What Is Your Favorite Fitness App?

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here and I have an author on the call today who's written three books primarily on software and also a book on fitness called Fitness for Geeks. He knows a lot about everything from quantifying your workouts to using apps to basically just geek geeking out with your workouts. And today we're going to be talking about how to get a better body and how to improve your performance by geeking out. So my guest today is named Bruce Perry. He hails from Massachusetts, and he's got a pretty geeky website called fitnessfg.com Bruce, thanks for coming on the call.

Hey, Ben, thanks for inviting me. Great to be here.

Yeah, no problem. I've been checking out your website ever since we connected for an interview and reading the articles that you put out on using apps and quantifying some of your results when it comes to fitness and training. And you're doing quite a bit as far as the stuff that you write. And I'll be sure and link over to your site in the show notes to this episode. But can you tell me a little bit more about yourself, tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and specifically what this whole Fitness for Geeks thing is?

Yeah. I'm a writer with a journalism and software engineering background, and I've spent decades as an athlete doing various team sports and endurance sports, et cetera, and researching fitness issues the whole time. And usually including early versions of some of these biofeedback tools, sort of the early geek tools like heart rate monitors and watches that would record your route and altimeters and things like that. And basically I always wanted to write a book on fitness. And my publisher is essentially a software kind of how to publisher. So we got together and I convinced them to get into the fitness field, but from a geek aficionado background or angle. So that's how Fitness for Geeks originated. And basically it's a holistic book because I think health and fitness is a melange of things. It's not just losing weight or working out. It's a holistic book that includes the science of nutrition, the science of exercise, like resistance exercise and endurance sports, the science of sleep and fasting, and all interwoven with this explosion of software tools and fitness apps for smartphones. So, and I included maybe a dozen interviews with scientists and athletes as kind of a spice on the main dish.

Yeah.

So there's just a lot of stuff in there. I have a friend from Austria who I gave the book to give it a read. And I think she was. She might have been a little skeptical beforehand. All right, I'll read this because Bruce wrote it. She came back and she just said, she put it better than I could. She just said everything is in there.

Nice.

Micronutrients, macronutrients, technology, sleep fasting, et cetera.

Cool. I like it. So when it comes to giving the audience a little bit of flavor of what it is you do, what are some of the geekiest things that you've ever done to get fit or to eat better or to. To basically achieve any of the goals that our audience might have?

Yeah, that's sort of a take your pick question, because I want to hear.

About some of the out there stuff.

One of the things I've done, actually write about it in the book is I use a smartphone app called Endomondo. And what it does, it uses GPS software to record where you are and so you can map out your entire route and what, you can take it a step farther.

So you use this like when you're.

Like when you're running or running, hiking, cycling, anything you're doing, you know, it will generate this really cool map. So what you can do though, you can take it a step farther and export the, what they call the GPS Exchange file, which is basically, here's geek talk here. It's basically an XML file that has all the location data, all the geographical points, millions of them, depending how far you went, you can take that file, rename it and import it into Google Earth, which reads that kind of a file. So that's sort of sharing data between different applications. And Google Earth will give you an even richer map showing where you were. And I've done simpler things like warn two devices at the same time just to see if their data is different.

Right. So how do you think that's most helpful for you when you use something like that?

Just to make sure that you're getting accurate information and just, you know, for pure interest sake.

Right.

The different devices really do give you different lengths of your workout and things like that. And you always see that following a road race because everyone's wearing these watches now and carrying their smartphones and they all say, that wasn't 10k, you know, that was 6.3, or that was 6.1 or etc. Etc. And the ironic thing is that the race directors were probably correct because the GPS devices in terms of 10th of a mile are notoriously inaccurate. So the race was probably 10k, but you're getting different distances. Another interesting sort of geek event that happened lately was I was just talking to you about a visit to Portland, Oregon, and as part of the promotion for my book, there was a 5k along the river there and it was called the couch to quantified 5K. It was a bunch of software guys, a couple hundred showed up for the run and the purpose of it was, as they announced during the race, they usually give you directions and things like that. It was all about the data, not the race. So everybody was supposed to bring a device. I mean, this is really geeky. Do the race. And they were going to hack the data afterwards. And there was actually that weekend, following the 5K, there was a hackathon. A hackathon that isn't a fitness geeky event. I don't know what is and what.

Exactly was going on during the hackathon.

They were just combining the data using different programming languages like Python and JavaScript. And I wasn't part of it because I had to leave earlier that week. But I did actually write a little article on the blog that I write describing what I would have done with my data, which was basically taking the different devices and exporting it. I think you can potentially do something interesting by taking an entire race, like for example, a duathlon and hacking all the data from people's devices. And you could see, for instance, you could see patterns in the data of the paces at different points in the course and compare it with age groups and genders. In a way, it was just a way to combine a 5k with the things that these guys like to do best, which is hack data.

So in addition to using something like Endomondo or competing in a hackathon, what other kind of geeky things have you done to help you to eat better or to get fed?

Well, in terms of eating better, I use nutrition data a lot, which is a analytical site where you can plug in what you're eating and find out its macronutrients and vitamins, minerals, types of fats. I'm always looking up what a particular food contains, you know, in terms of its omega 3 versus omega 6 and things like that.

Mm, cool. So what about. I know Nutrition Data is a website, and that's actually a really good website. I'll use that a lot of times to check up on foods and their content. That site is run by the Nutrition Deva, who I know a lot of listeners know of. She has a great podcast over on itunes called the Nutrition Diva's Quick and Dirty Tips to Something, Eat Better, Feel Fabulous, something like that. But anyways, that's a website but there's also a ton of apps out there. Do you have some favorite fitness apps or diet apps that you recommend or that you use?

Right. Yeah, I don't really like to play favorites, but there's so many out there now and they're emerging week by week. But I use Endomondo occasionally, the Fitbit tracker, which is a pedometer on steroids. It's useful for less for a workout than as identifying patterns in your activities throughout a day. And it has a really nice connected website. All of these things have like a web dashboard for the users.

Right.

That's where a lot of the quality comes from. It's not necessarily having this app on your cell phone as much as all these cool charts and maps and aggregated data on what you've done website. I think that's how they've changed the most. They've got this rich web interface.

Yeah.

And Garmin Connect, you've seen or use the Garmin devices. So they've got their own pretty cool web related area where you can see all your data. And they have an interesting feature which I think it's called the Player. And you can for example, do your cycling workout, let's say you're training for a triathlon and go back to this player and actually replay the cycle on a map. So you can see the little red dot go over the terrain and how fast you were going and even what your heart rate was at the moment. Yeah, I really wish I had that 10 or 20 years ago. I mean that's extremely useful. So that's Garmin Connect and then there's Runkeeper and there's a new, fairly new running related or endurance related app called, that looks promising, called Runtastic. And I think I haven't used that, but I recently downloaded it.

What's it supposed to do?

It's very similar to Endomondo in which you can just set the type of workout you're doing, running, cycling, hiking, whatever you take off. It records everything. It has some sort of 3D interface and I actually read a review of it. So I'm getting this information secondhand. But the guy was in the New York Times and the guy talked about a feature in which you can actually follow another user on a map in real time. So you can see them running down the street. And that seemed kind of creepy, but you know, sort of like cool, but a little creepy.

Uh huh.

So that's Runtastic. And there's another interesting tool online that actually can slow people down so you don't over Train. And I like this one. It's called restwise.

And I wrote a section that's a great one.

Yeah, I wrote a section in my book on that where they just take very pretty basic biofeedback, and then you plug it in and then it gives you a score, you know, based on how rested you are and whether you should train hard, you know, train moderately or take a rest day. This is a really underappreciated aspect of fitness.

Yeah, I've had those guys on the. On the podcast before.

Yeah.

You know, the one thing that. That's not on the restwise app yet is heart rate variability tracking. Do you use any apps specifically to track heart rate variability?

No. You know, and I don't wear heart rate monitors anymore for one reason or another. And one of the interesting things that happens when you take this biofeedback and stuff is that you. It trains you to know your own body. And I've gotten to the point where I can predict what my heart rate is to a surprising accurate level of accuracy.

Mm, yeah, yeah, me. Well, me too. But what about heart rate variability? Like the, you know, the change, the delta in terms of, you know, the change in time between each of your.

You mean you're sprinting, you reach your max heart rate. How long does it take to get say, under 120, that sort of thing?

Actually, heart rate variability is the length of time between the actual heartbeats themselves and specifically the delta of that. So you know, how. How. How variable your heart rate is as a. As a function of your. Your autonomic nervous system, like how your nervous system is feeding into your. Into your heart rate. Yeah, I know there's some apps out there, like one, one that I've been kind of messing around with. There's one called. I think it's called stress. It's stress test or stress check or something like that. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Anyways, what it does is you. You hold your finger up against the camera lens of your phone and it'll check your heart rate variability. And that's, you know, an instant measurement of the amount of stress that you're under at any given point in time. And I'll put a link to that.

How accurate do you think it is in terms of your cell phone's ability to pick up something that precise? Do you think that's very accurate?

Sure. It's just picking up your heartbeat and measuring the change in period of time between your heartbeats. So what I found is that that tends to correlate pretty well with another device that I use, that app that I just mentioned, that Stress Check one is free. The other app that I've used for heart rate variability or the other system I've used for heart rate variability is called the EM Wave 2 by the HeartMath Institute. And that's cool. And you hook it up to your earlobe and it'll measure your heart rate, your stress levels, your heart rate variability, and it's a really, really cool way to quantify your stress, your emotional stress or your physical stress. But it's like 150 bucks versus free and on your phone.

That's actually not that bad.

No, I mean, it's not too bad. I mean, if people are just getting started into kind of messing around with some of this stuff, it seems like a chunk of change. But no, it's to that. That one's worth it.

Yeah. If you're going. If you're going to be. If you're as knowledgeable as you are and you're really going to be using it a lot, you know, because the apps are really cheap, but smartphones aren't. So that might be a barrier to entry for some people, but I think more and more people are ending up with a smartphone for one reason or another.

So what about for sleep? Do you use any apps or do you do any geeky stuff for.

Well, yeah, there's the Zio, which I wrote about. Have you heard about that? That's the Zio Sleep Manager. That seems to be the Uber app.

But the Zio, you. Because I know there's some free apps that basically just like, measure how much you wiggle around while you sleep and then approximate your sleep based on that tracker does that. Yeah, but the. But the Zeo you actually wear, like you wear a device on your head that measures your electrical waves or something like that, don't you?

Yeah, yeah. I haven't used it myself. I got one of them to test and to write about. I had my wife do it because it just. I don't know. I don't like putting things on my head when I go to sleep. And the results are interesting.

So you're measuring has a little. Your brain waves.

Right, right. And I'm not sure how accurately they can do that because they really haven't looked into it in a tremendous amount of detail. But it did seem to provide some useful data on when you were in deep sleep, REM sleep, and other sleep stages at certain times of the night.

Like those four main stages of sleep.

Yeah. So you could hack that. I mean, you could see how different times of the week your sleep changes in response to different things you ate before you went to sleep.

My only issue is I have concerns that the actual measurement device that you wear in your head from the ZO may actually interfere with the sleep patterns themselves and possibly kick out data that is unique to when you're wearing the device. That's my concern with that device. And I've talked to a few other folks who share that concern. In terms of the potential for the electrical waves kicked off by the Zeo itself to actually kind of like skew the numbers while you're asleep.

That could be possible. And just the simple act of having headgear when you're sleeping could change the way you're sleeping. Disruption.

Yeah, potentially. I use the. I use the Earth pulse.

Now.

It's. It doesn't measure sleep, it simply enhances sleep. But it's just this device you put underneath your mattress that kicks out this pulsed electromagnetic frequency. And that for me, works really well. But yeah, it doesn't measure.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Doesn't measure sleep. But I just, you know, I know. I qualitatively know. It's like, yeah, I just slept eight hours and I feel like a million bucks versus when I don't use it. So, yeah. Now in terms of like finding balance between, say, like geeking out and looking at all this information while you're out training or sleeping or eating or whatever, and then also kind of balancing that between the geekiness part, but also information overload, like having too much data come out you. Where do you find the balance? Or how can someone find balance when it comes to something like that?

That's a really good question because people don't equate fitness with technology and apps and things like that. They just figure, oh, this is geeks overdoing it again. They're not really getting healthy because they're back on their computers. It's a valid point, but you just have to avoid putting the cart before the horse. It's your health that matters most. So you don't go out for a 30 minute jaunt and then spend three hours sitting on the couch looking at the data. I think people have to be aware of that. And yeah, that's it.

I didn't even think about that aspect. I was thinking more about the aspect of just like, like unplugging and seeing nature and stuff versus, like being tied to your phone. I didn't. But yeah, that's, that's a good point too. Is that. Yeah, there's, there's kind of a propensity that an hour run turns into 30 minutes of sedentary activity. Looking at the run, huh?

Yeah. No, what you just said is true also. I mean, you don't want to just be plugged in when you're, you know, you have your one time during the day when you're getting outside into the woods and it'll interfere with that connection you're making. But actually, you know, in general, these apps are probably the main health positive element of the technology revolution, which is general. I think it's generally, you know, it's played a role in undermining health with all the studies that have shown how unhealthy screen life is, you know, spending endless amounts of times in front of televisions and computers and smartphones, etc. But certainly the fitness apps have increased the tendency of millions of people to exercise. If anything, the downside might be over training.

Yeah, you know, for me personally, and I don't know if people who work in technology might have this feeling. I'm a coach, so I spend a better part of several days looking at files, GPS files and heart rate files and power files that the athletes who I coach are uploading to. I use a software program called Training Peaks to be able to access their data. And for me, when I go out on a run and I'm using, you know, whatever, I'm using the Quarq power meter on my bike or I'm using my Timex run trainer or my Timex cycle trainer to quantify my data, a lot of times it feels like work, like I'm on the job. And so for me, a lot of times I almost have to unplug and.

Not pay attention with coaching. It's a really practical tool.

Oh, it's changed my life.

When it comes to coaching, I assume your athletes are really ambitious, you know, about getting faster and stronger. So these are really, some, some people.

Just like want to, want to feel good when they finish Ironman. But yeah, I mean, some people, some people are looking at how many seconds faster they're running their, their half mile repeats or their 800s, you know, and, and so, yeah, that's, that's the cool thing about some of these, these apps and these tracking tools is the ability to upload the data to a software program and share it with somebody. Right. But yeah, that's also the, the, the hard part for people who are coaches.

So, yeah, like, for instance, the Restwise tool is really almost more for coaches because they can pattern Their athletes, the periodicity of their training can be patterned off, you know.

Well, the cool thing about rest wise is you can predict when somebody's going to get sick or get injured. Like, I've got. Well, I have six folks who I work with who use restwise. So they're signed up with restwise and they have me selected as a coach to share their data with. So I get those, those people's charts and it'll give me a restwise score that's whatever, 70 or 50 or whatever. And as soon as I see the restwise score begin to drop, if I don't actually make a change on their, on their schedule that I've laid out for them in training peaks, there's like a 90% chance of injury or illness within two to three days. It's like you can predict with that tool, which is cool.

Yeah. And I like the little device that you can use to pick up your heart rate and oxygen perfusion.

You mean the fingertip device, right?

Yeah, I started using that every morning.

Yeah, the oxygen saturation monitor, right. Yeah. That's pretty cool, too.

I always saw it in emergency rooms. Unfortunately, visiting a family member or something in the icu, they would have this thing on their finger. I always asked about it. So now I have my own.

Yeah. So do you ever look into any of these apps that can be used, or not really apps, but more like training tools that can be used for, like, swimmers in terms of monitoring, like when you hit a wall and you flip and, and measuring how many laps you've done or how long your stroke length is or anything like that?

No, I haven't seen anything. For swimmers, it might be a little difficult because not too many of these apps are waterproof.

I know the ones well, in this case, it's like.

I'd like to try one, though.

Like the Garmin 905, for example, I know is one that will. It'll measure, you know, like even something like an open water swim, like how far you've gone.

I was just gonna say that would be really cool to have. You know, I just took an ocean swim this afternoon to have a Garmin device and go to Garmin connect afterwards and see the map and add water temperature data and things like that. That would be excellent.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the kind of stuff they make one, and I think the company Finis makes one also.

Generally I'll do something like turn on Endomondo and then forget about it. For example, in the last week I was up in the mountains of Vermont And I took a, like a ridge hike above Mad River Glen ski area and it was all mapped out for me afterwards. And one of the good things about these hikes and then looking at the route afterwards is that you get ideas for the future. So I figured out a really good backcountry ski I could do in the winter from doing that hike and just looking at the Google map and Google Earth afterwards, and it showed the ski area below me. And I saw a place where I could take the hike in the winter and have the skis on my back and then ski down. And then the next night I took a really good mountain bike climb and mapped it and figured out the elevation grade afterwards based on the altitude data. But while I was doing that, it was, it's a beautiful summer evening and I'm getting into the physical aspects of doing the cycle climb and the beauty of the mountains. So in general, the apps are, especially if you, you turn off the voice and things like that. You know, Endomondo has a little thing that says you just did, you know, the fifth mile in 6 minutes 19 seconds or something like that. Yeah, they're pretty unobtrusive.

Yeah.

And you know, a lot of people are using these, the social media aspects to either they're beginners, they're getting back into, or getting into exercise for the first time, they're coming back from injury and illness. That's probably an unappreciated side of it. So all their family members are watching them make this great comeback. And whereas I don't get into social media as much, I'm more of a mapping geek. I think that's a really good feature of these tools.

Yeah, I've actually done that before when I have a very important workout to do. You'll, you'll turn, you can turn on Map My Ride or, or Map My Run in either of those apps. I don't know if that Endomondo app that you mentioned does this as well, but basically you can select that it'll kick out data to your Facebook page or to your Twitter page every, whatever, every five miles or every 20 minutes or whatever. And so it's like if you've got a, let's, let's say you're training for Ironman and you've got your 20 mile run to do and you're just like, oh, this is to be going, this is going to suck. I can't do this. You go over to Twitter, you go over to Facebook and you're like, just about ready to head out for my 20 miler. And then you turn that app on, it starts to kick out data. And you just know if you stop that, you'll have half a dozen friends when you get back. Being like, what happened? After five miles? All of a sudden it appears that you quit.

So you get a few people looking on your shoulder. Yeah.

And that can actually be, you know, it can be pretty powerful. And, you know, I see that as a coach sometimes too, when, you know, I'll look at someone's workout and, you know, they did half the number of intervals that they're supposed to do. And usually the athlete who I'm working with beats me to it and they give me their excuse when they upload the data or they give me their, you know, their reason when they upload the data. They run out of time, they had to take their kids somewhere or something like that. But yeah, that ability to share your experiences is, I think, in most situations, a powerful way to motivate yourself.

Yeah, I do a little coaching myself in cross country and I plan on this fall integrating some of these tools into it a little bit more than I did last year. For example, there's a pretty good interval feature in Endomondo and makes it a lot easier for me if I'm in the intervals with younger athletes to have the tool, you know, it chimes in different ways when you're supposed to be in a rest segment as opposed to the sprint segment.

Right.

So you can just turn it on, put it in my shoulder strap on thing, and it can more or less organize the Tabata sprint or whatever you're doing for you. And because in the past, I've literally run out of breath when it comes, especially during Tabata sprints, when it comes to telling people to, you know, that the 10 second rest is up and to start again.

Right, right.

There's lots of tools that you can integrate into workouts and it's kind of doing the work for you.

Yeah. Now, I know that we're starting to run short on time, but what about health? Like, do you, do you have any apps or any hacks that you use for just like general health, like monitoring, you know, anything from, you know, like blood glucose or, or lab numbers or anything like that?

Yeah, I know there's a lot of them out there. I interviewed a guy who's at Boston College who's doing cutting edge research on fasting and things like longevity and cancer. And he actively uses a tool, he and all his lab partners use this tool that measure blood glucose and ketones because they're all on a ketogenic diet. And, you know, he's a very strong advocate of keeping very low fasting blood glucose.

Yeah. I've interviewed a guy named Peter Adia on the podcast before, and he keeps himself in pretty strict ketogenesis, measuring his ketone body formation. I believe he's using a strip for that. But there's an app called.

Yeah, a lot of people on the paleo regimen are using glucose and ketone apps, but I haven't gotten into that.

Glucose Buddy is one.

I use a. This doesn't really fit the criteria of a health app as much as maybe fitness. But I use a connected body composition analyzer made by Withings and it's wireless. So I step on sends the data out over the Internet and it gets connected to the Fitbit tracker. That one's called what the Withings W I T H I N G S. Okay. And it's fairly accurate as body composition analyzers go. You know, they're. They tend to be a little quirky. Like, I found that they give you very flattering results when the. When the temperature is hot in the room.

So you suddenly magically lose fat.

You suddenly have. I suddenly have 6% body fat.

Right.

But it's a very useful tool if you are going to, for example, try to use these apps to engineer weight loss or muscle gain. For example, you're analyzing your nutrition so you know your energy intake and calories. You're using the fitness app so you know what you're burning up. And in the same dashboard on the web, you have all the results historically from the BC analyzer. Because, for example, the Fitbit dashboard is connected to the Withings, which is pretty cool. All these things can be connected. They're all working with each other, similar to what you were talking about with Twitter and Facebook being connected. It's an interesting suite of tools that can be used. For example, Fitbit plus fitday for Nutrition plus Endomondo plus Withings and they're all grouped together and so you get all that information at your fingertips.

Yeah.

Well, do you have a trend for the future is to have everything wirelessly connected? It's sort of like you've heard the geeky term the cloud, Right. You know, all your files and everything are Internet enabled, so you don't have to have them on your own hard disk.

Yeah.

All these fitness apps and health apps can be all grouped together and wirelessly connected.

Yeah.

So that's kind of a good geek topic topic to conclude on.

Well, you know, on. On the show Notes of This post, I guess we probably have a lot of people curious and maybe to give people a little direction. I'll tell folks that are listening in. Here's what I'm going to do. I use an iPhone and I've got a billion apps on my phone. I'm always kind of geeking out on, mostly like health, diet and sleep apps and some fitness apps. I'll upload all the different apps that I have on my phone if people want to just take an inside sneak peek at what I've got on my phone. That's a good idea. What do you use, an Android or an iPhone?

I have an Android even though I'm an Apple guy.

Cool. Cool it up with an iPhone. I took some notes while you were talking, so I'm going to put a link folks to all of the Fitness for Geek recommended apps too. Here. You can go over there and check them out.

I would also just chime in on a point that you made earlier that don't overdo it on this stuff too. It's really healthy to unplug. And I really think people should take technology holidays and technology sabbaticals or whatever you want to call them, and institute things like don't jump right into your email first thing in the morning. Or Twitter.

Guilty as charged.

Right? Me too. So yeah, I kind of force myself off technology. It sounds kind of contradictory, but you can't overdo this stuff and you don't want to make it a health negative thing.

Right? Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So yeah, check out the show notes, folks. You want lots of interesting links. I know we covered a lot of kind of different little tools you can use. Don't worry, they won't be affiliate links that we make money off or anything. Just links to the apps. That's all.

Nike is another big area we never talked about, but that should be added to the list.

Add Nike Plus. Do you use that one?

Nike Plus? No, that's the sneakers that are connected to their own tools. It's like Garmin Connect and Endomondo, where it's a whole suite of tools and you have a website and everything. But that's certainly a big one.

Cool, I'll put that one in there as well.

In Portland, Oregon, I went into one of their stores and I tried their connected Vertical Leap analyzer and I wrote about it on my blog to see how I won the Larry Bird jumping contest.

Wasn't Larry Bird the white guy who didn't jump very often?

Right. I wish I tried it when I was 19 when I still had some leaping ability. But that's part of the whole Nike plus thing. And if you go into their stores, you can try it out, and it's projected on this big screen and everything. And the baseline is LeBron James, which is 40.3 inches, and I did 19.8.

You're one half of Michael Jordan.

But that's what Nike's getting into. They're getting into all these fitness apps, too.

Okay, cool. I'll put a link to the Nike stuff as well. And then the last thing is if you are listening and you're trying to scream through the microphone or through the podcast right now and be like, wait, you guys, you forgot this awesome app that I use. Or maybe you're a complete geek yourself and you've got your own apps that you'd recommend. Chime in on the comments to these show notes and let us know what apps you use and why you dig them and how they're helping you. And we can get a little directory going for folks. So FitnessFG.com is the name of the website that you can go to to check out some of the other stuff that Bruce has written. And his book is called Fitness for Geeks. I'll link to that in the show notes as well. And Bruce, thank you for coming on the call today.

Hey, Ben, it was my pleasure. We should do it.