Collabofit

We just pushed a new build and are excited to announce the following new features:

• RSS feeds for all activities
• New activities have been added - Yoga, Steps and… Sledgehammer!
• Target weight goals can now be added, and you’ll see how long you’ve got to lose (or gain) those extra pounds. Or kilograms.
• Team Manager badges. You can now see who the manager of a team is because they’ve got a gold star.
• Link to add a new activity entry from each View Activity page
• Weigh-in history graphics show your target weight

Some of the bugs we fixed in this build:

• A nasty rounding bug where when you put in a number with a decimal that was bigger than .5 it would add 1 to the total.
• Dates are correctly editable again.
• Emails are correctly added to the system on new user sign-up. Existing users will get a message to update their email addresses on their My Account page.
• Lots of layout fixes and improvements

We hope you like the updates. Keep the feedback coming.

We’re really excited about the flavor of personal fitness that is being promoted by Health Hacks — a lot of it is just about taking personal responsibility for your own self and accepting that you can in fact do something to improve your own level of fitness, and that the only sustainable methods are ones that you can live with easily for the long term.

The Health Hacks Podcast started in the summer of 2006 as an outgrowth of Chris Brogan’s podcast Fat Guy Gets Fit. When Executive Producer Kevin Kennedy-Spaien came on board, health writers Jimmy Moore and Reinhard Engels were brought in to round out the show. The first formal episode of the newly retitled show premiered on August 30, 2006.

Check it out: Health Hacks Podcast. We’re subscribed.

This is a good set of tips for improving your abdominal region fitness. Most importantly, start easy and slow, then build up over time as you feel stronger.

The simple 2 step process to gaining six pack abs is as follows: strengthen your abdominal muscles and lose body fat. The concept is simple, but putting it into action is not. It will take dedication, willpower, patience and time to get a six pack but in the end, the effort is well worth it. Here is some info on the process.

http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Six-Pack-Abs

An interesting analysis of a simple weight-loss strategy by someone from MIT about losing 30 lbs using nothing but the principle of Conservation of Energy.

Want to lose a pound of fat? You can work it off by hiking to the top of a 2,500-story building. Or by running 60 miles. Or by spending 7 hours cleaning animal stalls. (It is amazing what scientists have actually measured. This last example is tabulated in the book Exercise Physiology by G. Brooks and T. Fahey.)

Exercise is a very difficult way to lose weight. Here’s a rule of thumb: exercise very hard for one hour (swimming, running, or racquetball) and you’ll lose about one ounce of fat. Light exercise for an hour (gardening, baseball, or golf) will lose you a third of an ounce. That number is small because fat is a very energy-dense substance: it packs about 4,000 food calories per pound, the same as gasoline, and 15 times as much as in TNT.

If you run for an hour, you’ll lose that ounce of fat and also a pound or two of water. By the next day, when you’ve replenished the water, you might think, “the weight came right back!” But you’d be wrong-you really did lose an ounce. It is hard to notice, unless you keep running every day for a month or more, and don’t reward yourself after each run with a cookie.

There is a much easier way to lose weight, as we can learn from the first law of thermodynamics. Eat less.

A reasonable daily diet for an adult is 2,000 food calories. That’s 8.36 megajoules per day, or about 100 joules per second-in other words, 100 watts. Most of that ends up as heat, so you warm a room as much as a bright light bulb. Cut your consumption by 600 calories per day and you’ll lose a pound of fat every week. Most diet experts consider that a reasonable goal. Don’t drop below 1,000 calories per day, or you might get lethargic. But at 1,400 calories per day, you can easily maintain an active life.

Of course, there is a catch. You’ll be hungry.

Read the entire article: The Physics Diet

Thanks to JME at the 20 Minute Fitness Solution for the pointer.

Check out what Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! fame has done using goal-setting and tracking using spreadsheets — he lost over 50 lbs! Nice!

From his post:

The advice I’ll give isn’t likely to be all that different that what you might read elsewhere, but the combination is what worked well for me. Hopefully it’ll motivate a few more people to do the same. I learned a lot about my habits and behavior in the process and suspect that much of it applies to most people who are struggling with extra pounds.

Diet Tips or How To Lose Weight with a Spreadsheet and a Web Site