January, 2011

Exercise — 1 Comment
20
Jan 11

You Burn More Calories While Not Exercising

This post was written by Jesse Schwartzman, an Advisor to Earndit. Jesse is a Tier 4 personal trainer at Equinox and he holds a Masters in Exercise Physiology from Columbia.

The real key to burning calories is to modify behavior when you’re NOT exercising. That’s right, I want you to focus not on exercising more, but on MOVING more throughout the entire day. If you think of structured exercise as the only time needed to burn calories, you are missing a large part of opportunities to burn calories. In fact the largest percentage of our energy expenditure doesn’t come from regimented exercise, but instead from our bodily metabolic processes and amount of general movement in the day. Ideally, exercise shouldn’t account for more than 25% of your daily caloric burn.

Picture our Paleolithic ancestors getting up in the morning, running around the forest for a half hour and then sitting on a log all day. Would you consider such a person an active individual?  :)

Even inactivity of just 12 hours can lead to a host of hormonal changes that can wreak havoc on mood, energy, weight loss, and recovery.  I just learned this at a seminar on metabolic training and performance this past weekend.

So… don’t workout and then think you can turn into a blob for hours on end without some consequences. I suggest you make sure that even on recovery days to try and stay active and avoid these undesirable consequences. Finding creative ways to move more is not easy, so here are a few options:  park further from the office, get up and take walk breaks at work, use stairs instead of elevators, etc.

Now if you’ll excuse me I am going to run around with my cat dangling a feather while he chases me. I have been sitting at this computer for too long.

Yours in good health,

Jesse

Company / Rewards — 1 Comment
18
Jan 11

Manpacks will reward your sweat with fresh undergarments

Manpacks is one of those concepts that makes so much sense, you wonder how it hasn’t existed before. You go to their site to create a pack of basic clothing (underwear, t-shirts, socks, etc) and they’ll ship you that pack every 3 months. It’s one item you can always have crossed off on your to-do list.

They have great selection at great pricing, plus you can change the contents of your pack anytime. You can choose from brands like Hanes, Champion, Calvin Klein and Under Armour.  They’ll send you a reminder email before any pack is shipped.  Manpacks is rewarding your hard work with a $20 credit.

I recently received my first Manpack and it was a flawless purchase experience.  I was thinking of modeling my purchase for you, but you were spared the horror when Harry advised me against it.  ;)

Exercise / Tracking / Website — Comments Off
12
Jan 11

Fitbit now earns you rewards on Earndit

I first learned about Fitbit when they presented at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008.  For those that aren’t familiar with the conference, it was an annual 3-day event that had a stronghold on the attention of the technology world.  The brightest minds in the industry would speak on panels, while the most promising startups were given a chance to show their dreams to the world on stage.  These startups were competing for a grand prize, and Fitbit was chosen as a runner-up.  At the time I was an Associate with a venture capital firm in New York.  I was so impressed by Fitbit that I reached out to the founders to ask if they needed some funding.  Though my firm wasn’t able to invest, they ended up raising money from one of the most respected venture capital firms in the country, True Ventures (the company also recently raised more money from another top-tier fund, Foundry Group).

Fitbit has developed a compact sensor that you can wear all day long to track your steps, calories burned and even sleep.  The device uses a 3-axis accelerometer to determine your movements.  It then uses the intensity & duration of those movements to determine calorie burn.  It’s a magical technology!  All of this data is then wirelessly uploaded to their website where you can see it in graphical form and identify patterns.  On the website, you can also manually log your food intake and body weight to complete your overall fitness picture.

Because the Fitbit is worn all day long and monitors even the slightest movement, we had to use a different formula to assign points to Fitbit activity.  As opposed to the typical “10 points per mile by foot” we give for other devices, we came up with a unique formula for Fitbit.  In a user’s daily report, their activities are classified into one of 4 buckets:  sedentary, lightly active, fairly active and very active.  We decided not to give credit for sedentary and lightly active minutes, opting to focus on fairly active and very active minutes.  As such, we give 0.1 point for each fairly active minute, and 0.75 point for each very active minute.  While it’s difficult to standardize points across different fitness devices, we feel that we’ve done a good job of creating a way to compare apples to oranges.  We’ll also continue to evaluate our formulas to ensure accuracy.

Finally, I’d like to give a big thank you to Paul Marcum who gave us access to his Fitbit account while we worked on the integration.  He trusted us with his personal data, and for that we are very grateful.

Rewards — 1 Comment
6
Jan 11

Peeled Snacks is now rewarding your exercise

Peeled Snacks is rewarding you with a $20 gift card towards their gently-dried organic fruit snacks.  These delicious pieces of dried fruit are a great source of vitamins and fiber with no sugar added.  They’re perfect for an energy boost before or after a workout.

Peeled Snacks were awarded Men’s Health Magazine’s “Favorite Organic Snack”, featured in Health Magazine’s “Healthiest 100″ and chosen as “Best Bite at Starbucks” by Nutrition Action Newsletter.

Be sure to tell us what you think of Peeled Snacks on our Facebook page.

As always, please let us know if you have any feedback on how we can improve Earndit for you.