I put off going to the gym and working out for a while because I didn’t have a focused plan and didn’t want to waste my time without a structured plan. One of the best ways to stay motivated is to track and monitor your progress. I have been using Gym Technik online fitness site for a few months and it has been great.
Gym Technik has an extensive library of workouts for men and women’s workout in conjunction with Oxygenfit, which make planning a workout program easy for beginners or people that want a premade workout plan. You can add additional exercises to a pre-built workout or create your own from scratch if you want to be more advanced. For runners and cardio, there are exercises for tracking that information as well.
See below for a sample of the various beginner workouts and other categories available:
You can create your workouts and print them for taking to the gym, then entering your information when you return. My favorite feature is the mobile site which I use with my Blackberry, but can be used with an iPhone or any other web enable phone.
The mobile site is helpful while at the gym if someone else is using equipment and you want to substitute an exercise, you can do it right on the fly. I also use my Blackberry to listen to music so it is convenient to have my workout plan and music all in once place. Be sure to check out the smartphone tips on the site for great advice on getting the best use out of your smartphone including how to jump back and forth between the site and music.
After you enter your workout information, there are several tools for tracking your progress including a calendar to visually see how often you are working out, body stats, and several graphs that display exercise progress which can be sorted in several different ways.
Having the exercise progress available is a big motivation and helps in determining whether to update your workout which is easy to do at any time.
Last but not least is the extensive library of fitness articles and advice on everything from general fitness advice, to specific body part training, to nutrition. This information is extremely helpful and can be used to fine tune your workouts or general fitness knowledge.
I have found this to be an excellent tool to help keep me motivated and have a focused workout plan for my time at the gym. I am currently using a trial premium edition that was just released, but have used the free basic edition for months and it has all of the features that I discussed. Check it out and comment with your thoughts.
