Collabofit

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

Gabriel — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 19:11:01 +0000

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

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

Gabriel — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:29:42 +0000

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

Losing weight the Wii way. (Wii is Nintendo’s latest videogame system)

Gabriel — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:19:03 +0000

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}::.

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

Gabriel — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:29:39 +0000

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”.

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

Gabriel — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 08:52:57 +0000

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!

What Collabofit is really all about.

Gabriel — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:51:48 +0000

This sweet comic is by Randall Munroe at xkcd.

New release - Collabofit version 1.1

Gabriel — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 23:12:09 +0000

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.

New activity: Track your snowboarding this winter season

Gabriel — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:53:40 +0000

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.

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

Gabriel — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 06:23:17 +0000

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

Photo by altuwa

Competition is starting to heat up

Gabriel — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:23:06 +0000

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.