Please recommend software to help me track my fitness activities and goals.

June 26, 2007 9:40 AM

Please recommend software to help me track my fitness activities and goals.

I've been using Excel for this purpose for three months, but have found doing so cumbersome. I'd like to track my cardio, resistance training, measurements, nutrition, goals, photos, and other related information. Here's the trick: my knowledge of fitness is relatively low. It would be nice to find a program that helps me figure out what is useful to track, perhaps even offers advice or hints on how to achieve my goals. Lastly, since no software is likely to replace the need for a nutritionist or a personal trainer, I'd like to be able to export information to share.

What software would you recommend? Windows, Mac, or Linux. Preferably free and open source, but willing to pay for the right software even if it means I can't edit the source code.

posted by sequential to Health & Fitness (11 answers total)

Try thedailyplate.com. With the exception of tracking pictures, it seems to do everything else you're looking for. You can track all your food and exercise, measurements, weight, goal, etc. Also, all these features are free.

It's a great site, and very useful!
posted by odi.et.amo at 9:45 AM on June 26, 2007

One thing to add... you can print out your food intake and exercise pages (they have a nice view for it), or you can "share" your "plate", as they call it. You can choose to make it open to the public or open to specific people through the use of a password of your choosing.
posted by odi.et.amo at 9:47 AM on June 26, 2007

Fitday may be helpful for you. It was extremely useful for me when I was trying to diet. I only used the free version, so I don't know what the for-purchase version is like, but I was quite impressed.

I believe that Fitday is aimed more at nutrition information than at fitness activities, but that may just be my own experience (I was aimed more at nutrition than fitness activities). Anyway, definitely check it out.
posted by Ms. Saint at 10:14 AM on June 26, 2007

I've recently started with SparkPeople.com, which has a lot of fitness content, including animated demos of strength training exercises. I used to use FitDay, which isn't quite a smooth, but might fit your needs
posted by libraryhead at 10:15 AM on June 26, 2007

Fitday's desktop application is much smoother & has more functionality than the web-based version. It was the best $20 I've ever spent.

SparkPeople.com is also a great site with exercise tracking functionality, but I find their site a little less intuitive than Fitday, which is more bare bones.
posted by tastybrains at 10:20 AM on June 26, 2007

Fitday PC is great, and completely worth the money, but as far as I know you can't export the data (other than to a .fdy file that can only be read by Fitday, which is fine if you're wanting to open your account on work & home computers, for example, but not if you want to bring it into excel or something), and there's nowhere to include photos. Otherwise it does everything you want.
posted by waterlily at 10:52 AM on June 26, 2007

I apologize in advance for the self-promotion.
I made a site for this purpose a few years back. I'm going to re-write it RSN, but it works for the most part now
trackstat.us
posted by slactoid at 11:31 AM on June 26, 2007

I've been happy with buckeyeoutdoors for tracking workouts. I haven't used the food database or diet tracking, though.
posted by bassjump at 11:38 AM on June 26, 2007

If you've got a Palm or PocketPC device, I'd highly recommend Diet and Exercise Assistant.
posted by jferg at 11:59 AM on June 26, 2007

http://www.joesgoals.com/
posted by zackola at 12:44 PM on June 26, 2007

You might want to check out http://konamoxt.com/ which is still in beta but has some workout tracking tools as well as a lot of community features.
posted by donovan at 1:00 PM on June 26, 2007