I have begun to think that Foursquare is not the best, most accurate way to track my workouts. Despite feeling good each time I receive a new “N weeks at the gym! That’s a new record!” notification, I’m craving something more accurate and robust that actually acknowledges the individual sweat sessions I put in.

The Nike Fuelband intrigues me, but I have heard that the activities I mainly do, like yoga and Pilates, don’t register well on the device. Sad.

However, I am a sucker for anything else that employs game mechanics, so I’m starting to play around with SlimKicker, which lets me track my workouts and food, complete challenges, earn badges, and level up via a website and an iOS app. It seems kind of like a Fitocracy and MyFitnessPal hybrid, although unlike Fitocracy (which uses a “freemium” business model), I can access everything for free.

I’m not super-interested in keeping a food diary, as I am more focused on building and maintaining a consistent fitness routine rather than losing weight, so I’ve mostly just logged some workouts, which is a fairly simple process; you can search for a type of workout or use a parametric filtering system to drill down into specific exercise types and body parts. I had some trouble finding Pilates until I realized that it was findable using search, but didn’t live in any of the filter categories (at least not the ones I checked). HOWEVER, now that I’ve entered Pilates and yoga into my workout, I do see them pop up in my default list of “Recent Exercises.” Awesome!

From my initial explorations I can see, with my UX-professional hat on, a few other design issues– for instance, when I double-logged my Pilates class from Monday, it was hard for me to find the individual day for me to edit my entries; it would be great to see just a really simple log of every piece of activity I’ve entered lately. The graphing/data visualization is still pretty light, as I can only see how many calories I’ve burned, and filter down by activity type. However, it seems like a pretty new service, and I’m sure the team is always rolling out new enhancements and features, so I really look forward to seeing how the platform evolves!