Category Archives: iPhone App

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.

It’s now deep into February and you may have already decided to give up on your New Year’s Resolutions. However, it is exactly at this point in time that you can turn a potential failure to stick to your choices into a positive change in your life. Many people fail at keeping their resolutions simply because they make poor decisions in setting these resolutions and set themselves up for failure. Try these simple steps to get back on track; don’t abandon your goals, break them down into more manageable pieces.

1. The Resolution Review

So you have had almost two months to start work on your resolution and you have failed to even start. Most often resolutions are abandoned simply because we make them “too big” and then cannot decide how, when or where to start. It may be time to truly reflect on your resolution and maybe review it. If you set a goal so unfathomable in a 1 year period, this is your chance to set a realistic goal. If the goal is realistic in a year timeframe, now is the time to break it down into monthly goals.

1. Make them Bite Size

Take your monster resolution and break it down into more manageable steps. We often look at large goals, get overwhelmed by what we promised ourselves to do and get depressed when we are not making enough progress. By breaking this one monster goal down into 12 monthly goals you can start by tackling a small goal and reward yourself when you achieve this more manageable goal.

1. Write it Down

By writing your goals down on paper, in your journal or even better on a social media platform, you are essentially providing a hard and fast goal. It provides a much more “set in stone” goal that you can continually keep reminding yourself of. In a positive way, keep looking at your goal and reaffirming your aspirations by achieving results on a daily and monthly basis.

1. Forget about the End

It sounds terrible, but in reality makes more sense to your sense of accomplishment. Try not to look at the actual end-goal, especially if you are easily discouraged. Tackle your daily, weekly and monthly goals without putting pressure on yourself to reach the year-end goal. For example, if you wanted to lose 100 pounds, and only lose 98 pounds by the end of the year; it is still an amazing achievement.

By worrying about the daily activities needed to get to the end result, you will actually be doing more to advance your goals than worrying about the end result without putting in the work on a daily basis. If you look to your next weight-loss or healthy work out goal it will be achievable in a positive way.

1. Treat Yourself

When you achieve a daily, weekly or monthly goal, start rewarding yourself, but remember to keep them in proportion. If you worked out for 30 minutes and kept to your dietary plan, reward yourself with 2 cookies or 1 scoop of sorbet, not a tub of ice cream. All your rewards need to be focused and measured, but you absolutely need to reward good results. At the end of a month, losing 10 pounds or reaching a goal for a 5k run, get a massage.

By planning out your route, getting effective support from the people you love, breaking down your resolution into bite size pieces and rewarding yourself, you can get back on track to achieving your New Year’s Resolutions.

The long-awaited vacation days are around the corner. But a few days away from home also means being away from your regular training routes, training buddies, and training routine.

But there is no need to sacrifice your running while you get some rest and relaxation. In fact, training at a new location can improve your performance and versatility, while you might meet some of the area’s friendliest runners.

Stay on track while you’re on the road, with these simple tips and strategies:

Plan your workouts

The biggest obstacle to training while on vacation is time. So, as you map out your sightseeing plans, you should also spend some time scheduling your workouts. Ideally, you’ll end up with a plan for how your training works into your vacation schedule.

If you’re training for a half or full marathon with one of Hal Higdon’s plans, you may want to plan your training so that your vacation corresponds with a “stepback” week.

Do your research before you leave

Plan and map your running routes, along with the top attractions and restaurants that you can’t miss at your vacation destination. Check out sites such as Map My Run or Trails.com for running routes at your vacation locale.

Make sure you have a few running routes in hand in case some routes you mapped aren’t suitable. By doing so, you won’t feel as concerned about running at your destination once you arrive.

Find a running buddy

Will you be traveling with others? Scope them out to see if there are any runners in the group. If you’re not lucky, you can still register at sites such as Athlinks and SeriousRunning or find a running club that you can join during your stay – RRCA is the place to start looking.

Running specialty shops are also a great resource for out-of-town runners. Not only can they provide useful information about running routes, but they may even offer a free group run that you can join.

Find a local gym

If you’re not 100% sure the running routes you found are safe, opt for the treadmill. Most larger hotels have a gym on site. But if the one you’re staying at doesn’t, try to find one locally where you can work out. Some gyms offer day guest passes or an inexpensive 30-day membership that will allow you to keep your training on track.

Enter a race

Entering a race is a great way to see the sights and guarantee that you’ll run at least once during your stay. Search on sites such as runnersworld.com’s Race Finder to see if there’s a race during the time you’ll be staying at your destination.

Take advantage of cross-training

When you’re on vacation, you may end up doing activities that aren’t part of your usual exercise routine, but that can be great substitute for your run. Is there a great hike or a bike ride you can take? Can you go kayaking, surfing or swimming? Don’t feel pressured to run every day and do one of those cross-training activities, instead.

If you end up not having the time to run while on vacation, don’t beat yourself up over it. Enjoy the relaxing days! Your body and your mind will thank you!

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.