Be Fit With Biray

I’ve been playing around a lot on Gyminee, a fitness-related social networking site. (Just think Facebook for fitness with additional features for logging your workouts and meals.) Anyway, they’ve recently launched a new feature called “challenges” where you can challenge your friends (aka “Gym Buddies”) to a task. It can be for anything! ‘First to lose 10 pounds’ or ‘Most miles ran in a week’ or ‘Longest without a beer’… you get the picture. I’ve challenged my Arizona-based Gym Buddies to 5K race in October called “Ghosts and Goblins” (I guess the Halloween theme is appropriate since we’re not all at the same fitness level, so it might scary to see a few of my colleagues cross the finish line. LOL)

Anyway, these ‘challenges’ can be both public (meaning, anyone on Gyminee can participate) or private (you can invite specific participants). Create one for your personal training staff or one for just your clients!

Gyminee also let’s you set up rewards for each challenge. With our 5K challenge, whoever finishes the race first will get the prize: money towards iTunes store. Five bucks goes into the pot when anyone accepts the challenge. As of this post, there are only 4 of us… so the winner will get $15 worth of entertainment spending!

The cool thing about these challenges is each one comes with their own widgets. See below:

This leader board widget showcases the people involved in the challenge. Great for small group challenges when you want to see how everyone is doing.

Or, post this widget instead:

This one showcases your ranking in the challenge without listing others involved. So if you have an ongoing challenge with a lot of people involved, you can let everyone know where you rank above/below other participants!

Every time someone accepts a challenge or updates their progress toward their challenge, these widgets automatically update! Gyminee also offers other widgets that track things like body weight, protein intake, progress reports, etc. So, why not put a widget on your blog or website? This way you can generate excitement both within your Gyminee community, as well as, by cross-pollinating the web!

The application of these widgets are endless, but hopefully they act as another way to keep people motivated in reaching their health and fitness goals (and challenges)!

Oh yeah, and they’re FREE!

(Only 85 days to go until my challenge starts… wish me luck!)