Keep your personal trainer in your pocket |
| | In an ideal world, we’d all eat only what is good for us, and none of us would need a national campaign to
encourage us to walk 10,000 steps a day. We’d hit the gym instead of watching two hours of prime-time TV
each night, and when given the choice between French fries and a side salad, we wouldn’t even think twice
before ordering the salad. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I don’t live in this fantasyland. I need help staying
on the right track—lots of help. I need somebody (or something) to count my steps, to help me make good
meal choices, and to encourage me to keep going—even if I still look and weigh the same. Essentially, I need
a personal trainer.
Believe it or not, you can easily transform your Windows Mobile phone into a portable personal trainer, step counter, meal planner, and even heart-healthy food database.
I use a Verizon XV6900 phone, running Windows Mobile 6.1. |
| | | The number of health-based applications available for your Windows Mobile phone is staggering. The types of programs—along with the costs associated with them—vary greatly. Here are just a few that I found
interesting:
| Weight Watchers Online. Weight Watchers members might want to try out the program’s mobile application that allows you to use your mobile phone to follow the plan. Pocket Workout Wizard. This app includes a library of 3-D exercise demonstrations that you can reference while you're at the gym, the park, or wherever you work out. Pedometer Log 1.0. A pedometer application like this one can count your steps and supply a report to let you know how many you’ve logged lately. Healthy recipe cookbooks. If your doctor recommends a heart-healthy diet or if you’re looking to round out your fitness plan by eating right, take your pick from this large collection of cookbooks that you can add to your phone.
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| You can find the greatest concentration of applications in an online application store. My Windows Mobile phone made finding an app store simple: From the Today screen, select the Start menu, and then click Get Applications. My phone takes me to Handango; your phone may take you to another site. | If you’re looking for something in particular (or if you’re just impatient, like I am), scroll down the page and type a keyword into the search box. A world of health and fitness apps will appear on your screen. Scroll through them until you find the one that most catches your fancy. Since I want to manage both my diet and my exercise routine, I narrow my search to a few applications that seem promising. But which is better for me? Wouldn’t it be excellent if I could try one out before committing to purchase it? Guess what? I can! Observe the TRY button.
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| | Download personal training applications to your phone | Whether you’re trying out an app or downloading one for good, it’s pretty much the same process. (Skip
the credit card transaction if you’re just taking one for a test drive.) Once you’ve selected the application you’d
like to use, click either TRY or BUY. (If you haven’t downloaded an application before, you’ll need to set up an account before you can try anything out.)
The app that sounds the most promising to me is iFitOne—Fitness and Diet and Weight-Loss Tracking Made
Fun!
Who can resist the promise of fun? |
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 Choosing a fitness program to download on a Windows Mobile phone |
I click TRY, click OK, and then click Yes. (Note that it downloads to My Documents.  After not too long (really!), the app seems to have downloaded. But, why am I still on this same screen? I thought I told it to Open the file after download. (See the check box in the screen shot above.) I return to my Today screen to do some sleuthing. I open the Start menu and click File Explorer, and then I click My Documents. Ah-ha! There it is. I double-click the file name to install it.
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| | | Now that I’ve navigated the install process (without breaking too much of a sweat), it’s time to get serious. All
of the personal training programs I tried need you to supply information about yourself. This is to help keep
track of your progress and motivate you to keep going by supplying encouraging reports.
| First off, click My Profile to fill in the basics. Double-click each line item that you’d like to fill in. (Keep in mind that the more you fill in, the better the program can work for you.) To keep myself on the ball, I’ve opted to have my Daily Log saved to my Calendar and to enable Daily Entry Reminders. Because I do actually have other things to do besides eat and work out, I don’t want the reminders to pop up all day long. I’ve asked for one reminder that comes at lunch time. (I’m optimistic that it will encourage me to eat a healthy lunch since I know I’ll be logging it.)
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| Daily Log | One of the reasons that your mobile phone can be a good addition to your fitness plan is that it’s always with
you. When you’ve got some down time, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that you might take a moment to
enter what you’ve eaten in the last few hours or whether you’ve just completed a jog, yoga class, or bike ride. |
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 iFitOne Daily Fitness Log on Windows Mobile |
To do this, open iFitOne on your phone, and select Log Entry from the lower-left corner of the screen. You’ll see the different types of information you can enter—weight, types of food (and how many servings) you’ve eaten, and more. Note that the far right column shows your “goals” for the day. This way you can see how many more glasses of water you’ll need to drink before reaching your goal of eight.
To fill in any exercise you’ve accomplished, click Activity in the lower-right corner of the screen, and then double-click Activity Name. A list of possible exercises will fill the screen. Choose the one you just completed, and then click OK. If your activity isn’t on the list, type in the name of your activity (I typed in Ballet), click Menu (lower-right corner), and then double-click Add to List. If you are really on top of things, you’ll keep track of the distance you’ve travelled, how many calories you’ve burned, and the duration of the activity. If you’re plugging in information about an activity that doesn’t strictly fit into to the template, take your best guess. For example, if you’re taking a ballet class, you won’t know for sure how many calories you’ve burned or how much distance you covered, but you can guess.
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| Tracking your progress | If you’re choosy about how you view your progress, you’ll be happy to know that there are options. You can track your progress on a graph, chart, or in a straight-forward summary.
| After I put in a little time to fill in my Daily Log and clicked OK, I found myself looking at a calendar. I click today’s date, and I see a strange-looking graph. It’s a progress chart, and it turns out that the reason it looks “strange” to me is that I haven’t been adding as much data—and I haven’t been as active—as maybe I should have. Thankfully, there are other options for status reports. I click the victorious little blue man in the lower-left corner, and I see a report that is more my speed. The report default on my phone is to Activity, but if I click Menu, I can pull up options. You can choose to display by activity, weight, size, or goals.
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| | | Even though everyone says it, and I always hope it isn’t true, the cold reality remains that no matter how nifty the program, results take work. Exercise monitoring programs for your cell phone are an excellent stepping stone, and if you combine a personal training app with an exercise app, along with a healthy recipe database,
you might have enough fun technology tools at your disposal to fool yourself into a healthier you. |
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