Spring FlowersIts Spring!  WOOO!  I can finally get out of the house again and start enjoying the outdoors!  Wait, you know what that means though?  Summer is just around the corner.  Bathing suit season is just a short, 2 months away.  Time to start really hitting those workout programs we’ve all been doing, right?  If you’re like the majority of us, you’ve hit that down time between “My New Years resolution is to lose X number of pounds” that ends in February and “Oh, Crap!  It’s hot outside and I can’t remember the last time I hit the gym!”.  Well I’m here to help you get back in the groove so you can show off that hot beach body by Memorial Day.  I’ve assembled a group of the most popular online aids that I think will make sure you stick to a great program not just until this summer but all the way till the next New Year when you can make a resolution to keep your exercise program instead of start from scratch.  Over the next five days I will post up my findings that will ultimately lead up to the best overall solution for making sure you’re beach ready by May 25th so check back often for the newest find.

When looking into the list of resources I wanted to try out, I went into it with the mindset of “I am a person who may have a bit of experience staying fit but I want to start up something that will work for me and that I can stick with for the long term”.  I pulled proven concepts together from my Sport Psychology classes that I thought would make the most sense to implement, mainly creating a log of your activity and food intake to create accountability, tracking your emotions towards exercising, motivation from peers and ease of use (you won’t stick with it if it isn’t easy).  With that, lets get into it…

MyFitnessJournal.com – The first program I came across when I searched for online fitness was this offering from MyFitnessJournal.com.  At first I was impressed with what they offered.  You can keep track of all workouts including cardio and weight routines.  A nutrition catalog full of plenty of foods helps keep track of all your meals with nice clean graphs and pie charts of your daily intake.  The online interface resembles a few tabbed spreadsheets created in excel.  myfitnessjournalThis may be an easy transition to those of you that have already been keeping things in spreadsheet form but for the average person starting out, this could seem a bit overwhelming.  The graphic interface leaves much to be desired.  It just seems clunky and buggy.  I couldn’t add workouts when I wanted to and the web app uses a Silverlight plugin from Microsoft that crashed on me a few times while trying to get aquatinted with it.  Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed.  The site offers everything I’m looking for aside from community involvement but IMHO, doesn’t do so very well. If you wanted to use it as a daily journal then I could see it as a possibility but my suggestion is to skip this one as an overall fitness app.

Come back tomorrow when I reveal my next site in my series dedicated to get you beach ready by Memorial Day.
Day 1 – MyFitnessJournal.com
Day 2- Trainingpeaks.com
Day 3 – DailyMile.com
Day 4 – Calorie Count
Day 5 – Gyminee.com