In the days following Christmas, I began to spot more and more people donning peculiar bands around their wrists. Some bands were playful pink, some were authoritarian black, but they all looked the same.

Every once in while these people, obviously members of a sinister cult, dropped what they were doing and frowned over their wrist bands with deep concern.

“Whatcha doing there?” I asked one of them.

“Working out,” she said without looking up.

Peculiar. And growing in popularity by the minute.

The workout of today has climbed out of the sweat-soaked gyms and dank basements. While some still prefer to get their sweat on Rocky-style — chopping wood, running up mountains and pulling cars through the snow — the tech savvy have found more efficient and less macho ways to go about it. 

This year, the big thing in personal fitness appears to be Fitbit, a doohickey that uses a three-dimensional accelerometer to track movements of the user. And not just movements, but the nitty-gritty of a person’s overall physical state — distance walked, calories burned, stairs climbed. With the assistance of its accompanying application, housed on your phone or tablet, the Fitbit logs every single thing a person does and advises on how it can be done better.

Some people are into that sort of thing.

“You get out of it,” says new Fitbit cult member Scott Taylor, “what you put into it. If you don’t wear it all the time, you’re not going to get accurate results, so what’s the point?”

Taylor, a Sun Journal reporter, was fidgeting with his wristband when I got back to work at the start of the week. He really digs the fact that the gadget watches everything he does. It watches when he works, when he relaxes, when he sleeps. Every moment of his life is charted, assessed and broken down into components to be studied and improved upon.

And it gets even creepier.

Remember the Wii?

In the warp-speed of technology time the Wii, once newfangled, has been around forever. It’s old news. These days, you don’t have to throw a few hundred dollars at workout program, you can get one for just a handful of change, if not for free, through workout apps that will run on the smartphone or tablet you carry everywhere you go.

“I have been using Seven on my iPad for 51 days now,” says Ann Berube, one of very few people we talked to who started a workout BEFORE the resolution-plagued new year. “I love it. It keeps track of your workouts and has different goals to meet. It’s simple to use — no real equipment needed.”

Indeed the app promises the same lofty results as those gadgets seen in the lower tech world. No workout equipment and just minutes a day! Fun achievements and rewards to keep you motivated!

“It’s called Seven,” Berube says, “because it’s a seven-month program — if you miss a day you lose a heart — you can’t miss more than two workouts in a month because if you lose all three hearts the whole program automatically starts over. Every month you regain the hearts you lost, as long as you only lose two. Of course there are still ways to cheat.”

Cheating, of course, is what resolutions are all about. Maybe you cheat your diet by having a little bit of that cheesecake with wine after dinner. Maybe you skip the workout so you can go dancing with your pals. Maybe you have just one cigarette after a few nerve-wracked days without.

According to Berube, Seven helps to combat those temptations by evoking one of the oldest human motivators there is.

“I would feel too guilty,” she says.

That was in November, a week or two before Thanksgiving. If any time of year is tougher than others on matters of discipline, it’s the holidays. We checked in with Berube two days before Christmas to see if she was still working out with her iPad. Surely that kind of technology is enough to overcome the temptation to slack off.

“No,” Berube admitted. “I have taken the last two weeks off. Will start it back up after the holiday.”

We’ll check in with her again around Valentine’s Day.

Geek fever

Last year, a Nielsen report revealed that a third of smartphone owners in the U.S. used applications from the health and fitness category in the first month of 2014. That’s roughly 46 million people jumping around their living rooms to satisfy the demands of a gadget small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The 46 million users, according to the report, accessed their apps an average of 16 times per month and used them for nearly an hour at a time.

The numbers released by Nielsen represented an 18 percent increase in the use of smartphone health and fitness apps. The report also showed that more women then men were using their gadgets to bolster their workouts and that most were between 25 and 34 years of age.

Another study, this one from Mobiquity, found that while 70 percent of people use mobile apps on a daily basis to track calorie intake and monitor physical activities, only 40 percent share data and insights with their doctors.

Marketers and app designers are well aware of these trends, of course, and new applications are released into the wild on an almost daily basis. Behold BodBot, an app released just a week before Christmas and one that promises to become your personal trainer, nutritionist and coach. 

“Where personal trainers, nutritionists and coaches can be extremely expensive,” goes the app description, “BodBot is designed to democratize these services. The training suite accommodates a broad range of fitness goals, including the ability to bring up strength deficits or specific muscles — from calves, quads, glutes, hamstrings and thighs, to biceps, abs, delts, back muscles or even the rotator cuff. Whether you’re new to exercising, looking to pick up weightlifting or bodyweight fitness, or a seasoned veteran, we’ll personalize your exercises and nutrition accordingly.”

Whether BodBot has the stuff to unseat Fitbit remains to be seen. And speaking of this year’s champion workout app, how much easier can they make your fitness routine?

The Fitbit kit (say that three times fast and burn calories) includes a wireless station. Walk by the wireless station whilst wearing your band and all your data will be silently uploaded to the database. So now, it’s not like you hired just a personal trainer, but a personal secretary as well. 

“I really like how it tracks my steps, calories burned and my sleep patterns,” says Linda Oliver Thompson, of Lewiston. “Or lack thereof — I don’t sleep well and it totally shows on my Fitbit. I also love that it is waterproof!”

Fitness offers full-service and provides a way to examine your habits from various angles. “The more you know,” according to the product description, “the more motivated you will be.” 

A half-dozen of our readers said they use Fitbit, in conjunction with apps on their smartphones, and that was before Christmas. Christina Carrier Thistlewaite of Lewiston uses a Fitbit bracelet with the Fitness Pal app to track her daily calories.

“You keep track of all your food you eat and you have a calorie goal daily,” she says, “depending on how much weight you want to lose.”

Jawbone, which also features wearable bling and a phone app, promises to help you make at least one healthy decision each day. Presumably, they’re not sending goons over to your house to force you to do sit-ups but, rather, they employ the use of SmartCoach technology to count your calories and chart your progress.

There’s Zombie’s Run, an app co-created by an award-winning author for extra special plot lines. “If your philosophy has always been to never run unless something is chasing you,” says Tom’s Guide, “here’s the motivational app for you!”

The app is an ultra-immersive running game in which a heart-thumping story line is blasted to your headphones, prompting the user to . . . you know. Run like hell. CNN called it “a terrifying, terrifying game.”

If you’d rather stay home where it’s safe, you can still sculpt those six-pack abs with apps like Runtastic Six-Pack Abs, which features animated male and female avatars focusing exclusively on your midsection.

If you hate working out because it forces you to leave Facebook, Fitocracy is an app that will sate your social network needs. According to Tom’s Guides, Fitocracy “uses a combination of gamification and peer pressure to encourage your exercise habits.” Because, you know how it is. There’s nothing like sharing your results with thousands of complete strangers to motivate a workout.

And finally, for the truly snarky, comes Carrot Fit, billed as “your new fitness overlord.” This one is built around the 7-minute workout philosophy, but comes “complete with wry commentary and hilarious exercises such as Celebrity Face Punching, Dragon Mating Dances and more.”

You just can’t get that kind of fun in an exercise that consists of an old frayed jump rope, a heavy bag patched with duct tape and some dusty dumbbells with vice grips holding on the plates.

I mean, what kind of loser goes THAT low-tech?