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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Running outside brings freedom and opportunities to interact with nature. Listening to music helps pass time, provides a motivation, and creates a pacing rhythm – so long as you listen at a safe volume. Running outside already poses numerous risks – why make it worse with music so loud you can’t even hear these risks? Safe music volume is another key to running safety. Last weekend I went out for a couple of long runs when it worked for my family schedule. One day that was 11AM after grocery shopping; the other day it was 7PM after dinner. Naturally at…
Each year since 1995, Running USA has documented the ‘state of running’ in terms of road races. They have looked at the total number of finishers of official races, as well as how those numbers are distributed by race, age, and gender. For every one of the last 20 years except 2003, there have been new records set in every aspect of road races as covered by Running USA. They released the numbers for 2012 last week, and as that was my first year of participating in road races I was intrigued to see the numbers. Here are a few…
Blue Goji has begun and aims to combine fitness and gaming into a brand new platform where working out is more fun by adding interactivity using various tech devices, especially mobile and tablet devices. The Blue Goji fitness game platform will function with tablets and smartphones (Android and iOS) on cardio equipment such as treadmills, stationary bicycles, and elliptical machines. The Android/iOS first platform will release near the 2013 holiday season. The formation of this new interactive fitness company was announced on July 29, 2013. This company looks to use their Goji Play game system and other interactive methods to “transform the cardio…
This weekend I completed the inaugural running of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon Marathon. The race takes place on the Pine Creek Gorge just outside of Wellsboro, PA. As noted, this was the first running of the race, which always means watching organizers work out the bugs in the system in real-time. I had gotten a couple of obscure comments from one of the leaders of a local running club group on Facebook, so I was watching what happened over the course of the pre-race and race-day events. It was a race and a weekend that left me conflicted in many…
My series ‘The Monday Mile’ has detailed interesting health and fitness tips and my own personal experiences and feelings. I filter things I discover through th elens of my own personal experience with significant weight loss and fitness routines, and trends and truisms that have come and gone through the years. Over at The Oatmeal, Matthew Inman creates what he calls ‘badly drawn comics’ … but more important is the stories he tells through the comics. Until a few weeks ago my favorite was the story of his house burning down when he was a kid, because it is touching, funny…
I have never had a problem perspiring – and given that I am also a distance runner who doesn’t shy away from the heat and humidity, and you have the recipe for some drenched workout clothes! All of my Dri-Fit stuff is still wet after several hours! Imagine if there was a way to harness all of that perspiration and convert it back to drinking water? Well, there is, and it is called simply the Sweat Machine and it is part of a UNICEF campaign to raise awareness for the 750 million people around the world without access to clean…
Have you ever stood in your driveway waiting for your GPS to find satellites whereas your phone was set a few minutes earlier? I have done it many times, as has pretty much anyone who has both a GPS watch and smartphone! The realities of power, cost and space make it hard for GPS watch makers to have the same capabilities as a smartphone. To deal with this, Magellan introduces the Echo – let’s take a look! The Echo isn’t like other GPS watches – because it isn’t a GPS! Instead, it is a specialized Bluetooth receiver that works with…
This is going to sound a bit cynical and perhaps it is: American culture has become obsessed with the possibility of actions without consequence followed by a ‘quick fix’ to undo whatever mess we’ve made. I have a picture of my mother at a bicentennial celebration in 1976 and she was rail-thin, thinner than I had ever seen her. She had problems for years losing weight after my younger sister was born, so her doctor gave her diet pills to help. In the mid-70s ‘diet pills’ were basically speed. She lost weight way too fast because the speed diet pills…