Push Yourself to New Wellness Heights with Fitocracy

January is the month of commitment to fitness and wellness goals. By now, however, things may be getting a bit stale in the exercising department. There’s quite a bit of research around that shows exercising with a friend keeps the momentum going – so a community based around sharing fitness goals has got to be a good thing. The folks behind Fitocracy built a community to help people get better at exercising. Their apps have won Mashable’s Top Innovation in Fitness and Health and a Men’s Journal App of the Year.

Making Wellness a Game

Fitocracy is not just about sharing fitness and wellness goals, though. It’s one of the best gamification attempts I’ve seen – with every bit of exercise you track on the website or one of the mobile apps equating to points. You level up as you would in something like World of Warcraft. My favourite thing about it is how they managed to including questing. Just like a game, you can accept quests which will net you more points. They can be anything from running every day to a certain sequence of leg exercises to taking a martial arts class. I once did 60 triceps dips in one day to finish a quest. That’s the funny thing about Fitocracy; just knowing you could get the next level or finish a quest pushes you to do that little bit more.

There are groups to join, and members are really good about giving ‘props’ when you post new activity, to cheer you on. You can even challenge other members to a duel, although you need to be a paid member, or Hero, to try this out.

Connect and Meet Your Wellness Goals

You can connect up your Fitocracy account to your social media accounts, as well as a few other fitness apps like Runkeeper. Initially, it does feel like a lot of data entry, but once you get going you can easily copy workouts over, cutting down on the time you spend entering individual exercises.

Best of all – it’s free. It’s hard to come up with any excuses not to join and increase your wellness in the face of that. And if you’ll excuse me, I need to go to do some squats, I’m so close to level seven…