When I started my fitness tracking project a month ago my first thought was that tracking should be fully automatic or at least as much automatized as possible. After my experiences from the first month this is still true. 

The best tools I have found so far are:

• Tap Log for general tracking
• Endomondo for sports tracking
• SleepBot for sleep tracking

All of these are either fully automatic (Endomondo and SleepBot) or extremely easy to use. 

Of the other tools I started to use I have noticed that I simply don't have motivation to use them any more. For example, MyFitnessPal is a great software to track what you eat, and used together with RunKeeper tracks how many calories you and and how many you burn. But using MyFitnessPal requires a lot of manual work and I simply don't have motivation for that. 

The next application I will test, as soon as it arrives to Android, is Moves. It looks like a perfect, fully automated solutions for tracking many things. 

There are two really important things in running technique: running form and cadence. Form is difficult to track with an app, but cadence is easier. Cadence in running means how many steps you take a minute - an optimal cadence you should aim for is about 180 steps a minute (which is quite a lot for a beginner runner at least). 

App stores are filled with different GPS tracking apps. Many of them also show you average cadence during your run. However, just tracking the average isn't enough, because often you walk a bit at the beginning and at the end of your run, and this affects the average cadence. 

RunSafe is an interesting app with exact information about you running cadence and impact of your running. It is easy to track your cadence during the run and also check the impact to prevent injuries. 

With RunSafe you get exact steps, cadence and impact per minute. RunSafe also has a metronome you can use during the training to make sure you run with correct cadence. It shows the results in a clear format:

Of course the big question is does this help? Ok, it is interesting to know your cadence, but so what? Well, the thing here is same as with the other tracking: once you start to track things and get information how you are really doing, it is easier to improve things. 

I have always thought that I run with good cadence. However, the result from my first test run was that my average cadence is 154 steps / minute. Of course average doesn't tell everything since I walked a bit during the test, but if I look at the cadences during differnt minutes of the run, most of my running is between 130 - 160 steps a minute. Too low. 

After this on my next run I started to concentrate on keeping high enough cadence. The results were quite interesting:

As a result my average cadence climbed up to 181 steps to minute, and I was able to keep a cadence over 180 steps / minute most of my run. Great improvement. 

Summary: if you want to know your running cadence, track it and improve it, here is the app for you. I highly recommend. I keep it open with the same time with a GPS tracker (my favorite is Endomondo) so I also get speed, route etc. data from other app. 

I have been quite proud about the fact that I eat healthy food which is good for training and getting to better shape. Since I started tracking what I eat with MyFitnesspal, results have however been quite surprising. 

I moved data from MyFitnessPal to Excel after a week of tracking. The tracking gives quite good information about carbohydrates, proteins and fat, but here is a simple chart about just the amount of calories:

Nothing really surprising here. Or maybe the fact that the amount of what I eat seems to vary a lot depending on the day. I would have guessed the difference between different days would have been a lot smaller. 

Next I combined data from my heart rate monitor. This was a bit tricky, because it is a bit difficult to get the data from Suunto's Movescount service to the right format. But after playing with Excel for a while I got the data to good format. When I combined my burned calories to what I have eaten, the results were a bit surprising:

The result was that I burn quite a lot of more calories than I eat. The difference in a week was about 2500 calories, which is quite lot. Of course this would be good news, if I wanted to lose weight, but not that good new if I want to improve my fitness and my marathon and triathlon results. Your muscles won't grow if they won't get the nutrition they need. 

So, the next goal for me is simply to eat a bit more of healthy food. Interesting to see what it does to my sports results. 

One of the basic things to track when training is your body weight. Usually most people want to lose weight and track if they are losing weight or not. However, just tracking your weight isn't that interesting. What is interesting is the reason why your body weight is changing. 

If you just want to track your body weight you can do it with a cheap body scale you can get from any supermarket. But the basic body scales won't tell you the reason why your weight is changing. If we simplify things a bit, there are three parts of you body that can change:

• Fat
• Muscle mass
• Water

If you want to change your body weight, usually you want to lose fat and gain muscle mass. However, when people start a diet and try to lose weight, quite often they just lose water and muscle mass, not fat. This was my concern also, because since I started training I have been losing weight. And I wanted to make sure that I am losing fat, not water or muscle mass. 

The good news is that there are many smart body scales in the market which track your weight and connect to your computer or smart phone. Here is comparison of few of the best body scales I could find:

1. Tanita BC-1500 
   
2. Wahoo Balance
3. Withings Smart Body Analyzer
4. iHealth Body Analysis Scale
5. Samsung Body Scale

The first thing which is different between many body scales is what they measure: only weight, or some other things (like fat, water and muscle):

As shown on the table, there are clearly two kinds of products: those that measure just your weight (Wahoo, Samsung) and those what do more thorough analysis (Tanita, iHealth). Withings is somehere between: in addition to weight it measures body fat and also tracks you hearth rate which might be interesting. 

In addition to measurements another important thing is tracking. You can of course track your results manually with pen and paper, but in practice it is important to have software where results are uploaded automatically from the scale. Different products support a bit different systems and software:

Of the different products Tanita is clearly meant to be used with Windows. There are possibilities to use it with OS X or iOS, but the main application is Windows-based. Wahoo and iHealth are meant only for iOS, and Samsung for Android. Withings support both iOS and Android. 

Different products have different features, but of course different prices also. What is a bit surprising however is that products with less features are almost at the same prices level as to products with more features. 

Tanita is clearly on an own price level. Of course, the target group is also a bit more professional athlete than of the other products. Tanita also offers a large number of accessories and connectivity, which explains the difference to other products. However, what is interesting than the price of the rest of the products is in practice on the same level. 

If you just look at the features and price, iHealth is clearly the winner here with most features for the money. Another interesting product is Withings which offers some features none of the other products offer (like pulse and indoor air quality). One limiting factor is also iOS: most products offer the best support for iOS, so if you are an Android user, your choices might be somewhat limited. 

There are many interested products to keep track on your weight and body composition. Tanita is probably the best product of these all, but also clearly on higher price level than the others. The rest of the products cost about the same, but offer different features. If you are iOS user, the best choice for you is probably iHealth Body Analaysis Scale if you want most features, Wahoo if you just want a simple easy to use body scale. If you are an Android user, I would go with the Withings Smart Body Analyzer. If you are committed to Samsung Galaxy ecosystem, choose Samsung body scale. 

I have been recently focusing on drinking enough water each day. Water is the key thing for healthy living and also important for training and good fitness. Water was also the first thing I started to track with Tap Log since I thought that would be easy. For that reason the results from the first week were quite surprising: I don't drink enough water, not even close. 

A person with my size and weight should drink about 2-3 litres of water every day. That means drinking water quite often. Which I do. But once I really tracked how much and how often I drunk water, I got quite surprising results: 

I am drinking about the half of the water I should be drinking. So my next goal is to increase the amount I drink to at least 2 litres a day. Let's see if tracking helps to fix this, because: what you measure is what you get. 

Another interesting thing I learned also was to move data from Tap Log to Excel and especially do interesting things to the data in excel, but more about that in the next blog posts. 

After setting up generic tracking my next goal was to start tracking what I eat. I tested a couple of apps and ended up starting a more thorough tests with MyFitnessPal.

The idea of MyFitnessPal is quite as same as most of the food tracking apps. You enter what you eat and the app calculates your calories (and carbohydrates, proteins and fat).  What I liked about MyFitnessPal app is a really big database where you can find just about any food:

After you find the food it is easy to add it to your list. And the list what you have eaten is also easy to browse:

You get also good reports of your nutrition:

What I didn't fully like is that the app is a little bit slow (at least on my old android phone). It also isn't as simple and easy as I would like it to be, but seems a little bit bloated.

Anyway, there are more positive than negative ing about this app, so I'll continue using it for now. But I continue to look for more simpler and faster alternative. Any thoughts on good similar apps are welcome.

The first thought for me when starting the tracking was that it either must be automatic, or extremely easy. I simply don't have time or motivation to fill in manually complicated and long web form to track what I eat or how much do I exercise. 

When I started my logging project my first goal was to find right tools for tracking. I had three request for the tools:

1. They  need to work on my Android phone
2. They need to be extremely fast and easy to use
3. There has to be an option to export data to excel (or some other general format)

I have already used Endomondo for tracking my exercise, so I needed a generic tool to track rest and eating. There are quite a many specialised apps for tracking that, but many seem quite complicated and don't have export option. 

The easiest app I found for Tap Log which looks really promising after a couple of days testing. The idea of Tap Log is that you can easily log anything in 5 seconds. You can create things you want to log and then create logs really fast. 

My idea was to track at least in the beginning things in five main categories:

1. Food (in general, how regular is my eating, not calories etc. I eat)
2. Sleep (how much do I sleep and what is my sleep quality)
3. Exercise (probably I still will use Endomondo for this)
4. Free time (what I do in my free time, for example how much do I spend watching TV)
5. Work (some work related things)

I then created things I want to log in each of these categories, for example in Food category I added the following things:  

Creating all the categories and things to log is extremely easy in Tap Log. Creating the structure I described above took me maybe 10 minutes. And then everything is ready for logging. 

You can log three different kinds of things in Tap Log:

1. Quantity (in other words, any number)
2. Rating (a 1-5 stars)
3. Text (any free text you type)
   
   

Logging happens in Tap Log by tapping the thing you want to log. Then a new screen opens where you enter the value you want to log, for when I want to log water I drink (quantity) the following screen opens:

I enter the amount (for example 2, if I drink 2 dl of water), and then tap Log. It takes about 10 seconds to open the app and make log entry. Easy and fast, just like I want it. 

When you make logs you can also of course check the entries you have made. It looks like this:

And of course, you can easily export all date to Excel-format and share it where ever you want to, I use Dropbox. 

So this looks like quite a promising way to start logging information about things I want to know about. Next steps would be to log this information for a while, then check what the data looks like in Excel and how what I do matches my goals. I probably also need to find a bit more detailed way to log what I eat and details about my exercise.