Wouldn’t it be great to give a gift that could change that special someone’s life?  Well, here is one idea…

How about giving the ‘Gift of  Health’ ?  The timing is perfect and armed with our new 1 year Gyminee PRO Membership, he or she can start fresh and begin that ‘Life Change’ in 2009!  Subscribing to PRO workouts, setting some achievable fitness goals, and participating in a Challenge are just a few of the small steps that lead to significant change.

Now if you wanted to impress them even more, you could add a cool Gyminee T-shirt from our Gyminee Store with that membership!. If you have a humorous side, go a size or two up or down as an incentive for them to reach their goals.

Healthy holidays from the Gyminee Team.

The final round voting for the People’s Choice is still in progress.  You can vote for us once per day, per email address by using the following widget:

Voting closes this Sunday night at midnight!  Thanks for your support!

the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories.

If you think Gyminee is the best fitness site on the web, then please cast your vote right away. Simply enter your email address in the widget below to vote. Thanks!

Most of what we have been working on recently has been totally behind-the-scenes (server upgrades, bug fixes, optimizations, etc.). We expect the Gyminee user-base to continue growing, and to do so at a much quicker pace in the near future. Soon, the Gyminee website will be able to scale at near 100% efficiency.

One of the updates that isn’t completely behind the scenes is a new and improved Food Search. I would expect that some of you keen-eyed users have noticed some improvements with their search results lately. This is because of a combination of things.

For one, we have completely revamped the search engine that helps drive the Food, GymBuddy, Exercise, and Forum searches. It will be faster, more stable, and also return more accurate results for all of the above.

On top of that, the (surprisingly complex) algorithm that helps return the best food results possible has been completely rewritten. Things such as how many times the food has been eaten and whether or not it has an image are now taken into account when you search for foods.

Enjoy and stay tuned for more updates in the near future!

For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with Gyminee Challenges, they are a very popular way for Gyminee users to compete with one another to see who can lose the most weight, run the furthest distance, lift the greatest amount of weight, and much more. Gyminee Challenges were released only a couple months ago, and we are pleased (to say the least) at how they have been helping people to exercise more and to stay motivated.

 In the 420+ challenges that have been created:

• Over 3,000 users have participated in a challenge.
• Over 4,580 lbs have been lost by users in Weight Loss Challenges.
  
• Over 25,375 miles have been traveled by users in Distance Challenges.
• Over 58,850,000 lbs have been lifted by users in Weight Lifting Challenges!

 Bike Across America

Lose 20 Lbs

 Run 100 Miles

Today, we opened our Gyminee Store and loaded it with some  branded t-shirts for both men and women. We wanted to start off simple and based on user feedback, decided on some heavyweight cotton T’s  for the gym by Gildan and some fitted cotton shirts from American Apparel to show your colors outside the club.

We’ll be adding more merchandise to the store over time and if any of you have any suggestions for cool products you’d love to see, send us an email or make a suggestion on the Forums.

• Better Time-Tracking: Back in the old days when you did some cardio and wanted to track it on Gyminee, you couldn’t enter hours, minutes, AND seconds. You could only enter a value and then select between hours, minutes, or seconds. Now, when you are tracking your cardio exercises you are able to enter your performance time more accurately using a compound HH:MM:SS field.
• Editable Food Log: Many of you have requested this feature, and now those requests have been answered. Your Food Log shows you what foods, and how much of each, you have eaten for a given day. The only problem was to change how many servings you had eaten you had to remove the food, search for it, and then add it again (quite a hassle). Now, clicking on the number of servings will allow you to quickly modify the amount you have eaten.
• Meal Planner & Grocery List Improvements: You have to be a Gyminee PRO member to enjoy these changes. The Meal Planner is a great tool that allows you to plan what you eat ahead of time to make sure you’re going to hit your goals each day. Before, the Meal Planner showed the amount of calories, fat, protein and carbs that were planned. Now fiber, cholesterol, sodium and potassium are shown as well! After planning out their meals, PRO users have a Grocery List that they can take to the store with them. Before, this grocery list allowed configuration of the ending date for the planned foods they wanted to see. Now, PRO users can configure both the starting date and the ending date.

• New Exercise Search: Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to track individual exercises or to easily find the exercises you are looking for. A new search field has been added right at the top of your Workout Log that will allow you to search for, and then track individual exercises. This makes it much easier to track that random day where you played tennis or went for a swim, instead of your normal workout routine.
• Prettier URLs for Users: I’m sure only fellow geeks will appreciate this one, but I know there are some of you out there  The old profile links looked like “gyminee.com/locker_room/43592″ (not very pretty). The new profile links look like “gyminee.com/locker_room/stephenb” - a link you can be proud to show your friends.
• Total Weight Change Shows %: This is one that only Gyminee PRO users will see (maybe it’s time to upgrade?). On your Locker Room, you will see your grades and your Total Weight Change, which is nothing new, but now your Total Weight Change is given as a percentage, along with the normal lbs/kg. I must admit, it’s interesting to know that there is 2.13% less of me here than there was when I started using Gyminee. 
• View All Posts by a Forum User: If you’re a Gyminee Forum user, you may have noticed that the text that shows how many posts have been made by a particular user is now a link. Clicking this link will show all the posts that user has made, and can be a great way to learn some interesting health and fitness tips from your favorite users.
• Of course, a significant amount of effort continually goes towards fixing small bugs and making Gyminee run faster and more smoothly. It’s not a feature that you’ll see, but it’s still one to appreciate.

• There have been over 800 competitors in Gyminee Challenges
• Over 3,200 miles have been traveled by Gyminee competitors
• Over 750 lbs have been lost by Gyminee competitors
• Nearly 100 Challenges have been started so far
• My vote for the best Challenge picture is the 40 Miles in the Next 30 Days challenge (I pity the fool who doesn’t join a Gyminee Challenge!)

Quite a few people have requested Twitter support in Gyminee, and we always thought it would be a cool way for users to share their progress and stay motivated. As of today, Gyminee now allows you to “tweet” your fitness activity as Twitter status updates.

Some example tweets:

• “Just did the Back and Biceps workout”
• “Just met my Body Weight goal!
• “Joined the Gyminee Running Challenge”

You can also configure which activities you do and don’t want tweeted. If you’re on Gyminee and on Twitter, then you can visit your Profile Settings page to set up Twitter support right now.

(Also, you can follow Gyminee on twitter)