So a week has passed and even Freud wouldn’t be able to dig out where you’ve repressed your New Year’s Resolution to “get fit.”  Every time your pesky, insistent mind points out that you are ignoring your own promise to work out once a day you casually take the thought and store it in a hidden cavern of your cortex.  So what can you do to actually get yourself to stick to a daily schedule?  Well, the geniuses at Fitocracy thought about it, and likely wondered how people — no matter what the situation — find a few hours a day to play Farmville, why is it they can’t get themselves to work out?

And with that, they may have struck gold.  They created the fitocracy social game, and let me tell you from personal experience —  with challenges, badges, experience points and level ups, fitocracy makes working out a lot of fun.

Fitocracy at its core is a game.  While it has various elements of a social network, it’s a game where you earn points for exercising and recording the exercise.  You can play to track your own progress, or compete against your friends.  This concept is pretty fun, and I have a group of friends who are using the service as we speak.  We don’t all compete outright — although some of them can’t resist trying to outdo one another — but seeing whether each person has checked in each day is a great way to keep each other motivated and exercising.

One of the smartest parts of the service is the track page, where you are able to enter the exercise that you’ve just completed.  As you can see in the image below, the selection of activities is huge, and for each one you can enter the number of reps and the weight.  This really lets you see exactly what kind of work out you did and measure how much stronger you’re getting.  There are definitions for each of the workouts as well, so the service can help you expand your repertoire.

You can add a series of sets of different exercises, and after you’re done your workout looks pretty spiffy.  Here’s the workout of a friend of mine — you can see that he’s able to add comments to each set and detail each set of repetitions with increasing weight.

This above result was shown in my ‘home feed’ which gives me an up to date list of all my friends’ latest activities.  It’s a great motivator to get moving.  You’re also able to join groups and see what other like minded people are up to all around the world.  I’m in a ‘martial arts’ group and it’s amazing to see the passionate discussion around the different types of arts and their merits.

I strongly recommend fitocracy to help fill your fitness needs.  I’ve laid out the basics of the services here, but there are also badges and challenges, which push you to your limit.  Give the service a shot and see what level you can get to!