You know how it is. You buy a new toy and it comes with little flyers describing trial offers - 30 days free! We used to "try" these things, until we learned that it was hard to cancel the service. So, when we bought our Polar Heart Rate monitor, we used the internal programming and skipped the premium PodFitness service.
We love our Polar Heart Rate Monitor, but honestly, these programs are very boring! They expect you to exercise at a consistent rate for 40 mins at a time. We've tried everything to keep motivated...exercise machines, TV, DVDs, audio books, music. Let's be real...it's DULL!!!
So, we finally broke down and decided to do the trial offer for PodFitness. Our GooseSecret - we use "virtual credit card numbers" for suspicious offers. Those card numbers expire after 2 months and if we want to continue with the service, we'll either put in a renewed virtual number (buying 2 more months) or for trustworthy places, we'll give them our credit card number. Trust us...they can't charge against an expired credit card number!!! After desperately trying to cancel Napster for 1 month (it only took 4 written requests and 1 hour on the phone), we have had to resort to such measures. (Note: no slam against PodFitness intended...we suspect they are nice people, but still, we're suspicious of any place we haven't used before).
Back to the story...we signed up for the PodFitness and found some Polar Heart Rate Monitor programs! WOW! We don't have to toss our watch to use PodFitness. So, we sign up for Melanie who uses the heart rate monitor. We then selected some music from our ITunes and the website creates a custom program with our music and Melanie's voice. Be aware that you get TWO trainers. You get your chosen trainer (who "designed" the program) and the "assistant trainer"...assistant counts for you and tells you how much exercise you've done.
So, you choose your exercise program, choose your music then wait awhile (2-3 minutes) while the music and voice are combined into an "MP3". Now, we say "MP3" in quotes because frankly, we never got an .MP3 formatted file. Oh no.... Here's the scoop - they use ITunes (Apple) or Zune (Microsoft). If you use the ITunes to choose your music, you'll end up with an M4P file/AAC file that will only want to play in ITunes or IPod. We geese do not like the IPod product - we have our Palm Centro and we love that and have no interest in the IPod. So, we then downloaded Zune (you don't have to sign up ! Just download using the "I've already signed up" option - it never asks you to sign in, unless you want to search for or buy music). Zune, being the Microsoft Product that it is, will write a .WMA file that our Centro can read (via PocketTunes).
Another trick to using either ITunes or Zune is that you MUST have playlists. PodFitness can't access your "library" of music. We geese created playlists for each artist so that we could quickly find the "good" songs that we wanted.
Another music selection tip that we figured out....each program will have a bar chart showing how many minutes at each intensity. Try to match the "speed" of the music to the bar chart. So, choose the fastest songs at the tall bars, and a slower song for the cool down. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? But of course, we geese tried for fast songs through out (more motivating, right?) but found it difficult to slow down during the interval training because we had fast music during short "bars" (or less intense exercise).
How to choose your trainer? Unfortunately, there is no science to this!!! You can read all the info you can, but that doesn't tell you whether that trainer will motivate you or not. Plus, we found that some trainers "talk" more than others. Some let the "assistant" do most of the talking (and you sort of wonder...Where's my trainer?). For some trainers, you're thankful they don't talk to you! Our current "selection" method is to first select someone who trains the way you want! We love the Polar Heart Rate Monitor trainings and only some trainers do that. Ok...so now we've found those folks, now we check their suggested intensity bar charts. We dislike the Polar trainer who wants us to do 10 mins at a time in three different intensities (we have short attention span...10 mins is just too long!). So, we seek out the interval trainers by checking their bar chart. Now it's a flip of a coin. You spend the time to build the program and listen to them. Is he/she motivating? Is he/she even there? Frankly, we wonder if Melanie left the building because we only recognize her "assistant", Britney.
We also tried "combined training" - which is a combination of aerobic exercise and weights. Lots of switching between activties. Good for those who have lots of equipment handy! There's a description of each trainer's suggeted program and we advise you to study before you mix your program. We never said that we had a Bosu, yet so many programs require one! Hmmm...they must think we live at the YMCA, but gee...we told them we didn't have a membership (even though we do...) So the lack of a Bosu eliminated many trainers from the list. We tried Bas Rutten and we love his voice. Though, it took awhile to realize that a "dumbull" is actually a "dumbbell"! We found him very encouraging and actually "present" at our training session...he didn't take a break at all (though his assistant also had a strong presence too...)
Important Late Breaking GooseNote: We just learned that the Bosu reference occurred due to a bug that causes the program to think we want to work at the gym, even though we indicated we were at home. Ok, we forgive PodFitness - just get the bug fixed soon. Workaround? Switch from Home to Gym to Home again. Now, no Bosu references or weight machines suggested!
Exercise duration. We told them that we could spend 45 mins exercising. Funny...some people claimed to average 50 minutes (ok...) and then when you build that trainer's program, it's only 30 mins (huh?). Maybe they'll increase the length of time for future programs? And what's with these people who think that we can exercise 6 days a week? Hello? We're lazy geese, let us work our way up from 3-4 times a week, please! Don't scare us before we've even started.
Another interesting thing...your assistant may call you by name. The assistant is great at "common" names...might not be so good if you have an uncommonly spelled name. There is an option to tell the assitant not to say your name. Some of our geese prefer not to be called by name and we think that's ok. :)
We think PodFitness is fun, but plan to spend at least 1 hour playing with it, mixing programs and listening to them to see how the thing works. Once you catch on, we suspect that it'll only take 5-10 mins to select and build the program (depending on whether you have a "fav" trainer and have a preselected set of music or whether you have to do your "searching around")