Well, last year’s plan to get healthier and lose weight didn’t work out so well. I signed up for the 5 Peaks trail runs and a 5 K. Zombie run, but I didn’t make out too well with training for the running. I ended up pulling some muscles in my leg and having problems with my hip and lower back.
Spent some time in Chiro/Active Release getting that fixed up and then broke my leg on an easy hike at the end of July. That pretty much did me in for the rest of the year.

However, it’s now a new year, the leg is doing well, although it still hurts when I’ve been fairly active.
I’ve got a simpler plan this year, each day I’ll either do 10,000 steps, or at least an hour of some sort of exercise. If I can pull that off for at least 5 days out of 7 each week I’ll be happy.

I’ve got a few tools and apps that will help. I’ve got my Garmin Forerunner 305 that I’ve had for a few years which I can use to track my heartrate, pace, distance and map my route, although I mostly just use it for heartrate.

I got a Fitbit One for Christmas, which tracks the number of steps I do each day, as well stairs climbed and distance travelled. The Fitbit website keeps track of how well I’m doing and allows for weight tracking and Food logging as well. There is a Forum section and I joined the Calgary Fitbit group, which has 22 members.

The Fitbit One and Website can also be linked MyFitnessPal.com, which has a very good iPhone app and website for tracking the food you eat each day. This is going to be one of the harder things for me to do consistently, but it has been shown that if you do track your food, you have a much better success rate in losing weight. It can also be used to track the types of exercise that you do, and will feed the food and exercise info back to the Fitbit site.

Another app that I have been using for quite awhile is TactioHealth. It has nice graphs for tracking weight, Blood pressure, activity and several other things. It also imports the step information from the Fitbit. With the other new apps and websites I’m using, it’s become a little redundant, except maybe for the Blood pressure, have to check if any of the other ones track that. However, I’ve use it the longest, so it has more historical information than the other apps/sites, so I’m still using it.

I also use an app called Pedometer GPS+ when I’m walking. It has some nice mapping functions and other features, again, now somewhat redunant with other items.

I also picked up an Omron Blood Pressure moniter a few months ago that I can use to track my blood pressure.
On the days that it isn’t nice enough to get out and walk, I’ve got all sorts of fitness equipment downstairs, a couple wobble boards, three bosu’s, all sorts of resistance tubing, a bench, a couple of exercise balls and various weights. I’ve also got a recumbant exercise bike upstairs that I picked up used a couple months ago to help with strengthing my leg.

So, basically, I’ve got more than enough stuff to be able to do this to track my progress, I just need to do it 🙂