Fitness

As kids in the '80s, my twin brother and I were allowed to watch about an hour of TV a week, which we typically used up on Saturday morning cartoons and which resulted in near total pop culture illiteracy. The dedicated hour brought on such intense euphoria that one time, when our father fell through the kitchen floor and broke a few ribs (it was an old house), we looked at him, saw he was still alive, and went back to watching Bugs Bunny.

For years this anecdote served as our central argument for more screen time (which soon included … Read more

How'd you like to check your pulse, respiration, and blood pressure as you brush your teeth in the mirror each morning? A PhD candidate at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology is working to make this a reality in the near future.

Electrical and medical engineering student Ming-Zher Poh has already used low-res Webcam imaging to measure the human pulse. He's now working on adding respiration, blood oxygen levels, and blood pressure to the list--all by having people simply peer into a camera or, for those who'd rather multitask, into a mirror in front of that camera.

The system works by measuring the slightest variations in brightness produced by blood flow through blood vessels in the face. Poh used public-domain software to identify facial positions in any given image and break that information into separate red, green, and blue portions of the video images.

To deal with both movement in front of the lens as well as different ambient light, Poh adapted a method known as ICA (Independent Component Analysis)--a signal-processing technique originally developed to extract a single voice from a room of conversations--to find the pulse signal amid all the video noise.

Initial results of the project, which Poh conducted with Media Arts and Sciences Professor Rosalind Picard and Media Lab student Daniel McDuff, were outlined in May in the journal Optics Express.

The pulse results turned out to be pretty reliable when compared with measurements taken by an FDA-approved monitoring device.… Read more

Looking to lose weight? Lower your cholesterol? Control your diabetes? Prevent cancer? These are among the proven benefits of a vegan diet--meaning one free of all animal products (meat, dairy, etc.).

OK, but how do you get started? Without your morning cereal, lunchtime Quarter Pounder, and the like, what are you supposed to eat?

Enter 21-Day Vegan Kickstart, a free app that provides three weeks' worth of meals, complete with recipes. Why three weeks? According to experts, that's enough time to drop a few pounds, lower your blood sugar, and just generally start feeling better. And, hey, anybody can … Read more

Many women of a certain endowment, shall we say, never forget the first time they began to feel their breasts. Not feel, as in touching, but feel, as in noticing the effect they have on a previously my-breasts-don't-impede-this task.

For me, it was the summer before ninth grade, and it was running up and down the stairs of my house. In the span of just a few weeks, I came to the dreaded conclusion that it was now too painful to make the journey from the kitchen to my bedroom without the aid of that suffocating, itchy, terribly untechy … Read more

There's no gentle way to put this, so I'll just come out with the cold, hard message from the Mayo Clinic this week: Letting even a small amount of weight creep onto our abs increases the risk for coronary artery disease and cardiovascular events, and furthermore, should not be considered a normal part of aging.

The Clinic studied 43 healthy volunteers with a mean age of 29, measuring blood flow through arm arteries to test the health of the inner lining of their blood vessels.

Over an eight-week period, some volunteers were instructed to maintain their weight, and … Read more

Social-sharing crazes, it seems, have no end. We tweet our grocery lists, share our charitable donations on Facebook, and use Foursquare to chronicle our journeys from home to Starbucks to the office. Now, it seems, it's all about broadcasting your well-being.

So when I decided to step up my recreational distance-running habit into actual race training a few months ago, of course I started exploring the outstanding array of mobile apps, fitness-tracking gadgets, and community sites out there and the experiences of people who have been using the social Web as an outlet for their training goals. What I … Read more

Say you're into yoga, but you have neither the time nor the money to make it to actual yoga sessions regularly. Or you're a cyclist who'd like motivation beyond music in your ears. Or you're trying to do weight training without having to glance at the text on your phone every minute to see what's next.

You might consider MynaTime, the personal workout assistant software announced Monday that gives users the ability to type in specific workouts.

The application--now available on Amazon.com for $24.95 for those with Mac OS X versions 10.5 (… Read more

CBS Early Show features reporter and weatherman Dave Price took the weather to a whole new level Monday morning by working up a sweat.

Price brought an innovation in exercise to the show--an outdoor elliptical bicycle called an ElliptiGO. It's a low-impact, high-output, cross-training bike that combines running and cycling.

He took the ElliptiGO for a spin around the 59th Street plaza, giving New York bike riders a run for their money.

According to ElliptiGO co-founder Bryan Pate--a former cyclist and Ironman triathlete who suffered hip and knee injuries--the eight-speed bike is meant to help runners avoid beating up … Read more

In a preliminary study a few years back, researchers found that an educational, online comic strip geared toward 8- to 10-year-old black girls helped them eat better and exercise more. But there were only 80 girls, and they all self-reported, and it's unclear whether the fact that they were paid skewed the results.

Now, the program's creators are set to really put the comic strips to the test when they launch a larger study, with 400 volunteers and their parents, to test the Web-based program. Called the "Food, Fun, and Fitness Internet Program for Girls," the … Read more