.KEYWORD vivonic
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Keep in shape with Vivonic’s Fitness Planner
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT vivonic-cover.gif
.SUMMARY In honor of this month’s Olympic Games, PalmPower is celebrating with a special health and fitness issue. To be physically fit, it’s important to manage your diet and exercise, and if you own a Palm device, you’ve got the perfect tool to do the job. Heather McDaniel has a review of a new application that will help you reach your fitness goals and keep track of all those calories.
.AUTHOR Heather McDaniel
Now that summer’s winding down, are you looking to keep yourself in shape over the long, cold winter? Are you worried you’re going to lose all the progress you made over the summer? Well, a company called Vivonic has a helpful software tool for your Palm device called the Vivonic Fitness Planner. It’s designed to help you reach your fitness goals and to keep track of the calories you consume and burn.
.H1 Getting started
To set up the Palm application, you need to provide some information to the integrated desktop software. (Sorry Mac users, the software only runs on PCs.) The first time you open up the Vivionic PC software, you’ll be taken to the Plan Wizard, pictured in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A The Plan Wizard will help you establish your goals, program, and nutritional needs.
Here you’ll find a series of questions that will help you establish your goals, your exercise program, and your nutritional needs. First, you’ll also be asked for your height, weight, and other measurements. Your goals can be to lose weight, to build strength, or to improve body tone, health, or athletic performance.
Next you select the benefits that are important to you. The software can record weight and other measurements such as cholesterol, blood pressure, and hours of sleep.
The Plan Wizard will also ask you about your medical history, whether or not you’ve had problems exercising, past injuries, and other cardiovascular risk factors and general health questions. You’ll then be asked about your exercise habits, as in how often and how intense you exercise on a scale from one to ten.
You’re also warned that you should consult a doctor before starting any exercise or nutrition program, which is always good advice.
.H1 What do you want to do?
Now you have to decide what kind of exercises you would like to include in your program: strength training, flexibility, or cardiovascular. I chose to do all three.
If you select strength training, you’ll then be asked what kind of strength training exercises you’d like to do. You’re given a full explanation for each option. If you selected cardiovascular exercise, you’ll be shown a list of common cardiovascular activities. These range from aerobics to running on a treadmill.
Once you choose the exercises you’d like to do, you’ll then be given an exercise plan summary, which will tell you how many days you should work out. If you like, you can change the plan and choose the days you want to work out.
Planning a schedule and keeping to it is vitally important when it comes to a fitness regimen. While having the software provide a plan is valuable if you’re unsure how to do it, it’s also important that the plan be something to which you can make a personal commitment. For example, if you tend to be run down in the afternoons, it might be better to schedule your exercise sessions in the morning when you’re still spunky and full of energy. You can use Vivonic’s Fitness Planner as a guide, or you can check out one of the many exercise books available on the market. A couple I like are listed in the Product Availability section of this article.
.H1 Establish your nutritional goals
The next step in setting up your planner is to state your nutritional goals. This calculates how many calories you need and how many calories you’ll need to burn. What’s great about the guidelines is that they’re just that: guidelines. You can change them to whatever you feel comfortable with.
For example, in the summary I was given, the Plan Wizard suggested that 55 percent of my calorie intake should come from carbohydrates, 25 percent from fat, and 20 percent from protein. However, I’m on the 40-30-30 diet, where 40 percent of my calories come from carbohydrates and 30 percent each should come from protein and fat. By simply moving the sliders, I adjusted the calories and grams I should eat each day, as you can see in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B You can adjust your calorie percentages according to your diet.
.H1 Adjust your fitness plan
Once you complete the Plan Wizard, the next step is to adjust your fitness plan. All the suggested exercises are set up for you. This is great if you don’t have a plan in mind already. If you do, you can edit whatever you need to. Just select the day and then select Edit. The software is flexible, so if you have your own plan to use, you can create your own circuits (a series of individual exercises).
Since I already have an exercise plan I use, I entered it into the Fitness planner. I went ahead and created circuits for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This can take a while to set up, but once you do it, you don’t have to do it again.
.H1 Extras
A very cool feature in the software and one of my personal favorites is the video pop-up. If you’re adding a new exercise to your circuit and you’re not sure how it’s done, you can click on Info, and a video will open and show you what to do.
Vivonic also offers downloadable plans from its Web site at http://www.vivonic.com. In association with the health and fitness Web site Asimba (at http://www.asimba.com), there are even plans available to help you train for your first 5K race.
.H1 Vivonic Fitness Planner on your Palm device
Okay, now it’s time to step away from the computer and put the Palm software to use. The software installed without a problem onto my Palm device. All you have to do is HotSync to install the application on your device. You need about 500K of space on your device to hold the food and exercise databases.
.H1 The daily journal logs your meals
Once I tapped the Vivonic icon on my Palm device, I was taken to my daily journal. This is where you enter what you ate throughout the day and any exercises you performed.
While I was installing the software I ate a plum, as messy as that may sound. But hey, I was hungry. So, the first thing I did was to enter it into my journal. The food database already has hundreds of common foods listed. These include meals from fast food restaurants (you wouldn’t believe how many calories are in a Big Mac!), to fruits, vegetables, and even some brand name energy bars.
What if something isn’t in the database? Well, I came up with a few solutions when this happened to me. For instance, I ate a protein bar that wasn’t listed in the database, so I saved the wrapper’s nutrition label and entered it in the PC software. (You can’t create new foods on your Palm device.)
Here’s another change I made. I have a cup of coffee every morning with a couple of tablespoons of 2% milk and a bit of sweetener. Instead of entering these three items every day, I decided to create an all-inclusive item and call it "Morning coffee," as you can see in Figure C.
.FIG C Breakfast with my Morning coffee is the most important meal of the day.
.H1 Report generation
Vivonic also keeps track of reports on your Palm device. All you have to do is tap on Reports in the lower part of your screen, and a report will show up that says how many calories you ate and how many you burned. You can see this in Figure D.
.FIG D You can see how many calories you consumed and burned.
You can also get more detailed reports by tapping on the pull-down menu in the top right hand corner. For example, you can get a nutrition summary, shown in Figure E. This is a bar graph that charts how much protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, etc. you consumed during the day.
.FIG E The nutrition summary charts how much you consumed during the day.
There are other graphs available that chart how many calories you consumed and burned over the course of the past week or month.
.H1 Vivonic at the gym
With my Vivonic Fitness Planner installed and set up, it was time for the real test: I took my Palm device to the gym. Now I’m a true geek. Where’s my propeller cap?
I’ve always carried a notebook to the gym with me with a check list of the exercises in my regimen, the number or repetitions I do, the weights I use, etc., so when I replaced it with a Palm device, it wasn’t as if I had something new to carry. In fact, it’s much handier because as I go straight to the gym from work, I often forget my notebook. My Palm device, however, I take everywhere, so there’s far less chance of it being left behind.
When it was time to work out, all I had to do was to go to the exercise part of the journal and all my information was right there. Figure F shows the type of exercise that I do along with the number of repetitions.
.FIG F This is my workout.
If you want more detailed information, tap on the Circuits icon next to Reports and you’ll be taken to the Circuit screen, shown in Figure G. The Circuit screen allows you to adjust the weight lifted and the number of repetitions completed.
.FIG G The Circuit screen allows you to adjust the weight lifted and the number of repetitions completed.
Another advantage of having your fitness plan spelled out on an electronic organizer rather than in a paper notebook is that fitness plans are flexible. As your skill level changes and you’re able to increase weights and repetitions, you can easily modify it on your planner. You might also change your plan to reflect different parts of your body that you want to work on. With a paper planner, this would require a lot of crossing things out and rewriting, which is not only sloppy but also potentially confusing.
While it was nice having all my exercise information right at hand on my Palm device , I have to admit I was worried that it might get dropped, spilled on, or knocked down by someone else. This is the kind of thing that can take away focus from your workout.
If you’re careful, though, having Vivonic’s application by your side is a great way to keep your diet and exercise in focus. This is a product that, after completing my review, I’ve actually continued using and integrated into my life. And get this: since I started using the planner, I lost three pounds and an inch off of my waistline.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Vivonic’s Fitness Planner, visit http://www.vivonic.com/products/palm.html.
For more information on Asimba, visit http://www.asimba.com.
For information on planning your workout, read Getting Stronger : Weight Training for Men and Women by Bill Pearl. It’s available at http://www.billpearl.com/catalog.asp?key=0-679-73269-1.
Another good book is Fitness Is Religion by Ray Kybartas (who was Madonna’s personal trainer), available at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684842114/102-3703252-6564127.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6e789
