At GymFu we’ve been blown away by how much progress you guys have made: 40% of you have doubled your reps; the top 100 PushupFu champions have 300,000 pushups between them; some of the top SquatFu guys have done nearly 1000 reps each (!!!) – not to mention the people who’ve achieved 200 crunches via CrunchFu! Amazing!

Now we’ve got something really awesome, we want to shout about it and help as many people as possible to get fit… but we’re only a tiny company so this is where you can help; we need you to tell the world about our apps – using Twitter and/or Facebook.

If you’re wondering what’s in it for you, well apart from getting more people for battles and the warm fuzzy feeling of helping people get fit we’re offering something we know you’ve been wanting for ages;

NEW VOICES! FOR FREE! Plus a 33% price reduction!

Yup – FINALLY, not only a pair of human voices to motivate you through the workout but also a price reduction so now you can get all the apps for a more rounded workout!

How you receive the voices is easy; from 1pm GMT on Tuesday 6th Oct (that’s 2pm in London, 6am in San Fancisco and 9am in New York) and for TWO WEEKS ONLY all you need to do is open the app, go to Home and use the special offer button to tell your friends about the apps.

You can find out more about the offer and the Terms and Conditions here.

How do I link my GymFu to my Facebook?

There are two ways to do this. The easiest way is to go to My Account, log in with your GymFu account details and follow the on screen instructions. There is also support to do this through the GymFu apps, although there are many more steps involved (sorry it’s a bit of a weird method from within the apps, but do persevere; your fitness is worth the hassle!).

If you are a Facebook user, why not become a fan of GymFu and celebrate your progress!

So a few months ago – with nothing to lose and everything to gain – I set about the task of turbo-boosting my muscle, Ferris-style. But here’s the catch; I wanted to do it completely without supplements. That’s right; no casein, no whey protein, no Weight Gain 4000 – just simple meat and vegetables. What’s more I wanted to prove you don’t need to be a gym-obsessed meat-head to make gains, so I ditched the gym too! Crazy huh? Here’s how it went:

UPDATE [31st Aug 09]: If you came here wondering how I added TEN kilograms of muscle (rather than the 5kg now in the title) then you may be disappointed – but don’t be! If you’re aiming for 1kg a week you are probably deluding yourself (I know I was). Find out why in the follow-up post. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the article:

1. Multi-Joint Exercises

To gain maximum weight you’re going to have to learn to love squats! Fortunately, barbell squats is a fantastic exercise that leaves you buzzing afterwards. Combined with pullups, pushups, crunches, deadlifts and rows this is a really great workout. Here’s my schedule (note; this is totally ripped from Stronglifts.com, so please visit their site!)

2. Record Everything

Measure your weight, body fat, dimensions and all your calories. How will you know to eat more or less if you don’t know what the changes are? I recorded my body fat using calipers I bought from Amazon (these ones are the best, in my experience). I cannot stress enough how important this is; you MUST measure your % body fat accurately – looking in the mirror can play tricks on your mind.

3. Always Make Progress

Don’t increase your weights suddenly by 10kg and struggle to do 3 reps; simply add 2.5kg every training day to your squats and deadlifts, and 1kg to the others. But ALWAYS do 5×5. This way you’ll make great progress.

4. The Equipment

For this experiment I didn’t use a gym; I wanted to prove that all you needed was a few of our apps, and a few freeweights. It’s definitely doable, but making a home gym that’s safe requires some care – especially as the weights start to get seriously heavy. I’ll be writing how I did this, on a budget, very soon. Subscribe here to read it first.

The Results

5kg of lean muscle is a spectacular result and is actually in the upper end of what I could have expected to achieve. I also added a couple of kgs of fat (which might not be a bad thing – having some body fat is thought improve your ability to fighting, for example) but this needn’t have happened had I monitored my stats better.

All in I’m really pleased with the results because before I was totally convinced I was a slow-gainer; just goes to show what hard work can achieve. Plus it was great fun – and that’s what GymFu is all about; whatever your goals, keep your workouts fun and you’ll achieve amazing results!

It’s November 2008 and I’m standing in a quiet basement gym with an iPhone strapped to my arm with elastic bands. On the phone is the first working prototype of PushupFu. I press the button and start squeezing out some pushups only to hear the robotic voice of the FuBot shoult “HALF” the moment I started to falter. And you know what? I actually did a load more reps! I obeyed this crazy terminator-style voice without thinking twice. It was a truly bizarre experience and at that moment I knew we had something special.

Since then I’ve clocked up thousands more pushups and put on 10kg (22lbs) in muscle. Clearly it’s worked pretty well for me, but how well has it worked for the rest of our users? Well, we’ve taken a dive into the data and the results are very exciting!

It’s clear; PushupFu is effective! We’re extremely happy that we’ve inspired thousands of people to improve their fitness and couldn’t ask for more. But you know what else came from our stats? We know which COUNTRIES are the fittest! Stay tuned to find out which countries are making great progress, and which are slacking. Feel free to take guess in the comments

[Footnote: The analysis excludes data from any users who've only used the app a couple of times. Makes sense we think - no one's going to reach 100 pushups just by installing an app and not using it, right?]

For those of you new to GymFu, we make motion-detecting fitness minigames to add a bit of spice to exercise. The whole thing started one day in the gym when Jof asked himself why so few people kept up exercise. The answer was to make fitness more compelling by combining a portable personal trainer with challenges and battles to keep people motivated. Since our launch (at 2am on New Years Day!) our users have clocked up an amazing 2.2 MILLION reps… and that’s just the start!

A big THANKS for visiting and we hope you’ll come back again soon. Please bear with us whilst the site is under construction; there’s still a few broken links here and there, but everything will be ready by Tuesday next week (4th Aug). We look forward to your return Feel free to say hello in the comments.