Evernote takes health to new heights with its 30-Day Fitness Challenge

Evernote is fast-becoming everyone’s favorite note taking app. Anyone with a less than perfect memory who uses a computer, smartphone or tablet can appreciate the cloud-based, multiple device exterior brain of sorts.

At LeWeb this past December, Evernote launched two new apps to help you track the food you eat and the people you meet. In fact, at LeWeb Evernote CEO Phil Libin told us how Evernote is evolving from an app to a platform. Musician use Evernote to compose songs, track snippets of melodies with audio recordings and jot down lyrics and sketches. Hairdressers use Evernote to catalog before and after shots of clients. With a new app called Say Mmm, you can now simply add a tag to your stored recipe on Evernote, and Say Mmm will generate a grocery list with everything you need to make the meal.

In January, Evernote announced its new Fitness Ambassador Chad Williams, an online fitness coach and nutrition consultant with 25 clients around the globe. Williams, who’s based in Vancouver, BC is leading a very new trend in online personal training.

In a recent Forbes article titled “The Internet vs. Your Gut: Personal Training Goes Digital,” author Ed Zitron writes about the flaws in commercial gym business models and the failure of traditional trainers to really care about their client’s progress. Meanwhile, the Internet has metaphorically and literally leveled the playing field for those looking to get fit online.

“The Internet has spawned countless resources for would-be exercisers such as BodyBuilding.com, BodyRecomposition.com, RippedBody.JP, LeanGains (the blog-meets-notepad of fitness and dieting guru Martin Berkhan), PubMed‘s millions of free scientific articles and the findings of nutrition scientist and lifter Alan Aragon,” writes Zitron.

Chad Williams develops personalized workouts and nutritional goals for his clients, using Evernote to keep track of their routines. He stays in near constant communication with them via Skype, email and text and uses YouTube for video instruction. For Williams’ clients, he says it’s pretty much mandatory that they use Evernote’s shared notebook feature and encourages them to make goals, as well as log their daily activities, sleep schedules, body measurements and the food they eat within Evernote.

“Using Evernote’s shared notebooks, we can both start to see patterns and habits, and we can conveniently view these everywhere using Evernote’s mobile apps. It’s so hard to realize what we’re doing day to day without this, and when we can look back with 20/20 hindsight, it can inspire us to make some real life changes,” says Williams.

It was his enthusiastic use of the product that caught Evernote’s attention in the first place, before awarding him the (unpaid) appointment. “For me, Evernote’s greatest feature has been its simplicity. It’s a blank canvas, notes program, which has worked much better than the plethora of detailed apps and platforms out there,” says Williams. “Before Evernote I’d use PDFs to create a program and they’d email pieces of their results with attached spreadsheets. It was really hard to get a clear overview or snapshot of my clients’ progress over time.”

Today, Evernote and Williams are announcing the Evernote Fitness Challenge, conveniently timed just after you’ve likely fallen off the wagon with your New Year’s resolutions. The challenge begins next week! At the end of the 30 day challenge, Evernote will host “a Twitter party” (date TBA) with participants to hear how it went, get tips from Williams on how they can continue their success or improve results, and also, give away some swag like Evernote t-shirts and water bottles, as well a grand prize– a month of Nutritional Consulting with a weekly 15 minute check-in call with Chad Williams himself, a prize valued at $200.

Here’s how it’s going to work:

1. Choose any combination of the four challenges presented below.
2. Create a notebook called ’30 Day Fitness Challenge,” or something more inspiring, like “30 Days to a new me.”
3. Every day you complete a challenge, take note of it in your challenge notebook. Take photos to track before and afters, and maybe even clip some motivational articles to help you along.
4. Join the Fitness discussion forum to share your experience, tips, talk with other users participating in the challenge, and connect with Chad. (Having group support helps you to stay motivated!)

4 Challenge Options (choose any combination of two)

2 Fitness Challenges:

• 100 sit ups per day. This can be done in one chunk or spread out through the day. You have the option to scale this down to 50. Pick a number and commit!
• 100 stairs per day. You can split this up throughout the day, or reduce the total number, but again, pick a set number and stick to it.

2 Nutritional Challenges:

• Water only. Do not consume any other fluids besides water for the next 30 days. If that’s too challenging, you can also choose to only omit alcohol and soda.
• No sugar. This one might seem simple at first, until you realize how many things contain sugar. Chad usually allows people to define what this means for them (ie: no sweets and candy, but fruit and sauces are okay).

“As Evernote’s Ambassador, I’d like to have as many people as possible completing the 30 day challenge. It’s not going to be easy! Take for example, the no sugar one. You’ll find it frightening to find that sugar is in everything. So, perhaps reduce refined sugar or don’t add sugar to things. And yes, sugar is definitely in most alcoholic beverages,” says Williams.

Will you take the challenge? Personally, I’m going for the 50 sit-ups a day option #1a. I’ll let you know how that goes. Good luck!

Love Evernote? Read our piece: The Future of Evernote: From memory machine to time machine.

➤ Evernote

Christopher Edwin Nuzzaco via shutterstock