Collabofit

This guy lost 9 pounds by playing Nintendo Wii Sports. If you want to start tracking your own videogame usage and fitness and weight stats, please send an email to gserafini [at] gmail.com and I’ll hook you up with an invite to Collabofit.

Six weeks ago, I began what has become a huge obsession of mine. It is called the “Wii Sports Experiment” (Read my original announcement of this from Early December ‘06). I outlined a 6 week game plan for myself, the idea being that I would continue ALL normal activity and eating habits, and simply add 30 minutes of Wii Sports to my day. For the past month and a half, I’ve stuck to these guidelines very strictly.
For those of you unfamiliar with “Wii Sports”, you can watch a video review of the game and find out what it’s all about, here
I’ve been meticulously keeping track of the following for the past 6 weeks:
- Weight
- BMI
- Calories burned per session/per game (via BioTrainer, thanks Nancy!)
- Body fat % (via a Digital Body Fat Caliper and a body fat scale)
- Heart Rate (at rest)
- Wii Fitness Age
- Additional Notes/Soreness

Read the rest of his story at .::{WiiNintendo.net}::.

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”.

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:

1. 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…)
2. 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?
3. 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!

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.

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

Photo by altuwa

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.

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/

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.