Fitbit

As I mentioned in another blog post back in May, I have become somewhat of a fitness freak this year. As well as swimming, gymming, yoga and pilates, I try to keep generally active and do as much walking as I can. Particularly to counteract my day job where I spend the majority of my time sat at a desk!

Something that aided my attempts at walking more each day – and doing more ‘steps’ – was upgrading my iPhone 4s to a 5s, which has a built in accelerometer and pedometer. I used an app called Pacer which was great for tracking my daily steps, calories burnt, distance etc. It was particularly good to see visual graphs of the day, week, month and beyond to identify which times and days of the week I was most and least active. (Obviously, I was far more active at the weekends and on gym nights.) But the problem with using your phone as your pedometer is that you feel like you need to have it on you at all times. Or else your steps won’t be logged and, kind of, won’t count!

And so, I recently decided that it was the time to part with some cash and invest in a Fitbit. A Fitbit is a wearable, wireless pedometer and activity tracker – which means that as well as counting steps it can calculate distance, flights of stairs climbed and quality of sleep (among other things).

My mum got herself a Fitbit Charge earlier this year and highly rated it – I didn’t even know what a Fitbit was before then! Some other family members have them as well and I think mum enjoys the competitive nature of it (as you can add friends and view a leaderboard of everyone’s weekly steps), as well as generally improving her daily and weekly step counts. It’s almost like a game – you even earn badges!

Needless to say, I got a bit jealous and wanted to try and compete with my mum’s step count – which in hindsight was a silly idea, because she’s so much better than me… But anyway, I have had my Fitbit for two weeks now and I love it!

Today’s step count (going to the gym helped get it over 10,000).

The Fitbit works alongside an iPhone app.

Unfortunately, there is a negative point to this blog post. Within a few days of using my Fitbit, it became clear that mine wasn’t very good at holding its charge…

A Fitbit Charge (oh so ironically named) is supposed to last about a week with normal use, but mine did not last as long as two days at a time. Had I not known that it was supposed to last longer, then this probably wouldn’t have been too much trouble. It doesn’t take too long to charge a Fitbit back up into a useable state so I was able to do it whilst sitting still and reading or using my computer in the evenings. Although a few times I charged it up over night which meant that my quality of sleep was not properly logged.

After a bit of Googling, I found that I wasn’t the only Fitbit user with battery problems. But I also found that Fitbit are extremely good at dealing with customer queries and problems. So, last Saturday morning I sent an email to their UK customer support team explaining my Charge’s charge problem. Within a few hours (on a Saturday!), I had a reply. They needed a few more details about my Fitbit, like where I bought it from (Amazon), but after that I was told that a replacement Fitbit Charge would be on its way to me within a few days!

My completely free-of-charge replacement Fitbit arrived today – exactly at the time that they said it would. I’m currently charging it up but fingers crossed this one will last 7 days! I can’t rate the company highly enough for their customer service. Thank you, Fitbit.

ps. Mum shared this link with me this morning. Yes, it is that addictive.

Fitness

I have been a member of the gym in Bedford almost as long as I’ve lived here – since last July. But when I say ‘gym’, I mean that for the last year I have used the swimming pool regularly (2–3 times a week) and been to yoga and pilates classes (1 or 2 yoga classes a week and pilates on a Sunday morning, when I can). At least, that was the case up until a few weeks ago…

I’ve now used the actual gym facilities about 4 or 5 times. I had never properly been to a gym in my life so this is all very new for me and, so far, I’ve only tried out the the bike and cross trainer. I was pretty pleased that I managed to do 8km/20mins for my first time on the bike – not at a particularly difficult level, mind you, but hey.

I use a couple of fitness apps on my iPhone to track my exercise sessions. I find that it keeps me motivated to exercise regularly and to either remain consistent in each ‘session’ I do or to exceed my averages. Plus, it’s good to be able to look at a whole week, month or longer period of time and see how I’ve improved.

I blogged about Splash Path/Speedo Fit, in a fair amount of detail, last summer but since then they’ve had quite a major re-design. In fact, I think it happened not long after I wrote that blog post! Also, I treated myself to a new iPhone yesterday – I upgraded from a 4S to a 5S – so now I have a larger screen with which to use the app.

My longest swim of 1,798m was last Thursday!

I’ve been using the Speedo Fit app for well over a year now and so my overall distance (144,250m) sounds quite impressive, I think! So now that I’ve started to expand my weekly exercise beyond swimming, I have also started using another exercise app: Fitlist.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’m using it properly at all but I just wanted to be able to have something calendar-based to record distances and times for each of my sessions in the gym. I haven’t been using the app for very long but it’s great to see that I’ve exercised far more days than not. Yoga and pilates classes go down in this app, as well as swims and gym sessions!

A lot of the figures generated by that app, calories for example, won’t be very accurate as I have no idea how many calories I burn in a pilates class! The bike, cross trainer and no doubt other gym equipment will tell me how many calories I’ve burnt though.

Now that I have an iPhone 5S, I should be able to make proper use of the iOS8 Health app and the built-in pedometer. Again, I have no idea how the Health app fully works but apparently it takes its data from other third-party health and fitness apps – Speedo Fit and Fitlist, for example. But as I only got the phone yesterday, I have yet to experience these feature properly.

Yummly

One of my friends first showed me Yummly, a recipe database website and iPhone/iPad app, last year when a group of us were at her house and we were about to commence cooking a chickpea and butternut squash tagine. I started using it a few weeks later and have since started recommending it to others myself – I told my mum to download the iPad app only yesterday!

Yummly is a great little tool, that is both visually appealing and highly functional – you don’t just search for a recipe, you can search by a specific ingredient and tailor your search to your own dietary requirements. I used Yummly a lot during my month as a vegan, changing my dietary preferences from pescatarian to vegan.

You can save your ‘yums’ to your own account and categorise them if you so wish – dinner, sides, desserts, salads, soups, whatever you want. It will also recommend you new recipes that you may want to try based on things you’ve yummed or been looking for. Recipes come from various sources all over the Internet, like BBC Good Food and the Good Food Channel, but are usefully compiled into one place with Yummly.

This is my profile with most recent yums, most of which I haven’t actually cooked yet.

And some of my ‘collections’. I’ve only just really started using this feature.

Yummly was launched in 2010 by foodies on a mission to invent the ultimate kitchen tool. Whether it’s finding a recipe or going to the store, Yummly wants to make it easier for foodies to do what they love – cook, eat, and share! Yummly’s mission is to be the world’s largest, most powerful, and most helpful food site in the world. – about Yummly

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming

I have been a keen swimmer for most of my life – although my mum does like to tell me tales of how it was difficult to get me in the water as a really young child. At some point, longer ago than I can remember, I must have decided that I did like to be in the water after all…

Through primary school I had weekly (term time) swimming lessons, although I’m not sure I ever got further than my 100m badge. Possibly I made it to 200m? 400m? (I wonder if those badges and swimming certificates are still around at my parents’ house…) Although I stopped those lessons when I reached a certain level, I still used to go swimming for fun with friends sometimes – most notably after violin classes on a Saturday morning. Violin I did not keep up, but swimming I did.

In my second year of university, after only swimming sporadically in the first year, I had an annual membership to use a hotel’s gym and pool facilities. I only used the gym a handful of times but often I would swim maybe 3 or 4 times a week. The hotel was less than five minutes walk from where I lived so that helped – and being a student, apparently, meant lots of free time! Unfortunately the pool was tiny – only 12 metres in length, at the longest point (it wasn’t rectangular either) – so I’m not sure how much distance I actually covered.

PHOTO: Alice Douglas-Deane, fellow graphic designer and sea swimmer. (I’m second from the left.)

Then there was sea swimming. I didn’t start properly swimming in the sea until the end of second year – when I presumed the water to have warmed up a bit. By third year, I was an avid sea swimmer. I swam every Sunday without hesitation as part of the CSM Sea Swimming Club. But it was more of a social thing and an invigorating ‘makes you feel good about yourself for running into the freezing cold water on a Sunday lunchtime like a crazy person’ kind of thing. I’m going back to Falmouth in just over a week (I can’t wait!) and I’m planning on fitting in at least one dip in the sea. My body will need to do some serious re-acclimatising to the cold.

Before I moved from Milton Keynes, I used to swim at Middleton Pool in Newport Pagnell. It was conveniently on my way home from work and I used to try to go once a week – although more often than not, that didn’t work out. That’s when I started using an app on my iPhone called Splash Path so that I could keep track of how much I was swimming each time (yes, I count lengths as I swim) and try to consistently improve.

It’s only now that I’ve moved to Bedford, properly signed up for a gym/swimming pool (Robinson Pool – also 33.3m in length, like Middleton, which is handy) and have been going consistently once or twice a week, that I am starting to really appreciate being able to visualise my swims. It’s encouraging to see my swim streak weeks figure going up, as well as my general distance improving. I started swimming in Bedford doing a measly 20 lengths, or 666m, but now…

My swim this evening – 40 lengths of 33m.

Splash Path – now known as Speedo Fit (I assume because Speedo give them funding to make the app) but I still think of it as Splash Path anyway – at its most basic level gives you the function to record how many lengths you swim at a certain pool, at a certain time and therefore how far that is. But it does other things too:

• Set your goals, track your swims and keep motivated with virtual swim challenges.

• Track every swim, monitor your progress and personal statistics.
• Keep motivated by setting yourself a virtual challenge like Escape from Alcatraz.
• Join the swimming community – share and compare your progress with friends or swimmers at your local pool.
• Find pools wherever you are with the UK’s most comprehensive source of local swimming pools (including Ireland).
• Check pool opening hours, swim timetables.

I’m currently ‘swimming’ across the Irish sea. It is a long way but I have completed all the short challenges.

Hopefully I’ll be upping my days swim streak from 1 to 2 tomorrow, by going two days in a row. I usually tend to go Mondays and Thursday but the bank holiday threw me off this week. Plus I didn’t go until Sunday last week (my one and only swim of the week, but it was a good one) due to not wanting my freshly henna’d hair to turn the pool water green prior to that.

You can get Speedo Fit from the Apple app store here, for free.

Augmented technology

My group and I are looking into augmented reality technology for our app design. There is some incredible stuff out there, and the technology is being developed everyday. It's so current and the possibilities seem endless. If you don't know what augmented reality is, check out this.

Some cool apps/technologies around now:

A bit scary, but pretty cool anyway.

This one is crazy. We printed out the piece of paper with a kind of QR code

on it and it really did work - pretty fun!

And talking of QR codes, I made this:

If you have a barcode scanning app, you can work it out.