Let’s be honest. You don’t get all your fitness information from FitHacks. If you did, you’d probably be pretty starved over the last month. But that’s OK. Life goes in cycles. And it’s good to know that even when I’m not posting fitness information disguised as a metaphor, there are those who are. Below are a few of my favorite fitness blogs that you should be following as well.
NerdFitness
“Level up your life, ever single day.” Steve Kamb has recently become a full-time fitness blogger. With the passion he has for fitness and geek culture, FitHacks readers should feel right at home.
GymJunkies
“Hardcore fitness training.” Surely you’ve heard me mention Vic Magary and his intense approach to strength training. He has A LOT of information about weight training for the beginner and advanced alike. He’s also another ex-office dweller turned fitness professional – my kind of guy.
ZenToFitness
“The simple, no-nonsense gued to staying fit while living life.” This site has some excellent nutritional advice based around a life of simplicity and health. Another long-time favorite of mine.
MarksDailyApple
“Primal living in the modern world.” If you enjoy the feeling of drinking from a firehydrant, then this site is for you. Mark blasts you with nutritional science and information until you can’t take it anymore. He is a real advocate of “primal living” (i.e., eat and exercise like our primal ancestors would have).
UltiTraining
The #1 Ultimate Frisbee training resource. This site is a little more specialized to my sporting side. If you don’t know I am an avid Ultimate fan. I usually play 2-3 times a week and desperately want every aspect of my game to get stronger. This site helps me do that.
My wife and I recently completed Dave Ramsey’s personal finance course called Financial Peace University. Overall, I thought it was a great course with a ton of valuable information regarding personal money management, investing and getting out of debt. Throughout the course, I was struck with how similar the ideas of debt management and fitness really are. In both aspects of your life you have to make budgets (money or calories), utilize personal discipline, and have the ability to maintain motivation for an extended period of time.
A particularly unique idea of Ramsey’s was the “debt snowball”. This was his preferred method of digging yourself out of debt by paying down the smallest debts you owed first then rolling the money that you were using to pay that bill into the next smallest debt owed. This way you would systematically eliminate all your outstanding bills one at a time from the smallest to largest.
While this method of debt elimination is fantastic, I think the idea also holds water in other areas of life management as well. Lately, as you can probably tell from the frequency of my latest blog postings, I’m struggling somewhat in my personal time management. I have a full time job, I’m pursuing a Master’s degree, I have a two year old son and a brand new baby girl. So in an attempt to get my growing “to do” list back to a manageable size, I tried Ramsey’s debt snowball method for time management.
1) I listed out everything that I had to do in the next few weeks on a sheet of paper. Some of these things were simple phone calls I needed to make. Others were long time annoyances that have been on my mind for months.
2) Next, I went through and mentally arranged them in order from “simplest to complete” to “most complex”
3) I systematically began making myself complete the simplest tasks first even if they weren’t due for another two weeks. I did this for a few reasons. One, I could now release the brain power that I had been spending on that simple task and roll it into thinking about the other items. Two, I could use the momentum from marking something off my list as extra motivation to get more things done. It’s funny how satisfying crossing off an annoying task can really be.
4) Finally, I continue this process until only the major things are left. The cleared “to do” list builds my confidence to continue accomplishing things. Plus, all the time I would have spent on worrying about the smaller tasks can now be devoted to productive thinking about the big items.
You may think this is a silly yet obviously application of the “debt snowball” but the idea has genuinely proved productive for me the last couple of days. If you are like me and currently find yourself swamped in small “to do” items progress through them systematically from easiest to hardest and let me know how it works for you.
(photo by Ivan Walsh)
Recently I was allowed access to review a great new fitness iPhone app called Fitness Builder from PumpOne. The app aims to be your one-stop shop for all your exercising needs. It contains hundreds and hundreds of unique workouts designed by professional fitness trainers, stat tracking of your own various fitness measurements and even allows you to monitor your physical progress. The workouts seem to be designed for any goal in mind, whether you want to target certain muscle groups, improve your sports performance or have limited access to equipment.
The workout routines themselves are easily accessed via the intuitive user interface and feature well illustrated exercises with pictures, text and video. Once a workout has been selected, you can simply swipe through the exercises one at a time. There is also a timer to keep your rest periods to a minimum.
After you have completed a workout, you can log your activities into the app’s database to track your progress over time. If you so desire you can also share your workouts via Twitter or Facebook.
Overall, I think the app is wonderfully designed and contains an amazing amount of information for the beginner to intermediate fitness enthusiast.
What I liked: I think that Fitness Builder is particularly great at supplementing an established fitness routine. Often times I find myself searching online for new exercises to target certain muscles groups. This app contains literally hundreds of illustrated exercises that have helped me add new elements into my workouts on just such occasions.
What I didn’t like: Even though Fitness Builder had a wealth of information and described many different workouts to target the areas you were wanting to focus on, I would hesitate to use this as your only source of training advice. Unless you systematically and regularly worked through every workout in the app, you may be left with a somewhat unbalanced fitness plan. I’d say if you just want some great new routines to try to incorporate into your already existing program or want a simple way to create and log your own routines, you may still find the $9.99 price justifiable.
link – Fitness Builder
