Technology Meets Fitness A Match Made in Heaven ?

I was up in the wee hours in the morning completing my new home page top 5 list for this week.  The page is about the top 5 most useful tech gadgets for fitness.  I wanted to please some of my website visitors I will be getting from the Popular Science website sometime this week.

I recently collaborated with engineer and freelance writer for popular science Brett Zarda on a test of the Nintendo Wii fit system.  We used the Wii fit and talked about it and its usefulness for a fitness program.  His article should be out any day now.

I didn’t realize at the time, but Popular Science’s articles are broadcast all over the net from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, so I could get another server crashing day on my website AskTheTrainer.com The problem is I didn’t scale down all my pictures on my website so they take up too much memory.

I really don’t know what to save the pictures on.  I don’t want to lose any quality to the human eye.  I know that the human eye can only see a certain number of colors so I wish adobe photoshop had a setting or information that told you how much quality is needed to save for the web at the best visual but less memory hogging resolution.

As far as my top 5 list I had to give the Wii some credit for trying.  I think in the future if they would collaborate with a team of fitness experts the program on the Wii will fully take advantage of the impressive home technology

The technology of the balance pad actually reminded me of some equipment I used for my Undergrad at Oregon State University.  I think the equipment I used for college probably cost $10K + compared to the Wii which is less than $400.

The top gadget had to be the Ipod nano.  I have worked out probably 1000 times in the past few years and I have packed along my Ipod 100% of the time.  I did a page on the best workout music a few days ago as a matter of fact.

This just reminds me, my 100th pair of headphones just crapped out and I plan to head to the gym in a few minutes.

I think they design headphones to die.  Every time the cord gets severed somehow which cuts off sound to one ear then you get pissed and cuss and throw it away.  They need to design a pair of headphones which is tough enough to last through any workouts.

The gadgets that I wish I had but I know how good they are were a main part of my list.  I wish I could get the new garmin forerunner to test out before I wrote about it but I know how useful and fun that thing would be.

I never really pay attention to heart rate while I exercise because I focus on heart bursting high intensity intervals but to long distance runners, the polar heart rate monitors would be a tremendous tool.

The last gadget was the body fat scales.  I know people give them a hard time but they miss the point.  They may not be accurate for some people but they are reliable.  If you use them at the same time under the same conditions you will get an idea if you are losing body fat or not.

People often think their body fat percentage is lower than it really is.  Don’t hate the scales.

The last honorable mention product was google earth.  It is the coolest thing since sliced bread and every major news organization uses it for their television broadcasts and webcasts.  It can also be used as a cool fitness tool to track how far you run.

Enough talking about fitness, I need to get my deteriorating butt to the gym, without my ipod