As my faithful readers know, about a month ago I did a preliminary review of two health and fitness Web sites that offered some innovative apps for keeping track of your weight loss progress. The two sites are Traineo and Gimme20, and I used both of them to help me get started on a program to lose weight. This is part one of a two-part follow up to my initial story. Tonight’s post will focus on the Web sites, and tomorrow I’ll write more about my personal experience. On to the results!
When I started out, my intention was to use Traineo to track my diet and my weight and Gimme20 to track my workout. I set up my accounts and got started.
INTERFACE
Traineo’s interface is very well done. They incorporate AJAX elements seamlessly into their pages. I never got the feeling that I was lost, and all of the interactivity enhanced the site rather than getting in the way. The graphics are typical Web 2.0 (shiny reflections and big, bold fonts). Overall, Traineo hits it out of the park with their user interface.
Gimme20 has a more traditional interface without as much AJAX slickness. They still have the look of Web 2.0, though, with their vibrant colors and big fonts. And their “Build a Workout” feature benefits from the AJAX treatment.
My one complaint about Gimme20 is that I had a hard time finding my personalized homepage where I could update my progress. On Traineo, once you sign in, there’s a big, green button on traineo.com that takes you to your personal page. On Gimme20, you either have to scroll down, click a link to your personal page, and click the “My Fitness” tab or click on a small text link in the upper right-hand corner (”My Workouts”).
First of all, My Fitness and My Workouts take you to the same page: they should be named the same thing. Second, the default tab for your personal page on Gimme20 is “profile” where you see information about yourself like homepage and blog posts you’ve written. The default tab should be the fitness tab so it’s easier to update your progress.
I guess that’s a fairly minor quibble, but I think it’s significant.
CONTENT
Traineo’s approach is a survey of fitness, meaning they offer a little bit of everything fitness-related. They don’t dig deep in any one area like Gimme20 does with exercise. In fact, this is Traineo’s biggest failing. Tracking your workout consists of choosing from a preset list of activities, noting how long you engaged in that activity, and selecting from four levels of difficulty. Not a very scientific approach, and as far as I can tell, you can’t customize any of it.
Tracking your diet consists of rating your diet from “poor” to “great” and entering your total daily calories. The calorie bit is helpful, but I could have benefited a great deal from some sort of calorie counting app that would let me enter what I’ve eaten and calculate the calories for me. As it stands, Traineo offers a link to the USDA nutrient database, which is cumbersome and has a useless search function. They could do much better themselves.
One thing that Traineo gets right is their offering original articles in the “Library” section. They have some really good articles about exercise, eating right, and what appears to be a dead link for articles about motivation (not very motivating if it doesn’t work!). Gimme20 could really benefit from a similar feature. Adding opinions from “experts” would give their site some extra gravitas.
Both Traineo and Gimme20 have large communities of users, but I didn’t really have the time to actively engage in either one. Gimme20 seems to have more features built in to their community, but that’s just my observation in a quick look around.
Gimme20 lacks the diversity of Traineo, but what it lacks in diversity, it makes up for in targeted content. Specifically, Gimme20 focuses almost exclusively on the exercise aspect of losing weight. And they do it very well. Users can add exercises to a list from which they or other users can create custom workouts. These workouts can be tracked pretty much however you want: reps, durations, weight, etc. Users can either create their own workouts or subscribe to pre-fab workouts created by other users. It’s an innovative way to approach working out.
Overall, I liked Gimme20’s content better. I think it’s more important to do one thing really well than to do a lot of things halfway, and Gimme20’s workout content is vastly superior to anything on Traineo. If Gimme20 added a similar interface for user-created diets and nutrition, they could very well corner the Web market on fitness.
Over the course of the last month, I spent far more time on Gimme20 than I did on Traineo. In the end, I pretty much just used Traineo for its weight tracker, which I liked better than Gimme20’s because it calculates total weight lost instead of weight lost since last weigh in. Neither site is perfect, but I think Gimme20, with it’s depth of content, is a lot closer than Traineo, which is really just a pretty face without much substance.
Check back tomorrow to see how I did with my fitness program, including how much weight I lost.
