Health and Fitness

Wahoo Fitness Is My New Favorite iPhone Fitness App!

While reviewing the Magellan Echo, I needed a fitness app on my iPhone. There were a few supported, so I tried the popular ones. They didn’t expose much functionality, so I tried Wahoo Fitness, which was detailed in a document from Magellan. Turns out it the perfect partner for the Echo, and it’s the best fitness app I’ve ever used!


Get Fit and Heart-Healthy With The Polar RC3 GPS, Review

Polar built its reputation on heart rate monitoring technology starting in the late 1970s designed to let you REALLY listen to your body. I have friends who swear by their products, and with the RC3 GPS they offer up their latest hardware and software for tracking all of your workouts, and it represents some of the best technology for runners.





Spree ‘Revolutionary’ Fitness Monitor Launched At CES 2014!

Everyone is speculating that the ‘hot new thing’ at CES this year will be ‘wearable technology’. Wearables include the Pebble watch, Google Glass, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, Magellan Echo, and fitness monitors such as Fitbit Force, etc. New to the category is Spree ‘Revolutionary’ Fitness Monitor from Hothead Technologies, bringing heart rate and temperature to help you better understand your health!


T-Rex Runner Launches Ramblen, Resource for Traveling Runners

With the huge number of sites like RunKeeper and Yelp to give opinions and options for eating and finding routes, you might think it is easier than ever for a traveling runner to hit a new city. Sadly this is not the case, as recommendations of routes often lack context, and definitions of ‘healthy dining’ vary wildly. In this light the new site Ramblen has launched to provide curated recommendations for eating and exercise for travelers. One of my favorite running blogs is the T-Rex Runner – I appreciate the humor and randomness, but also the way she immerses herself…


Polar Introduces the Loop Activity Tracker

The Activity Tracker market is getting crowded with new releases from Nike, Jawbone and FitBit offering more and more features and integration into our lifestyle. Is there room for another one? Polar hopes that by offering more features, they can expand the market further. So they have introduced the Loop – more than just an activity tracker.


PAFERS XSPIN Takes the Drudgery out of Indoor Cycling

With the weather cooling off, it gets harder and harder to convince myself to take my bicycle outdoors for an exercise ride, but spinning for miles on an indoor bike can be a mind-numbing bore. Fortunately, the gear heads at PAFERS have released a new exercise aid to help add some motivation to indoor cycling. Their new XSPIN is a Bluetooth enabled device that works with many exercise apparatuses to inspire harder training.


MapMyFitness Bought by UnderArmour

When I bought my second pair of Nike Free Run shoes last year, one factor was that the shoe had the slot for the foot pod that connected to my Nike+ GPS watch that hooked into my laptop to help me track my workouts. Under Armour lacked such a tie-in, so they bought MapMyFitness.


Xbox One to Feature Xbox Fitness Free for Gold Subscribers

Video games and exercise don’t often go hand-in-hand, although attempts at calorie burning games by major consoles have been made in the past.  However, with the new Kinect 2.0 technology included with the Xbox One, Microsoft is trying to lure us couch potatoes off of our favorite La-Z-Boy by combining videos by popular fitness instructors with Kinect’s new ultra-sensitive cameras.


Is There ONLY Competition OR Completion? – The Monday Mile

A recent New York Times called ‘The Slowest Generation’ slams the younger generation for abandoning competition and running races ‘for the bling’. The article – and the ‘Dumbing Down, Slowing Down’ article that inspired it – contend that competitiveness is dulled in the aftermath of a generation raised on ‘everyone gets a medal’, and finishing is now its own reward. The articles point to an increase in average finish times for races, the increased popularity of non-timed ‘gimmick’ races such as color and mud runs, and the move to stop funding elite runners at races by Competitor Group. They say that…


Reminder That All Female Joggers Might Be One Run from Death – The Monday Mile

A week ago, satire site The Onion posted ‘Nation’s Female Joggers Know They Will One Day Be Assaulted, Buried In Woods’, where women acknowledge this as simply part of the circle of life. All fun aside, as fall arrives it’s a good time to step back and remind ourselves of the need for enhanced safety on shorter, cooler days. I wrote about early morning running tips in the first part of spring as I started to see more people emerging from their winter cocoons, and now as school is back in session and the mornings are darker it makes sense…


5 Things I’d Rather Do Than ‘Boston Qualify’ – The Monday Mile

Today registration for the Boston Marathon opens. Qualifying for Boston is an aspiration or goal for most long distance runners. While some debate if it’s ‘the best’, it is the most coveted and prestigious – and hardest to get into. But there are things more important to me than getting a BQ – I’ll list five. Naturally there are many people – thousands every year, in fact – who are fast enough to qualify for Boston. But as I have engaged the running community it seems nearly every running blog involves someone who has Boston as an eventual goal. I…


Run-n-Read Helps Out With The ‘Reading On Treadmill’ Issue

Do you use a treadmill or elliptical system for exercise? Do you read while on it? If so, you’ve probably encountered eye-strain as you were moving and trying to focus on the stationary e-device text. Run-n-Read from Weartrons seeks crowdsource funding to deal with this issue by tracking motion and repositioning text to keep it stable in your visual field. Run-n-Read uses a combination of hardware and software to stabilize text. The hardware tracks your head motion relative to the screen and text, and the software runs on your iOS or Android device to shift the text position in real…


Avoid These Hydration Mistakes During Marathon Season – The Monday Mile

Hydration is a problem for everyone – office workers deal with dry environments from conditioned air and need to increase fluid intake to compensate. Athletes bodies use it more quickly and it is easier to get into a very dangerous place. As fall marathon season starts it is important to separate fact from myth to keep hydrated and safe. Through the years there have been a number of articles and guidelines put out about what we should drink, when we should drink and how much we should consume. Most of these have been pretty rough guidelines, and can generally be…


Mario Esposito Discusses Sensoria Fitness Game Development Projects

We recently talked with Heapsylon’s CTO Mario Esposito about impressive gear that can interface among the physical world and video. Esposito  also co-founded Heapsylon in 2009, which concentrates on wearable body sensing technology. Heapsylon, a Washington-based start-up, has launched Sensoria Fitness, which consists of mobile applications, the first e-textile pressure sensing smart sock, and Bluetooth anklet. The mobile application monitor and guide you through real-time audio cues. The smart sock, completely made of fabric, can be washed or dried like a regular sock. The anklet magnetically snaps on the cuff of the sock and sends commands. Sensoria Fitness recently completed two successful campaign on…


Use Back-to-School to Revisit Your Health & Fitness Goals – The Monday Mile

Many kids across the country are already in class, with other states opening within the next week. It’s back to school time, and that means getting organized for a new year. This sense of a fresh start can apply to everything, so as we get our kids equipped and organized, it is worth revisiting our health and fitness goals. At the end of last year, I talked about using the ‘SMART’ system to evaluate your resolutions. I emphasized the importance of setting goals that would make you accountable for tracking and milestones, and that were specific enough to be measurable. One…


Debunking the ‘Running Doesn’t Aid Weight Loss’ Myth – The Monday Mile

I have talked many times about how running has fueled my weight loss and maintenance through the years. Many people take up running but don’t lose weight – and this week I have had the same old report brought up twice about weight loss and exercise. Bottom line – losing weight is hard work requiring changes in eating and exercise. One of my favorite Bloom County comics involves Opus looking at an index of diet books and deciding how to reshape himself, with Milo offering the basic advice ‘how about eat less, and exercise?’. Here it is: Perhaps you have…


Science or Not, Wu-Long Slimming Tea is Awesome!

  It seems like the science behind weight gain or loss changes all the time, leaving us wondering if today’s health food will be tomorrow’s junk. For thousands of years oolong tea has been a weight loss aid  with no negative effects, so weight loss aid or not, Wu-Long Slimming Tea tastes fantastic and is reasonably priced! There are a number of natural herbal products that claim certain health benefits, or have at least been used for that purpose for many years. One such product is oolong tea, which has long been reported to support weight loss. Those claims have…


Merrell Vapor Glove Minimal Running Shoe Review

Minimalist running means different things to different people, from zero-drop to barefoot design to little cushioning. Regardless of definition, the Merrell Vapor Gloves qualify; they have zero drop, 2mm of cushion, and they can fold up into your pockets. They are amazingly comfortable while offering an uncompromisingly minimal design, so it’s worth checking them out to see if they’re for you. I did an initial impressions post on the Vapor Glove, and now after spending more time with the shoes, it is worth going back to see they have performed over a longer time period. So let’s get into some…