Ongoing Issues With My Fitness Apps and Devices

With the boom of mobile devices and wearable tech, the fitness industry seems to be growing under this love the world has for technology. We love our phones and it shows by how close we keep them to our sides at all times. I would say 90% of my day (awake and asleep), I am no more than 25 feet from my phone. Of course, most of that time it sits on my office desk or on my nightstand charging at night. However, it is still an arm’s reach away. Even when I am at the gym at my local YMCA, I keep the phone on a window ledge. (It needs to be close enough so my bluetooth Motorola Buds can play my Spotify playlists.) Add a heavy dose of infatuation with our mobiles and stir in a double dash of social sharing issues and the need to unlock achievements and you end up with a recipe for showing the world that I am fitter than you and I have the stats and stickers to prove it.

There are hundreds of health and fitness apps currently on the Google Play store. Most of them are cheap knock offs or apps with training guides that are laced with microtransactions to unlock new workouts. However, there are a few great apps out there to help you track your progress and compare stats over the course of your journey to a healthier you. I’ve tried a few of these apps and love them to a point. I’ve run into a few issues between some apps and how they interact with each other that kind of spoiled my attempt to track everything. Things were going okay when I was just using my phone and a mobile app to track distance run/biked or my computer to log workouts. Then I decided to step it up a notch and bought a Garmin device. This is when things started to go downhill but I don’t think my Garmin is to blame.

Prior to this year, I was using Endomondo. However, my employer’s work and live healthy initiative did not include this fitness app as one of the allowed fitness trackers. I decided to go with MapMyFitness due to its partnership with Under Armour. (My sister designs for them so I place my loyalty in them at the moment.) Overall it is a great app and the UI is easy to use and it has lots of activities to choose from. I was also pairing it with MyFitnessPal another UA affiliation) to track my nutrition.  These apps worked great together. They both tracked my calories and showed my net calories based on my activity level. It also showed me how many calories I could eat each day if I wanted to lose x amount of weight per week. I was very diligent about tracking my nutrition for a couple of months in MyFitnessPal. I slowly stopped once I ran into two major issues in MapMyFitness.

Back in April, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 10. It is a GPS watch and even though it is thier base model, I love using it for walking, running, and riding. I was able to sync my watch with MapMyFitness and import my workout data and maps from Garmin to MapMyFitness. This is when I started noticing some issues. The first issue was my watch automatically tracks every activity as running. Once I sync my watch with my PC, I can modify the activity and other details of my workout. This is fine and the Garmin portal is excellent and very simplified for anyone to use. However, the modified data never updates on the fitness tracker and keeps everything as a run. (MapMyFitness pulls the data immediately after the watch syncs to my PC.) The second issue I was noticing with MapMyFitness was anything I imported from the Garmin watch or added on my phone app was shared with all my friends and sent them push notifications. The problem is I have all settings set as private. When I log events on the PC, they stay private. The mobile app, not so much. I’ve reset the settings and reinstalled the app. Nothing changes. I was annoying my friends with all the activities I was adding per day. I added everything because I needed so many hours per month for work and the more calories I tracked the more I knew I could eat. I did try adding multiple workouts on to one entry (which is allowed in MapMyFitness) but if I did that it would not take the calorie total and remove it from MyFitnessPal’s nutrition diary. I tried hitting up MapMyFitness support but they were little to no help. I could not find other users on the forums that had a similar issue.

Frustrated, I stopped tracking everything. I unlinked all apps from each other. I still use my Garmin watch throughout the week but I keep all the data in their own portal. I only log other activities in MapMyFitness at a bare minimum and only do it on the PC. I make sure I log enough hours for my work bonus and then stop. Luckily, I already hit my year bonus and can stop. It’s a shame, I would love to see the overall picture of things I do between running, biking, soccer, yoga, disc golf, gym, etc. I might go back into experimenting with Endomondo again and see if it plays nice with everything. I would also like to try other fitness devices from Garmin like a fenix 3) and others but do not have the funding to just sample the arsenal of devices that flooded the market over the last 2 years.

I will probably do some reviews of these apps and definitely my watch in the near future. They all work great on their own and deserve to be tried by all. Especially if you are highly interested and motivated in exercising. I love seeing all that data, looking at maps, and comparing the numbers. I do like to share some of my longer runs and rides on social media. I’m not that fast, so its not a full on gloating technique but it is very close to it. We should all be proud of our achievements no matter how big or small.

Maybe I am trying to track too much across to many apps. Maybe having the control and being very granular does not always work out. Maybe I just need to simplify things. Maybe I shouldn’t care about net calories based off my activity. I am curious to hear how others track their healthy lifestyle via technology. Do you have a single app that satisfies diet and exercise? Comment below.

Great Cycle Challenge Still Rides On

Last month, I was signed up to take part in the Great Cycle Challenge. It was a pledge to ride my bike for 100 miles in the month of June and raise donations for child cancer. It was a great idea and there was a lot of activity for the event. From everyone except me. I was a lazy sac when it came to my bike last month. Actually, I was pretty lazy overall that month. So far the event has generated $1.6M in donations and over 960,000 miles were logged.

Luckily, the event was extended and I can still reach my riding goal. It would be nice to hit or come close to my donation mark. There is still time for me to log my rides and generate money. The last day for donations is July 31. If that is also the last day for rides, then I have 84 miles to go in 2 weeks. Sounds doable with determination but next weekend is the 24-hour soccer event known as Sarah Parvin Memorial. (This is another child cancer sporting event.)

I am asking everyone to check out my progress and donate $1 from your Paypal account. I am going to hit a few local rails to trails and start adding up the miles. I’m going to ride to my parents house tomorrow to borrow the truck for a Home Depot run (new grill, smoker, and fire pit for the weekend). That means that I will eventually have to ride back home.

As of right now, I am ranked 192nd in Pennsylvania with donations. I may never hit #1 in the US with over $12k, but I can at least help make a difference.

If I do not hit 100 miles by the end of this month, then I will add another 100 miles to my goal and extend it through August. I will keep going until I hit my mark. So, if August is a bust then September will be 300 miles total. October 400…Don’t worry, August will be the finishing month if I fail this month.

Remember to donate under my page. Thank you!