Fitness Software for Real People
As much as we may not want to believe it, everyone knows that long term weight management requires both diet and exercise. Is your ideal body simply hiding behind a layer or fat or would a bit more muscle tone help too? If you're like most people then changes to your lifestyle in terms of diet and exercise will help you lose weight and keep it off.
Let's face it, starting an exercise program isn't rocket science. Adding a 1/2 hour of walking each day is a great start. Once your heart, muscles and mind get used to the extra walking you'll be ready and excited to add new exercises. Marathon runners don't start running marathons, they start with small workouts and as they get in beter shape progressively run longer distances in shorter and shorter amounts of time.
But how do you know when you're ready for more? How do you know if you need to push yourself a bit harder or give yourself more time to improve? Keeping track of your exercise routine is the best way to keep an objective eye on your progress. Numbers don't lie and when you see that you're walking the same distance in less time you'll know that you're ready to add a few more miles to your walk, start running or even train for a marathon!
Figure 1: FitBody Pro allows you to track the repetitions and weight for each anaerobic exercise in your workout. You can designate the machine or piece of equipment used as well as enter notes on this exercise each time you perform it. Your workout history for the exercise is automatically graphed each time you enter the sets, repetitions and weight for the workout. The graph above depicts the least and most amount of weight lifted across the sets performed.
Figure 2: In addition to tracking your workouts, FitBody Pro logs your performance towards a goal for every exercise. Each time you log an entry for an exercise FitBody Pro includes the top number (e.g. greatest weight lifted, longest distance, greatest time) in the goal achievement analysis. This helps you determine if you've plateaued or are continually moving towards your goal.
Figure 3: In addition to tracking anaerobic exercises, FitBody Pro also allows you to track aerobic workouts. Rather than just capturing the exercise and the amount of time you spent performing the exercise, FitBody Pro allows you to track the levels performed for the exercise such as warmup times (shown here as Intensity Level 3 for 5 minutes), laps with times, or you can just track the total time. Each time you log performing an exercise FitBody Pro automatically graphs your historical performance of the exercise.
Exercise Goals and Weight Loss
When we think of exercise, often times we remember high school physical education or a failed attempt to get in shape in the past. The real secret of weight loss is making small changes to what we eat and what we do to burn extra calories each day. For some people, this is jumping right into an exercise program and for others this is walking after dinner, parking further away from store entrances or doing video aerobics in our living room. The common element for each of these methods is burning more calories.
Anyone can start a workout program, but in order to lose weight it is important to stay on the workout program. Just like yo-yo diets don't help us lose weight, starting and stopping workout programs do little more than make our muscles sore. The key to success is setting and achieving reasonable goals. FitBody Pro helps keep you on track by comparing your workouts to your exercise goals in order to give you immediate feedback on your progress.
By setting exercise goals with FitBody Pro, you can start exercising and know when you're ready to move onto a more challenging program.
Anaerobic & Aerobic Tracking
Achieving your health and fitness goals is best accomplished when you exercise your body aerobically and anaerobically. Tracking both of these types of workouts towards your goals is imperative to continually pushing your body to improve.
The problem with most approaches to tracking progress is determining what the goal should be. Many programs attempt to give you feedback in terms of total pounds lifted or total minutes of exercise. Unless you're a piece of industrial equipment, these numbers mean nothing in terms of health and fitness.
The FitBody Pro approach is one in which you or your personal trainer determine what your fitness goals should be for an individual exercise (e.g. bench press or Nautilus Skate Machine). You are then able to track your exercises and receive feedback on how well you're progressing towards achieving your goal.
For anaerobic exercises, this is typically a weighted goal such as "I want to bench press 150 lbs." For aerobic exercises, the choices are more flexible in terms of time or distance. FitBody Pro allows you to track your aerobic progress in minutes or distance. Sometimes you'll want to work towards higher numbers (as in distance running) and other times you'll want to work towards lower numbers (as with sprints or racing).
Numbers and Sense
You're not likely to carry your laptop computer around the gym so successful workout tracking depends on keeping things simple. Until gyms install workout tracking kiosks (hopefully with FitBody Pro installed), the best way jot down what you do in the gym is with pen and paper. Technology just doesn't mix well with dumbbells and sweat.
Instead of forcing you to track your workouts in new and odd ways,
FitBody Pro is designed to track exercise in the same way that professional trainers do. Sets, repetitions, weight, laps and time. These are the common sense numbers that form the numerical results behind our workouts. FitBody Pro uses these same common sense numbers to provide you with additional information (like workout histories) that paper based log books can't.
Choose Your Exercise
FitBody Pro comes equipped with a complete set of exercises to choose from. To record your workout simply click on an exercise to add it to the day's workout log.
The FitBody Pro Difference
Individual weight management is most successful when you're able to continually make small improvements to your diet and exercise. For diets, this means trying to cut out small amounts of "bad nutrients" without sacrificing "good nutrients."For exercises, this means setting a goal for an exercise (e.g. walk around the block 3 times in 30 minutes) and striving to do better (25 minutes!). By keeping track of your goals, you'll not only know when you're improving but you'll also be more motivated when you see your improvements.
FitBody Pro is designed to be used by those new to exercise as well as professional athletes. The concept of tracking your progress towards a goal is universal for us all. FitBody's excellent tracking and feedback tools make keeping track of your workouts both simple and fun.