Sparkpeople.com
Type: Fitness website that allows users to track nutrition, workouts and other goals
Cost: Free
Bottom line: This seems to be one of the most fully featured fitness websites out there, packed with resources and containing a supportive and large community. It does not look as sleek, however, as some of its competitors, and tracking nutrition and workouts is very tedious due to flaws in the design of the website.
I am a long-time user of SparkPeople and have found that fitness tracking is an invaluable tool for me as a home exerciser. Today, I’ll be providing an overview and lifetique of the features that I find most useful on Spark:
Food database and calorie counter
myNutrition is an enormous database of both Spark and user-entered nutritional data for pretty much any food you can imagine. If your food is not in the database, you can enter it, but be prepared to jump through hoops to do it. Unlike some competitor websites, Spark is not on an Ajax platform. This means that the process of entering and searching for foods involves about three extra unnecessary clicks and a page load for each food entered, which gets quite tedious when you’re tracking everything you eat. What frustrates me most, however, is that there’s no compatibility with Spark’s sister site, SparkRecipes.com, in which you can enter recipes from raw ingredients to obtain nutritional estimates. Being able to import manually entered recipes would greatly enhance functionality.
Nutrition guidance
myNutrition estimates the number of calories you should consume each day, as well as various macro and other nutrients. It will also build a meal plan for you if you choose to do so, and this is completely customizable. This is all based on your weight, sex and age, as well as the average number of calories you burn each week and your weight goal. It is completely customizable, and you can manually adjust calories and the amount of weight you want to lose per week.
Fitness tracker
myFitness tracker contains a limited database of Spark entered fitness activities and estimates the number of calories burned based on the length of time the activity is performed, as well as user data (weight, height, sex). You also have the option of manually entering activities and calories burned. Unlike some competitor websites, when estimating calories Spark does not take into account effort, which means that its estimates are often substantially off- for me, they tend to be overly conservative. For example, I may do step-based circuit training that has me high in the aerobic zone throughout, but my options are “circuit training” or “step aerobics,” both of which provide what seem to be very low estimates (250-300 calories) for an hour-long, extremely strenuous workout. Spark acknowledges that their estimator is just that, an estimator, and of course close estimates of calorie burn would only be obtainable by monitoring metabolic rates in a lab. However, accuracy would be improved by allowing users to enter effort levels.
Strength training guidance
myFitness also creates customized weight training programs for those who are interested. I do not use this feature, but Spark contains a wealth of free streaming training and exercise videos that are excellent resources, especially for beginners. A highlight is the 10-minute workouts series.
Community profiles and support
SparkPages and the message boards are easily one of Spark’s best features. Spark has a huge number of users who regularly discuss nutrition and exercise-related topics ranging from motivation to technical questions. This is extremely motivating regardless of your goals, particularly since most users have SparkPages (profile pages) outlining their weight and fitness journeys. I have been impressed with the supportive and friendly attitudes of Sparkers, and I think the community may help people reach weight or fitness goals. Again, my criticism here is the design: the boards are not easily searchable (even when you’re searching for your own posts!), the format makes posts difficult to read, and the categories are so broad that it is difficult to find specific information.
Overall: SparkPeople is incredibly useful and contains many excellent features, but its poor design detracts from its functionality. As is, I would recommend SparkPeople despite these problems. Personally, I have found its use to be such a hassle that I rarely use it anymore, but I think that may be because currently, I would only use it for tracking fitness. I probably would feel differently if I were trying to lose weight.