Aol’s primary health & fitness blog – That’s Fit – wrote an amazing piece about Earndit last week. The article is pasted below, or you can click here to be taken to it directly. It’s awesome to see Earndit getting such positive attention!!!
New Site Pays You to Workout
What motivates you to exercise? Maybe you want to have a lean body, a healthy heart or just want to be able to have a few pieces of pizza without worrying about your waistline. But what if looking and feeling good isn’t quite enough to get you to the gym? You want a reward for your hard work, darn it. And Earndit is here to help you out. Earndit is a site that provides rewards for your workouts. The premise is simple: You sign up on Earndit using a tracking service such as Nike+, Foursquare, Everytrail, Garmin Connect or, coming soon, Fitbit. These services then help you earn points for workouts. For example, if you check in at the gym using Foursquare, you get 15 points (unless you’re the mayor, in which case you earn 20 per check in). If you use a service that tracks your distance, you earn a certain number of points per mile based on whether you travel by foot, bike, skate, paddle or skateboard. Once you’ve earned points, you can exchange them for rewards ranging from coupons to online consultations with a professional trainer. We love this concept. Hey, even lifelong runners and gym rats can use a little extra motivation! But the site has a little way to go. Of course, tracking systems have to be used in order to keep people honest, but there are a lot of them out there — it would be great to have the option to use more of the apps available on different phones. And we’re looking forward to more companies signing on to provide rewards. We like free jewelry and stilettos as much as the next girl, but we can see this really taking off when people can start earning points toward, say, a free GPS watch or other cool workout device. And we’d really like to see ways to add to the types of activities that can be counted toward points. If you provide proof you’ve signed up for a race, could that count? Or what about somehow transferring information from, say, the Wii Fit? It might be a bit of a wait for all this since Earndit is still quite new. The founders admit they aren’t even making any money off it — yet. But we think that will change. This is a novel idea that plays off the popularity of social media, and with the way social media has taken a shine to fitness, it’s a perfect match. Will you be signing up? If not, what’s holding you back?