Collabofit

Who needs sit-ups? - Some good tips from a U.S. Army fitness instructor

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Some good tips about doing more whole-body excercises instead of just isolated abdominal exercises.

You can’t dead lift 600 pounds if your abs aren’t strong, but you will never see a 600-pound dead-lifter doing crunches and sit-ups.

Both exercises have a long history in our military, but dead-lifters know something most in the military do not: Isolation exercises are the wrong way to develop abdominal muscles.

Read the entire article: Who needs sit-ups? - Military Off Duty, Army Health, military fitness, army physical fitness - Army Times

Posted in Fitness, Fitness Activities | Comments Off

How the ripped actors in the movie “300″ got that way - Gym Jones

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Want to know how the actors in the movie “300″ (based on a famous Greek Spartan battle) got their ripped abs, toning and overall bad-ass muscles? They did it the old-fashioned way, by earning them honestly. Admittedly, 10-12 hours of gym workouts a day, 5 days a week, for 4 months, and probably anyone who survived that would end up considerably more fit.

Mark Twight at Gym Jones explains the regimine they put the actors through:

Buzz about the movie “300″ increases in volume as its release date approaches. Because we were responsible for the fitness and appearance of the barely-clothed protagonists we are fielding calls regarding the training undertaken by cast and stunt crew. Since it was a Hollywood gig assumptions are made about the preparation, with a 50-50 split between accuracy and utter madness. The following explanation should help to rectify the more erroneous ideas about what actually happened.

…

This sort of training seems perfectly normal to us but others find both the work and our language unusual. Gerry Butler commented that, “the first time anyone ever told me I was ‘fat’ was after I got this part.” Many observers got hung up on the penalty part, or the fact that one penalty session was called “Loser’s Redemption”. One individual commented, “You call people ‘losers’? That’s unkind.” And the answer is that we’re not here to make friends; there’s a job and it’s got to be done.

…

The second misconception surrounds the idea of the Spartan workout, aka “300″, how frequently it was done or who actually finished it. “300″ is a one-time test, an invitation-only challenge undertaken by those deemed ready for it. By the end of our four-month project 17 people had done the workout (Logan and I were two of them). This constitutes about 50% of the cast and stunt crew. We supervised every test, evaluated each rep for quality and only counted those that achieved our standards for form and range of motion. Like many workouts “300″ is not hard once you’ve done it but the apprehension built up ahead of it — something we encouraged — was enough to make some guys fear it to the degree that performance was compromised. This workout was a crucible that some passed through and others still have hanging over them.

“300″
25x Pull-up +
50x Deadlift @ 135# +
50x Push-up +
50x Box Jump @ 24″ box +
50x Floor Wiper @ 135# (one-count) +
50x KB Clean and Press @ 36# (KB must touch floor between reps) +
25x Pull-up
300 reps total

Gym Jones was started by a bunch of climbers. They are bad-ass, and set a pretty good example for people who want or NEED to accomplish real results in their lives for when the real competition happens — on the mountain, in fire fights, or playing professional sports.

For those of us who program computers for a living… there is inspiration in seeing their dedication and hard work, maybe even enough to get us off our butts for a change.

Click here to read the full article at Gym Jones about their “300″ workout

Posted in Fitness, Fitness Activities, Gym | 2 Comments »

3 more fitness activities added that you can track on Collabofit.com

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

We just added, by popular request, these new activities that you can track on your Collabofit user page:

Aerobics
Dancing
Elliptical

If you have any other activities that you would like to keep track of, let us know. If you don’t have an invite yet, send an email to: gserafini [at] gmail.com with the subject “Collabofit Invite Please”.

Posted in News, Fitness, Developer Updates, Online Fitness, New Features, Fitness Activities | No Comments »

The first fitness site that lets you get points for playing VIDEOGAMES!!! Oh yeah, we just added 10 more activities you can track :)

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

By popular demand, we’ve added 10 more fitness activities to Collabofit that you can use to track your fitness stats. Some of these are gym activities and some are home and fun activities.

New Collabofit activities:

Basketball
Benchpress
Curls
Hiking
Housework
Pullups
Racquetball
Stairclimber
Videogames*
Yardwork

* Videogames???

Here are the top 3 reasons why we think it’s useful to track your time playing videogames using Collabofit:

Lots of people love playing videogames, and it is common to actually work up a sweat while playing them. i.e. there is _some_ fitness benefit (we think…)
By treating videogames as a fitness activity worth tracking, hopefully people who like to play videogames will look at some of the other activities you can track using Collabofit, and will realize that something as simple as taking a walk is worth more points than playing videogames. Maybe the same competitive drive that leads some players to play for hours on end will also lead them to get out and do something else useful with their time and get some sweet fitness points for doing so. And that’s a good thing, right?
What other fitness site actually gives you points for playing videogames? How cool is that!

If you want an invite, email gserafini [at] gmail.com with the subject: “Gimme a Collabofit Invite Please” and we’ll hook you up. (Open public signup is coming soon, but sending us an email so we can send you an invite is currently the only way you can get an account.)

Now get your Dance Dance Revolution on and Wii your way to a slimmer trimmer you!

The cool photo of people playing a Nintendo Wii is by delta_avi_delta, hosted on Flickr and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

If you like the idea of getting points for playing video games, please digg this article and / or vote it up on reddit. Thanks!

Posted in News, Fitness, Developer Updates, Online Fitness, New Features, Fitness Activities, Fun, Videogames | 12 Comments »

New release - Collabofit version 1.1

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

Well, it’s been about a month and a half since our last major release. Our apologies for taking so long to get a new release out, but we have been busy coding and didn’t want to put out this release until it was ready.

Here are the major new changes and features in Collabofit 1.1:

Upload a custom picture - We’ve discontinued support for using Gravatar images for now until they get their new server up and running since they’re slowing down our page loading times. When you upload a picture to Collabofit it is automatically resized for you.
Team pictures - If you’re a team manager you can upload a custom picture for your team.
Better user badges, and some new badges you can earn: For points: 1k, 10k, 100k, and 1 Million point badges
Improved weight graphs - you can now see a trend line showing your progress
New My Teams page - You can now get to all of the teams you belong to in one easy location
Persistant sign in - You will stay logged in now until you click the Sign Out link. No more having to log in every time you want to enter a stat each day.
Improved use flow for My Account page
Improved security model of backend API system
Lots of backend changes that will make adding new features much easier in the future
Over 50+ major and minor bugs squashed

Let us know what you think. We’ve got a list of new features that we’ll be working on next that we’re really excited about.

Leave a comment if you have any feature requests you’d like to see in the next release.

Posted in News, Fitness, Developer Updates, New Features | 1 Comment »

New activity: Track your snowboarding this winter season

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

Snowboarding is now an activity you can track in Collabofit - your own personal online fitness stats tracking application. As usual, RSS feeds are automatically updated every time you add an entry.

This was added at naomiredding and Simon’s request.

The cool picture of a snowboarder is by garrulus and is Creative Commons licensed and hosted by Flickr.

Posted in News, Fitness, Developer Updates, Online Fitness, New Features, Fitness Activities | No Comments »

Rollerbladers rejoice… you can now get points for doing what you love

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

So, we now have rollerblading as an online fitness activity for which you can get points. Just in time for winter…

Photo by altuwa

Posted in News, Fitness, Developer Updates, Online Fitness, New Features | No Comments »

Competition is starting to heat up

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

The top 5 slots are getting some fierce competition…

This week, andymc has taken the lead.

If you’d like an invite to Collabofit, leave a comment and we’ll see if we can hook you up.

Posted in News, Fitness, Screenshots, Online Fitness, Competition | 1 Comment »

New Collabofit build (1776) - RSS bugs fixed, new activities

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

We’ve just pushed a new build of both the front-end website and the backend API server that fixes a number of RSS bugs, fixes Free member display of summary stats, and adds the thousands separator back in where appropriate.

You can now enter stats for both lunges and squats, as per user request. Lots more are coming soon…

We’re now displaying the top 50 members and their points rankings. Of course, as of today, there are a grand total of… 17 active members. But we’re growing rather rapidly, so we expect to see that list maxed out pretty soon.

As always, let us know if you see anything amiss, or if you have a suggestion for improving the site.

You can see an example of how a RSS feed can be integrated into a WordPress sidebar on my site - Gabriel, where I’m using my Latest Stats RSS feed to automatically update my blog whenever I enter a new stat. I’m using the SimplePie WordPress RSS plugin to read the feed.

Thanks,
Gabriel - http://collabofit.com/members/gserafini/

Posted in News, Fitness, Developer Updates, Release Notes, Screenshots, Online Fitness, New Features | No Comments »

6 year-old boy does 10,000 pushups in 3hr 20 min! (allegedly)

Monday, September 25th, 2006

This would have earned him 30,000 Collabofit points. Too bad he’s too young to join… hahaahah. Dang.

Lu Di, 6, does pushups as other young kungfu students watch at a kungfu school in Central China’s Henan Province July 26, 2006. According to school president Shi Yongdi, Lu did 10,000 pushups in three hours and twenty minutes four days ago. Since he shows so much promise, Shi says the school will waive his tuition for ten years.

By the way, that equals somewhere around 1.2 seconds per pushup. 50 pushups per minute, for 200 minutes in a row. Fierce.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2006-07/27/content_651249.htm

(via Digg)

Posted in News, Fitness, Amazing | No Comments »

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