Elations product lineup (fresh fruit not included)

Not too long ago, a box arrived at ShrinkGeek Orbital HQ from the folks at Elations, with a few samples of their stuff. Since Mike isn’t the only one complaining about the inevitable grind toward getting old, and years of questionable behavior have been not entirely kind to my joints, I decided to give them a try. As a delivery system for glucosamine and chondroitin, Elations take a Flintstones Tablets approach (or maybe it’s Mary Poppins) – making what is usually One More Bland Or Yucky Tablet into a sweet-tasting beverage.

How well does it work? And why would you want to take glucosamine and chondroitin, anyway?

This is the brightest color in the book, unless you make notes with a colored pen.

There’s a scene in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, where Randy Waterhouse is aboard Doug Shaftoe’s boat, which is laying at anchor over a sunken WWII submarine. Randy wants to strap on a SCUBA tank and check the wreck, which is about five hundred feet down, out. Doug, being a helpful and experienced diver, has an entire shelf of books about SCUBA diving, which he suggests might provide guidance on doing so. Randy, eventually, realizes that the glossy, tourist-flavored ones are probably not going to suit his needs, and instead ends up poring over older, unadorned books “with titles like DIVE MANUAL.”

Starting Strength, Second Edition, by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore (Aasgaard Press), is DIVE MANUAL for someone who just wants to get stronger.  There are useful illustrations and photographs. There are extensive, straightforward, and helpful descriptions of the right way to do the handful of exercises presented. There are explanations of how the muscles and skeleton work together to do them. There aren’t any fancy moves or convoluted jargon.

Coach Rippetoe simply talks to the reader as if they are paying attention.

He’s well worth paying attention to.

I first caught wind of this particular Nintendo DS exergame when I was at E3 with the Joystiq crew. As I work on Joystiq’s sister-site, Massively, I had zero chance of checking it out there, sadly. Nonetheless, my curiosity piqued, I filed this title away in memory to check out for ShrinkGeek once I was back and everything was sane again. The truth is, I should have had this product well before E3, because I’ve gotten addicted to checking out my step progress every day, and probably would have been much better prepared for the walk-fest that is E3! No, it’s not a deep game – and if you go into it expecting that, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. That said, for what Personal Trainer: Walking sets out to do, it nails it effortlessly.

What is that exactly, you ask? Well, I could call this a pedometer, but that’s just not doing it justice. Sure, the small peripheral you carry that comes with Personal Trainer: Walking counts steps like any regular pedometer does, but it also acts as something of a fitness mentor – a feature you’re just not going to get with a regular pedometer. When you first fire up Personal Trainer: Walking, you’re given the option of creating your own personal mini-Mii, or importing one from your Wii. That said, when I wanted to import my Wii Mii, the program suggested I do some strange Wiimote chicken dance where I had to press four buttons, stand on one leg and sing Louie Louie. Needless to say, this didn’t work very well. Thankfully, I found my Wii had anticipated this peripheral, and instead there was an easy on-screen option in the Mii area to connect to my DS. I took the easy way out – a move which I heartily recommend to anyone wanting to import a Mii.

Once imported, my Mii then made friends with my new pedometer peripheral, and they proceeded to take me through the initial setup steps. The program started me out at a very reasonable 3,000 steps based on my initial information (37, overweight, sedentary job) and explained just what I could expect in terms of the program. In exchange for checking in, Personal Trainer: Walking would not only check my daily number of steps against the target, but also how fast or slow I was stepping, when I was stepping – an overall life rhythm, essentially. Easy enough, I thought, and headed for bed – ready to try out the peripheral the next day.

We recently had the opportunity to take The Comfort Store’s Pedal Exerciser for a spin. The concept is simplicity itself: tuck the device under your desk or set it in front of your television-watching or console-gaming seat, and put all those hours of chair time to work with some light lower-body exercise.  It can also be employed for arm work by setting it on a table, but this would obviously preclude more involved activities, so it’s better suited to watching NatGeo and FX than playing NeoSteam or FFXII.

We spend eight hours a day at the office; even with modest resistance (it’s fully variable via the knob on the central cylinder) and low pedal speed, the calories you can burn using it up should really add up.

So, how does it perform? Step behind the curtain to find out!