improvement on the workout screen is the music integration. You can now change your playlist mid run without having to stop your workout. Just tap on the album artwork and select a new playlist.

The previous version of the app had a “Lock Buttons” feature which placed  small padlocks on the buttons that could accidentally interrupt a workout. That was a bit confusing so we have replaced that feature with a more intuitive “Locked View”. If you have previously had “Lock Buttons” turned ON, the Workout screen will now automatically change to the “Locked View” when you start a workout. You can also tap the “Lock” button in the lower right corner of the screen to switch to the “Locked View”. With the lock view all buttons that could interrupt your workout are removed.

The Locked View removes all buttons preventing workout interruptions by accidentally tapping the screen.

Try Connect free for 30 days

With this update you are able to try RunHelper Connect free for 30-days. The RunHelper Connect service enables you to automatically backup your workouts, see your progress across all Bluefin apps, and much more.

The New Connect Tab

Everyone needs a little extra motivation to stay on a workout schedule. RunHelper Connect helps you stay motivated by awarding you points every time you workout thus making working out a bit more fun.  You can also unlock Achievements that give you extra bonus points and a beautiful trophy for your virtual trophy case.

See your latest activity, points earned, and unlocked Achievements.

Changes to the training plan

This update brings an adjustment to the training plan based on the feedback we have received from customers. Workouts for Week 1, Week 2, Week 5 – Day 3, and Week 6 have been modified to make the training plan more gradual.

In addition to interval changes for the workouts above, we have made the following changes:

• Workouts don’t end with a Walk interval anymore. Since a 5 minute cool-down walk is included, having a Walk interval as the last interval before the cool-down was redundant.
• Week 1 Run intervals have been increased to 60 seconds.

For any comments or feature requests please don’t hesitate to write us at support@runhelper.com

What happened?

This morning we learned that posting to Twitter from our apps stopped working. It turns out Twitter has changed their API, which means that the now old way of posting does not work anymore. They have announced this change on their website but unfortunately we have failed to notice it.  Continue reading →