GetFit.com.au

If the Beijing Olympics inspired you to improve your athletic performance or just spend a little less time on the couch, the technology industry can help.

Gadgets and web services won't make you faster or stronger but, by recording your efforts and enabling you to measure your progress and compare against friends' or rivals' results, they'll provide plenty of motivation to keep striving for a personal best.

For a very few dollars, cheap devices such as a pedometer tell you how many steps you take, the distance covered and the kilojoules burned during a workout.

Cyclists can buy a speedometer, trip meter and ride timers for about $15 - the price of a basic bicycle computer at sites such as Torpedo7 (torpedo7.com.au).

If you follow the same route for your workouts and record your times, you'll soon be able to create a history of your performances and compare results from different days.

There's much more fun to be had if you marry these devices with your PC. You can accomplish this feat with devices such as USB pedometers that store data from your walk and upload it to your PC, where special software builds a profile of your workouts.

The Omron HJ720ITC PC pocket pedometer is such a device and is $65 at pedometersaustralia.com.

Sites such as mapmyrun.com or bikely.com add another dimension by letting you create maps of your runs or rides in Google Maps. When you enter your journey, the sites calculate the distance travelled.

Bikely shows you an altitude profile of a ride so you can see just how high you climbed and calculate the total ascent and descent you achieved.

These sites also let you share routes. Once you have plotted a course, all you need to do is save it, agree to share it and your feats will be available for anyone to view, making a more-than-useful resource for finding useful places to exercise.

Both sites let you annotate a route, so you can let others know about hazards such as bumpy paths or just leave behind instructions for hard-to-navigate sections.

Bikely and MapMyRun have three problems: entering a route accurately is fiddly and time-consuming; you need to remember the route you rode or ran to enter it into a PC and they rely on dodgy data, especially for altitudes - we plotted rides along waterside bike paths and, according to Bikely, we were in a submarine, not riding a bicycle.

Gadgets that use global positioning systems (GPS) to track your workout with satellites are a useful alternative, especially now that many mobile phones include the technology.

Nokia has created free software called Sports Tracker (sportstracker.nokia.com) that turns 20 of its phone models into exercise-tracking machines.

It overlays your exercise progress on a map while reporting your speed, average speed and distance. And some phones can count your steps like a pedometer. It comes into its own once you upload the results of a workout to the Sports Tracker site where it overlays the GPS data on Google Maps so you can see where you went. Upload as many workouts as you want, compare them, file through a library of past workouts and share them with friends.

We tested the application with a Nokia N95 8GB and found the software intuitive, although the GPS tracking was a little inaccurate - one ride apparently saw us veer through the grounds of a private school, taking out a fence, a building and several tennis courts along the way. The program also needs careful attention to set it in motion.

Features that allow you to upload data wirelessly mean you'll record your rides with ease.

An enhancement we would have appreciated is a bracket to mount the phone on a bicycle, a third-party product available online but sadly missing from the N95 box. Instead, we slipped the phone into the back pocket of a cycling jersey where we worried that sweat or rain could damage it.

We got lucky with the weather on our test ride and the unit stayed dry and did its job well - although we couldn't see it while riding.

The alternative to a phone is a rugged sports GPS, which eradicates the rain and sweat problems. We tested Garmin's Edge705, a $649 device that is the peak of computer-aided exercise.

Such models combine the functions of a GPS phone plus Sports Tracker but come with everything you need to mount them on a bike. Other models designed for runners include arm or wrist straps.

Dedicated devices will survive a hard knock and other exigencies of exercise.

The 705, for example, has a weatherproof cover for its USB port. And it beeps like a 1970s video game.

Its maps don't match the resolution of Google's maps, a minor disappointment correctable with an upgrade for a fee.

The upside is that it also has a wireless heart-rate monitor and a cadence meter to measure how often you turn the pedals of your bike.
All this data may be uploaded, along with route maps, making this just about the ultimate exercise aid.

If you own an iPod Nano, the $48 Nike + iPod Sport Kit turns it into an exercise aid. It has a small wireless sensor that slips into a pocket of some Nike sneakers and a receiver that slots into the iPod. The two communicate to record your run, noting time, distance, speed and energy burned. You can then upload this data through iTunes to nikeplus.com.

By Simon Sharwood | theage.com.au

Comment from Dean Piazza - Your Online Personal Trainer

Who would have thought exercise could go so Hi Tech and these gadgets can turn boring workouts into fun adventures. Elite athletes have been using this technology for a long time so its good to see these same tools available to the general public now at affordable prices.
Combine these tools with an Online Personal Trainer who will provide the support and motivation and you will have an awesome winning team on your side to help you stay on track even when you feel like quitting!

Click here to sign up for your very own personal trainer online and let technology work for you.

https://www.getfit.com.au/registration.html

Dean Piazza
www.getfit.com.au

Posted by Dean at 11:50 AM | Permalink

With alot of emphasis on dieting in the media this article about learning how to cook is very true - throw away the microwave which encourages you to heat up fast food that can be high in fat and tasteless and learn how to prepare fast, fresh, nutritious meals - this way you will enjoy your food more and consume the right type of calories - not the ones that make you fat !

I dont use a microwave and cook most things at home with the George Foreman Grill - its excellent !

Enjoy the article below

Dean Piazza
www.getfit.com.au
Your Online Personal Trainer

AS AUSTRALIANS have been eating themselves towards full-fat, inglorious deaths in the past decade or two, an essential skill has been fading away, now a skeletal shadow in the corner.

We have forgotten how to cook.

The revelation is shocking and sad in equal parts: the more we gorge ourselves, the less we are in love with the wonder that is food. This can be the only explanation for the loss of such an essential skill.

Isn't preparing food - the modern-day equivalent of hunting, gathering and providing nutrition to self and family - essential to a healthy life, like washing and cleaning?

The disclosure of this developmental regression came from media personality and television chef Jamie Oliver at the launch this week of his latest venture, a TV series in Britain and a cookbook for the world.

His project is aimed at educating a society ignorant about the basics of how to prepare nutritious and easy meals from real foodstuffs.

In the first episode aired in Britain this week, Oliver spoke to a woman who did not know that water bubbled when it boiled and another who had never cooked a meal for her children, despite them being aged two and five.

Oliver believes Britain is facing a new form of poverty caused by a generation that lacks the basic life skills to feed their families.

He is right and Australia is in the same uneducated and unskilled boat. It's an issue that has been bubbling away at the centre of the health/obesity/lifestyle disorder problems, but has rarely been so explicitly outlined.

To clarify, we are not talking cooking osso bucco for a dinner party of 10 or presenting a perfectly garnished roast lamb with all the trimmings. We are talking about the increasing number of people who don't know how to cook at all - and many are loud and proud of it.

I have friends and acquaintances who openly profess to not know a saucepan from a wok. They claim to despise the craft and creativity of cooking but say they delight in consuming food.

I fail to see how one can exist without the other, but apparently this is possible because of instant meals or kitchen-loving spouses and housemates.

How did cooking get thrown out with hand-washing and ironing clothes? How did so many people become so busy that getting a meal became an extra they did not opt into? Food and its consumption are the cause and the symptoms of many of society's ills: obesity, ill-health and the rush-rush, no-time life.

It is ironic that the key to beat the obesity epidemic is eating, and eating well.

Eating is as essential as air and we need it as whole, clean and pure as possible. Fresh, real food has never been more needed.

But we shovel in gobsful of non-food morsels and pretend we are deriving nutrients. We fill up on rubbish and pretend we are satisfied. Chips are a pantry staple and soft drink is Australia's largest supermarket chains' biggest-selling item.

Regardless of the economic tough times, takeaway food shops are still doing very good business. We claim to be time poor, but spend hours of our leisure time in shopping centres and sitting in food courts.

The Dietitians Association of Australia says the average Australian family spends 15 per cent of its food budget on takeaway food.

Goodness knows how much more is spent in the frozen food, meal-in-a-box or banquet-in-a-bottle aisles of the supermarket.

It's appalling.

Whether or not Oliver's latest cookbook, released in Britain today and Australia next week, will be a big seller or whether the TV series will be a British TV success remains to be seen.

I suspect it may not be the super-seller his other books were.

Why? Because those who buy cookbooks have an interest in cooking. The target of this book are people who are not, but should be.

At least he is offering help to those who need nutritional and life skills. We need more, though.

Governments could help us help ourselves by adding a tax on foods low in nutritional value and high in sugar or fat, and use that to subsidise the cost of healthy, whole food, like fresh fruit and vegetables, plain milk and whole-grain bread.

Ultimately, we have to take responsibility for our poor personal and collective state and decide to change our dysfunctional and unhealthy ways.

It's a matter of loving life and the essentials in it enough, and learning the skills to make our lot better

Jane Fynes Clinton smh.com.au

Posted by Dean at 12:03 PM | Permalink