Walker Tracker Blog

I recently received this email:

My pedometer is HIGHLY inaccurate. Last night I walked for an hour covering about 3 miles and the pedometer recorded about 300 steps. I’ve tried positioning it different ways and it’s no good. I walked down the hall from my cube to the break room and counted 104 steps, one-way. With the pedometer on my belt it recorded less than 20 steps. With it in my pocket on the walk back it recorded 120.  This calls into question all the calculations for users of these pedometers in our Walking Challenge.

We’ve seen time and again that when walkers don’t have faith in the equipment that is, in part, meant to motivate them, the program won’t work as well. I’m well aware that running a walking program is a balance of costs and resources. But when making a pedometer-purchasing decision, it’s important to remember that not all pedometers are created equal.

The good news is, pedometers are one of the cheapest exercise tools you can buy. The high end of pedometers is around $30. The pedometer I have in my pocket (an Omron HJ-112) I’ve owned for four years and I bought it for around $20. Have a look at what our individual walking community says about their pedometers.

Omron HJ-112

When you’re talking about a thousand pedometers, the difference between five dollars and twenty dollars is huge. With that in mind, here are a couple of ideas we’ve seen in order to help with the purchase of higher-quality pedometers.

• Employee kick-in: Some of our programs have asked their employees to kick in $10 for their program which can offset the initial cost of a higher-quality pedometer significantly. And when they realize they’ll be getting a $15 – $20 pedometer for $10, the value proposition is easy for them as well.
• Loaner Pedometers: One of our programs has purchased a bulk of loaner pedometers. They run shorter term walking competitions of about eight weeks each a couple of times a year, and for each competition they loan out the pedometers and collect them at the end of the competition. This might not work in all settings — however, your walkers will respect the equipment more, your pedometers will last longer and you won’t need to re-purchase them for each walking program you run (incidentally: We’ve seen that running series of shorter-term programs works incredibly well, which is why we’ve begun offering fully managed walking programs.)

In any case, spending the money to purchase a higher-quality pedometer will pay off in the end. You’ll have walkers more committed to the program, and will thus yield much better results. We’re trying to enable long-term lifestyle changes here at Walker Tracker, and you need a pedometer you can rely on for the long haul.

Here’s another great looking grant.

Humana – Communities Benefit Grant (Utah) The Communities Benefit Grant is focused on improving health experiences or building healthy communities in the areas of childhood health and education, family wellness and active lifestyles, and health literacy for diverse populations and seniors. Awards up to $100,000 are available. The program is open to nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations located in the state of Utah.

From their PDF, one of the areas they focus on is:

Family wellness and active lifestyles – Projects or initiatives that strengthen the health of families through physical, social, mental, emotional, or environmental support

Hey! We run a socially-oriented, physical-activity program that provides great emotional support for its members and through its encouragement of walking as a means of transportation, is strongly pro-environmental. Bingo.

As always, drop us a line if you want to integrate Walker Tracker into your community, physical-activity related program.

Deadline: June 25, 2010 Learn more at Humana: http://www.humana.com/about/companyinformation/hcbutah.asp

Via the Center for Healthcare in the Schools

From time to time I’m going to post information about grants that are related to obesity, children and schools, and walking and physical activity. In most cases, this would not be something we’d seek ourselves (we’re not a non-profit), but I would think our community might like to know about these, and we’d be more than happy to work with any grant-recipients, of course, in realizing the grants.

This looks like a good one.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – Active Living Research: Building Evidence to Prevent Childhood Obesity The purpose of the grant is to support research to inform policy and environmental strategies for increasing physical activity among children and adolescents, decreasing their sedentary behaviors and preventing obesity. The program places emphasis on reaching children and youths who are at highest risk for obesity: Black, Latino, American Indian and Asian/Pacific Islander children, as well as children who live in under-resourced and lower-income communities. A total of up to $1.5 million will be awarded. The maximum award for a single grant is $150,000. Preference will be given to applicants who are either public entities or 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. Applicant organizations must be based in the United States or its territories. Deadline: July 1, 2010 Please contact the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for more information and to apply to this funding: http://www.rwjf.org/applications/solicited/cfp.jsp?ID=21121&cid=xem-emc-fa

Via The Center for Healthcare in the Schools

We’ve just made it a little easier to organize a walking team.

Now you can pull not-yet-registered walkers directly into your walking group without requiring them to find and join your group.

Create a Walker Tracker group and then surf to your new group’s administration pane.

There’s a new option there for inviting people to your group. You’ve always been able to invite already-registered walkers, but now you can enter in a string of email addresses. Once those people register, they will automatically be placed on your walking team. Presto!

Invite existing members of your walking program, or walkers who haven't yet joined the site.

While you’re there – check out your Competitions screen. If there are no walking team competitions there yet, start one up!

Here’s a new feature for our corporate walking programs.

Facebook integration!

We’ve had this for a while in our community program and now custom walking programs for corporations, cities and educational institutions can take advantage of it. After a walker has posted his/her steps, a box will show up asking if they would like to post their steps to Facebook. The step blog entry will be posted right into their Facebook newsfeed.

We know that there are some of you who shudder at the thought of your employees posting their steps to Facebook. That’s why there are two controls on this.

Turn it on in your administrative panel under ‘Features’. It defaults to off. After that, each walker will have the option to turn it on/off in their own settings.

Get a second chance to edit your post before posting it into your Facebook feed

Hi - this is the second post in a series called: 12 Things You Can Do With Walker Tracker (that you might not have known about) I’m going to run through a few nifty Walker Tracker tricks and explain how each of them work. To see each of the series, you can click on the ‘12 things you can do with Walker Tracker‘ category. Feel free to ask questions under each post.

Post your team/group’s progress to your own website, blog, intranet, Facebook page, etc.

What is a widget? A widget is a little window you put on your own site that pulls data and information from another site. In our case, it shows how many steps your group has walked — and it updates itself auto-magically.

Steps for putting a group widget on your website:

1. Register for Walker Tracker if you haven’t already. Here’s the registration page for the community site for individuals, here’s custom walking program for corporations or municipalities.
2. Create a group! (Groups and Teams are the same thing on Walker Tracker. A team is simply a group in a competition)
3. Click on ‘Group Widget for your blog or website’. Since you’re now the administrator, surf to your group and find this link at the top right. 
4. Enable your widget. There will be a message there allowing you to enable/disable your widget, provided you are the administrator of your group.
5. Note the Group ID # of your group, and follow the link to Widgetbox, which hosts our widget.
6. Enter your Group ID into the Widgetbox form and get widget code. Click their big GET WIDGET button after you’ve entered your Group ID. This will bring up a screen that will allow you to post your new, shiny widget to any number of other systems. Facebook, WordPress blog, Blogger, etc. Since each environment is a little different, use Widgetbox’s help to get your widget integrated.

Why would I do this? Say you’ve got a walking challenge going on between a few different teams in your company, or a walking competition between groups. Take these widgets and slap them together to create your own walking challenge site wherever you like –your own intranet or in a blog post. Or perhaps you just want to show off your team pride.

Enjoy!

p.s. — of course you can also post a widget of just your own stats. Under the ‘Your Stuff’ menu, choose ‘Step Widget”

Hi - this is the first post in a series called:

12 Things You Can Do With Walker Tracker

(that you might not have known about)

I’m going to run through a few nifty Walker Tracker tricks and explain how each of them work. To see each of the series, you can click on the ‘12 things you can do with Walker Tracker‘ category. Feel free to ask questions under each post.

1) Add steps by text message (or chat!)

Walker Tracker would like to talk to your mobile phone!

Add a step and step blog entry, check on your Walker Tracker friends or view your stats. Adding steps by text message makes it really easy to stay up to date on your steps when you’re not around a computer.

Here’s how:

Go to your preferences

Click on ‘mobile phone integration’ right there at the top.

Oh no...the dreaded red shoe -- I'm running below the monthly step goal I set for myself.

Hook up your phone

Send a new text message on your phone to this number:

1-425-522-2960

with the text: YourUsername:YourPassword

Bilbo's password is too guessable!

Walker Tracker will answer back within a few seconds to let you know how it worked out.

Walker Tracker accepts various commands. Log in to see them all here http://walkertracker.com/index.php?page=devices

Feel free to reply with a ? or menu at any time for a list of options.

Add Today’s Step Entry

To add today’s step entry, just reply with a number.

eg: 6471

Or add a step entry/blog for any date using this format:

• [####] [date] [blog entry] - send a number, a date and a blog entry and it will record your steps/blog for that date 
  eg: 4838 Oct7 I’m currently hiking up the side of a mountain!

*If you’re outside of the USA/Canada, have a look at the devices page to hook up an Instant Messaging account.

This feature is included in Walker Tracker Pro accounts and all Employee Walking Program accounts. Please keep in mind that your phone service might have text-messaging fees.

Good luck!

According to a new study out of Princeton, rats who have access to high fructose corn syrup become obese. No surprise, right? But this is compared to rats who consumed equal caloric amounts of table sugar. Those rats fared fine.

“This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.”

In addition to drastically lower activity levels, corn syrup certainly seems a likely candidate for blame for radically increased obesity levels in the US:

“In the 40 years since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the U.S. have skyrocketed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1970, around 15 percent of the U.S. population met the definition for obesity; today, roughly one-third of the American adults are considered obese.”

Read about the study at Princeton: A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain

I’m very thrilled to introduce map-based competitions.

We’re a big fan of Walker Tracker competitions here. They help you visualize your progress over a period of time. You can compete as a team or as an individual while poking friendly jibes at each other. Alternately, you can have your own private party, where you (or just you and your friends) are the star of the competition.

But when you walk — you cover real distance, and so it’s especially fun to put that analogy on a real map.

How long does it take to walk along the Grand Canyon? To stride along the Columbia river to the ocean? Now you can find out for sure.

As you walk along, milestones are revealed to you, adding a sense of discovery to your journey.

Map competitions are in beta — but please feel free to hop in and try them out.

We received help from the very talented Adam DuVander, who is writing a book on map development on the web. Thanks Adam!

We do a lot of data visualization here on Walker Tracker, not the least of which is using maps to visualize data (oops! Not yet announced!). For this reason, I really love the work of David McCandless on informationisbeautiful.net. He takes huge amounts of data and makes it visually stunning, and very easy to, for lack of a better word, grok.

His latest work – “Snake Oil? Scientific Evidence for Health Supplements” is relevant to anyone who ponders whether to take a Vitamin C for their next cold (spoiler: maybe), take Folic Acid if you’re pregnant (spoiler: Yes!), or Vitamin E for your heart (spoiler: might be best to try something else).

Here’s the image version

The interactive version allows you to isolate them by cause

As my friend Dr. David Naimon pointed out, not all supplements are evenly studied. The chart might be a little deceiving as some of the items low on the list may have also received inadequate testing.