health and fitness

Jawbone, a company known mostly for Bluetooth audio accessories like the Jawbone Era and the Jambox, is venturing into the health and fitness industry with a new product called the Jawbone Up.

First revealed at TEDGlobal, it's essentially a tiny wristband that works in conjunction with the Jawbone Up iPhone app to track your movements, sleep patterns, and eating habits to help you make healthier lifestyle choices. Jawbone breaks that into three categories: Measure, Engage, and Act.… Read more

Bluetooth audio accessory company Jawbone is extending its line into health and fitness. Later this year the company will launch a motion-recording wristband called Up that will connect to smartphone apps. It will be able to discern when its user is exercising, sleeping, or eating, Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman told me.

Rahman announced the product at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Tuesday. It was, he says, more of a concept launch than a product release. He did not disclose when the product will be available or how much it will cost. Rather, he was hoping to generate interest … Read more

Your Technotronic playlist aside, running on a treadmill is inherently boring because you're stuck in a room running on the same platform. But what if you could switch things up and simulate actual, real-world topography?

The NordicTrack x7i Interactive Incline Trainer, which goes for $2,000, is loaded with Wi-Fi to interface with iFit Live, a fitness database that pulls actual trail and marathon routes from Google Maps (which, though not supported in the limited official workout library at this time, should really include Google Moon). Among the trails that are included: the Delicate Arch Trail at Arches National … Read more

For the past week I've been inseparable from a small bit of black plastic hooked onto my left pocket. It's not a cell phone, or a security card for work. Instead, it's the Fitbit, a high-tech pedometer with a neat trick--it tracks your daily and nightly activities, then sends that information to the cloud wirelessly.

The $99 device was first unveiled at last year's TechCrunch50 show in San Francisco, but the company only began shipping out its first pre-orders last week. I've spent the past seven days using it to track my daily activity levels, as well as my sleeping and eating habits.

Unsurprisingly, it hasn't moved me to make a dramatic shift in the way I live my life, but it has given me a benchmark of how active or inactive I am on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. In other words, you can be a non-gym rat and still get a multitude of uses out of this, but it will always be more beneficial for highly active people.

The Fitbit itself is a clip, and almost symmetrical except for a button on one of the sides. This is the only button on the entire device that controls what you see on its small, but very readable OLED display. Each time you click it, it cycles through how many steps you've taken, how far you've gone in miles, how many calories you've burned, as well as your current activity level which is displayed as a flower; the taller it is, the more active you've been.

Compared with some other pedometers from companies like Omron, Sportline, and Apex Fitness, many of which feature onboard clocks, stopwatches, and "trip" meters, this may seem a bit anemic. But there's more than meets the eye. The device tracks things like duration of activity, and what time of day you're doing it--two things that can be seen back on Fitbit's site once it syncs up.

The Fitbit can be stashed in your pocket, on your belt, or anything else you can clip it on. (Fitbit's product manual mentions something about bras--I didn't get to try that out.) It then uses a three-dimensional motion sensor--like what's inside of Nintendo's Wii remote--to track your movements.

Besides tracking steps, caloric burn, and distance, the Fitbit can be used to monitor sleep duration and habits. This requires users sliding the Fitbit into the included cloth wrist wrap, then holding the Fibit's one button for a few seconds before going to bed, and then again when they wake up.

I found this an easy habit to pick up and build into my normal routine, though worth noting is that the included strap's velcro is basically glued on, and can be accidentally removed quite easily. I also had one night of sleep where the device came out of the strap, forcing me to fish it out of the bed the next morning.

Once you've held the button for a few seconds to start the sleep cycle, the device then waits for you to stop moving to begin its count. It also keeps track of any movements during the night, like if you sleepwalk, start waving your arms around, or get up to go to the bathroom. This information is tracked on Fitbit's site, including how "efficient" your sleep was, which is a percentage of how much time you spent sleeping versus how long it took you to go to bed and how many times you became "active."

While the Fitbit can be used as a pedometer in the traditional sense, installing software on your computer lets you sync it up with Fitbit's site. To do this you have to make use of a special base station which comes with the Fitbit, and is the only way to both charge it, and check its battery level (which is rated at 10 days between charges).… Read more

At this year's International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association's convention and trade show here in San Francisco, computer-based fitness games and health data for the Web stood out as big trends. Inactivity from sitting in front of computers can lead to obesity, but the health industry seems increasingly to be using computers to combat sedentary lifestyles and attract customers to gyms.

At the IHRSA trade show this week, I saw computerized scales that talk to your watch, fitness data that automatically uploads to the Web, and arcade-style dancing games aimed at fighting flab. As gyms and fitness gadgets … Read more

Spring is almost here, and soon we'll be showing the world much more than just our heads and hands. That means it's time to get up off the couch and start doing whatever we can to get our bods ready for summer. Need advice on that? These sites can help.

Gyminee If you're looking for a way to track your workouts and get some dietary advice, Gyminee is a great place to start.

In a matter of seconds, you'll be able to join Gyminee and start creating a workout regimen that will help you lose weight, tone your muscles, or gain strength. And you won't need to do it alone. With the help of Gyminee, you can find exercises and create a regimen from pre-configured workout routines based on your goals. Gyminee does a fine job of helping you do whatever you want.

Gyminee's tracking tools are very good. Once you sign up, you can put your weight, resting heart rate, and measurements into the system to see where you stand today. As long as you keep inputting that information on a regular basis, it will show you a detailed graph providing your progress over the term of your workout. That's easily my favorite feature because it's a great motivation tool that helps me see just how far I've come since I started exercising.

While Gyminee does a fine job with workouts and tracking, I was disappointed with its dietary advice. It does provide a detailed analysis of required calorie, fat, and protein intake to get you to your goal weight, but it doesn't do much more. It doesn't tell you what to eat and how to do it. It doesn't tell you when you should be eating. It basically tells you that you need to have a certain number of calories every day and leaves it at that. For a full-featured health improvement site, that's weak.

Gyminee boasts extra features like a forum so you can discuss health considerations, and you can make friends with others and track their progress. If you want, you can also set challenges and see how close you are to achieving those goals. Gyminee offers good features and it's worth using even though it doesn't have enough dietary information.… Read more

Lose It is a free, simple-to-use weight-loss app that can help you set long-term goals and track calories consumed and burned. The Lose It interface is very intuitive, making it quick and easy to log both food and exercise--which is a must for any good diet and exercise tracker. The first time you use Lose It, you enter your gender, age, weight, height, and desired weight and weight-loss rate, and the app sets a goal date and gives you a daily calorie budget. The app then helps you track your progress with graphs, logs, and daily feedback (such as useful &… Read more

Correction: This post initially misstated the type of cancer Lance Armstrong survived. It was testicular.

Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist who was everybody's hero until he dated Mary-Kate Olsen, is taking his LiveStrong brand to the Web much in the way that MC Hammer did with DanceJam.

Armstrong has formally partnered with Demand Media to launch LiveStrong.com, which debuted in full on Tuesday. It's a site for keeping tabs on fitness, wellness, and weight-loss goals, along with discussion forums, editorial content, and videos--other sites in this space are Wellsphere and SparkPeople.

It's a for-profit spinoff of … Read more

Nintendo has figured it out: Why should it let others take all the glory for the Wii's supposed health benefits? Tech Digest says the company is developing a game called Wii Health that will "test your fitness and send the results off to an unspecified UK hospital for analysis."

Not everyone is on the Wii's fitness bandwagon, daring to suggest that real-life exercise is better for kids than playing games regardless of how serious they are about them. But at least one personal trainer has created a workout routine based on Wii play, and others say … Read more