Kick starting dacadoo

I’ve tried just about every fitness and health app going and regardless of how much of my wage packet I do or don’t fork out, I fail to keep up using them. Whether it’s because I get bored or because I fall behind for a few days and then feel too guilty to log back on and just end up deleting them, either way I can’t seem to find one that fits my lifestyle.

Juggling a nine-to-five job with socialising, keeping fit, seeing the family and commuting means that entering arduous details into a fitness app on my phone often falls to the bottom of the pile.

However, dacadoo promises to be different so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Kick starting dacadoo – The setup

Set-up is easy, both online and with the mobile app, which should be the standard in the modern age but I often find many fall short on this first and very important step. With dacadoo the control is with the user so once you have put in your basic details such as your name, email, weight, height, date of birth and location, you are pretty much ready to start.

Your ‘dacadoo coach’ will then ask you a few questions about your lifestyle, which are based around three main factors; stress, sleep and nutrition. I did this on the website, and found it easy as the site guides you through the various steps to completion, allowing you to then tick off each bit as you go.

This then gives you a ‘dacadoo score’ which takes into consideration your stress levels, nutrition and activity. This number will then either increase or fall if say, you feel particularly stressed one week or don’t keep up your exercise. The system will even tell you that your activity score will decrease in the next so many days – a nice gentle reminder to get up and move!

The ‘dacadoo coach’ will then send you questions about your nutrition, stress and sleep every so often, but you can choose how frequently you want to be asked in the future. For me, this was much better than other systems I’ve tried as it was far more convenient and much more under my control. You can even go back and change these settings if you find that it is bothering you too much, or you feel as if you aren’t giving the system enough data.

dacadoo

Once you have completed the process to set up your account, you can then enter any fitness goals that you have, whether this is losing weight, running a certain amount of miles or doing an activity for a specific amount of time. This is the bit that I found most useful.

Like a lot of my friends, I need to set myself a target to make sure I don’t just sit on the sofa every night with Netflix and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. By being able to enter this into the dacadoo system, I felt it was official and that I could also then divide this target into daily amounts so I knew how far I needed to run.

For me, I also really liked the way dacadoo has its own achievements so it congratulates you when you have clocked a certain amount of activity or filled in so many questions with your dacadoo coach. As simplistic as this seems, I found that on days when I am tired and really can’t be bothered to go for a run after work, this spurred me on to think ‘well a quick one won’t take very long’.

One of the perks of using a high quality system like dacadoo is that it incorporates so many features and other technology. This makes it stress-free to track everything from your sleep, stress levels and activity. For many people with too few hours in the day, this is essential. Once you have your Nike+ or Bitfit, you can attach these to your dacadoo account and every time you use it, it can then automatically be uploaded to the website or straight to your mobile app. This means you don’t need to spend the little amount of time entering details about your exercise.

daca-doo or daca-don’t?

dacadoo’s innovative approach is far more natural than anything I’ve used before, especially if you already have the fitness gadgets to link up to the system. Even if you don’t, you can still get a lot out of the website and mobile app and track your targets, you just need to enter the activity and the length of time you spent doing it.

I haven’t managed to stick to using it everyday, but I think it’s a system that is very user friendly and has definitely tapped into the busy work/life/health balance that so many people are trying to juggle. If you want to improve your fitness, set yourself goals or just monitor your health, but also have a busy lifestyle, then the dacadoo system could be exactly what you need.