fitness - page 5

Apple relies heavily on caffeine. A recent company job listing advertised a role for an iCup technician, with the important task of providing “a fresh brew coffee to all Apple employees within their department.”

Jony Ive’s design team is especially obsessed with the black stuff: For years they kept a $3,000-plus Italian Grimac espresso machine, despite the fact that it leaked all the time. For a while in the 1990s, the design team was even mockingly dubbed “Espresso” for their unabashed love of caffeine culture.

Apple’s not alone in its coffee snob behavior. The rise of coffee shops — with seemingly hundreds of variations on the old coffee standards — have infiltrated every city across the United States: Americans spend $18 billion per year on specialty coffee alone.

But how much do we actually know about it?

I’ve been a runner for a long time. I trained for (and ran) the 1994 Los Angeles Marathon. I’ve run 5K races, half marathons and relays for full marathons up here in Alaska, too. I find that running gives me the best bang for my buck: All I need is a pair of running shoes, some appropriate clothing (it gets cold up here), and some music to keep me getting out there.

Recently, though, I’ve been playing with a new bit of gear: the Pear Sports heart rate monitor, paired with a set of earbuds engineered to stay in your ears while working out, plus a pretty fantastic mobile app to make sense of the heart rate data.

Jose Torres, CEO of Boogio, wants you to track your fitness with the most obvious part of your body: your feet.

“We’ve got 60,000 layers of sensitivity in the Boogio,” he told Cult of Mac at last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, “so we can track gravitational force, inner balance, and three different acceleration forces of your feet.”

As the nation grows more obese yet car culture still rules, here’s the nudge of the hour: your car and your fitness app talking to each other, reminding you that you’re not moving enough.

Automatic’s smart driving assistant can turn your old hunk of junk into a smart car, but the company announced today that it’s teamed up with Jawbone to whip your belly rolls into shape by giving drivers more insight into how your physical activity and driving patterns are connected.

Wahoo’s first heart-rate sensor was of the pedestrian ANT+ variety, and connected to the iPhone through a 30-pin ANT+ dongle. Around a year later, the Atlanta-based outfit introduced the first heart-rate sensor that connected to a smartphone through Bluetooth; specifically and only to the iPhone 4s, since that was the only phone at the time with Bluetooth 4.0 under the hood.

Wahoo upped the ante again in January at CES, when they revealed a radical departure from traditional heart-rate based fitness tracking: Their new highly sophisticated, three-model TICKR sensor squad, combined with an all-new app that turns conventional fitness-tracking on its head. Now the first of the TICKR trio, the TICKR Run, is hitting the street.

I’ve always hated running. When I’m asked, I jokingly say that the ten years of life I probably lose by not focusing on cardio-vascular exercise, I make up for by not feeling compelled to jog in a big circle each day after work, or talk about running shoes at dinner parties.

But if there’s one thing that could get me running it’s a zombie apocalypse — in which members of the once-dead rise again to try and feast on my brain and internal organs. And I’m definitely not the only one.

Gamified fitness app Zombies, Run! was launched a couple of years ago, but has just been updated with a number of new features.

For those unfamiliar with it, Zombies, Run! replaces your regular running soundtrack with a zombie story in which you are the main character — with your level of physical exertion playing a part as you outrun zombie hordes, collect supplies, and eventually return (brain intact) to base camp.

The Tao WellShell is probably unlike any iOS-connected fitness device you’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t simply track steps, or heart rate, or weight, or any of the other standard metrics tracked in dozens of other connected fitness devices. Instead, this little guy actually acts as the fitness device itself, rather than simply a tracker (though it does indeed also track heart rate, steps and sleep patterns).

What if Apple’s iWatch is’t an iWatch at all? What if it’s a spec, like CarPlay, that lets folks like Casio and Rolex put an Apple chip inside their watches to make them talk to your iPhone?

Problems solved:

• Apple doesn’t have to get into the fashion watch game, or make “ladies” and “gents” watches.
• The watch industry gets a shot in the arm (pun intended) as watches get useful again.
• You don’t need a power-sucking display. The iPhone is the display.

You know how you see folks running or jogging and holding those pathetic little half-kilo (one-pound) dumbbells in their hands? And you know how sometimes you also see runners carrying their iPhones in a hand?

What if there was a product which was both a weight and an iPhone case? Somewhat predictably, given the title of this post, now there is. It’s the ToneFone, and it is billed as “The World’s Heaviest iPhone Case.”

How much coffee do you drink? If you drink any at all, then the answer is probably “Too much.” And how does all that caffeine affect you? Now, with Jawbone’s new Up Coffee app, you can find out.

With rumors of a new Apple-made “fitness app” coming to iOS 8, secret meetings with the FDA, and murmurs of more sleep and fitness experts joining the Apple ranks, the iWatch rumors are heating up on this week’s CultCast! Plus, a classic Nintendo game makes its way to iOS; Microsoft says goodbye to the one and only Steve Ballmer; and new job openings in Cupertino could mean big upgrades in battery life for future MacBooks…

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Softly giggle your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin.

Gross is an iPhone app that’ll tell you just how lazy you’ve been for the last week. And believe me, unless you’re managing to get out an exercise in the middle of this icy winter, then the first time you fire up the app you’ll probably find yourself saying it’s name out loud.

LAS VEGAS — Rather than come out with a more casual-oriented wearable fitness tracker like everyone (and we mean everyone) else, Wahoo stuck to its athletic roots and took the more serious route of improving the heart-rate monitor strap and accompanying training software the company introduced a few years ago.

In fact, Wahoo has created three new versions of its Bluetooth HR strap. The company even tried to restructure the way athletes think about training with the new “burn or burst” approach for the Wahoo iOS app.

LAS VEGAS — It was only a matter of time before the behemoths of the fitness world jumped into the fitness-band fight; although considering Garmin has been making wrist-borne fitness gadgets for ages (in the guise of their Forerunner line) one might have expected their new Vivofit to have arrived much sooner.

LAS VEGAS – It seems like every company is busting out a tiny sensor that keeps track of your steps and other fitness goals here at CES, but if you’re slouching over a computer for 8 hours a day, correcting your posture can go a long way toward improving your fitness. Lumo is putting a different spin on the pedometer by focusing not just on how much you’re moving, but on whether you’re keeping your head up and shoulders straight too.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2014 – For those with cardiovascular issues, keeping tabs on your blood pressure and heart-rate means spending extra time and money going to the doctor’s office for frequent check-ups. To cut down on the trips to the doctor, Qardio is releasing the QardioArm – a wearable blood pressure band that is completely integrated with iOS.

New Years resolutions are just around the corner and if running if your go-to method for shedding the holiday pounds, Nike+ just added a coaching feature to its running app that promises to whip you into shape.

The free app allows users to create running goals like taking on your first 5k, 10k, half-marathon, or marathon, and then lays out a running regiment for you up until the big day of the race. Nike+ Coach trains users by mixing in various distances and running paces throughout you jog and can setup running reminds for you to help get you off the couch.

Here’s what’s new:

Pyle Audio makes one of pretty much everything. If it has wires, knobs, plastic or is made of a material that can be found in or near our solar system, Pyle makes it. Cover for your boat’s stereo? Yes. How about a thingy that detects leaks from microwave ovens? You bet. And a waterproof telephone handset for the shower? Try not to gurgle when your boss calls.

Add one more gadget to the (wait for it) Pyle. This time, the prolific company has proffered up a scale — one of the fancy Bluetooth-connected ones that comes with its own app.

If Cult of Mac ever created an award for “Most Prolific i-Gadget Maker,” there’s little doubt it would eventually end up in a cabinet at iHome’s headquarters (or possibly more accurately in a cabinet at their parent company, SDI technologies, which also owns New Balance and Timex).

Of the four new gadgets iHome has just revealed, the two we’re highlighting are a set of Bluetooth headphones endowed with the unimaginative moniker of iB85 Bluetooth Wireless Foldable Headphones and the somewhat more interestingly named iB12 Sport Earbuds with LED Safety Flasher — though the latter’s name is perhaps only more interesting simply because it combines the words “Safety Flasher” and “Earbuds.”

Bike2Power has just added an iPhone 5s version to their line of ruggedized, weather-sealed BikeConsole Smart Mounts for bicycles. The lineup already has a version for the 5 and 5c, but the new 5s model allows access to the Touch ID fingerprint sensor.

Now that winter has hit the country, cycling has moved indoors for much of the U.S. That means straddling a stationary bike or throwing your trusty road or mountain bike up on a stand (or if you’re really brave, rollers).

That’s where the Xspin comes in. it’s a small box filled with sensors and a low-energy Bluetooth 4.0 radio that attaches to a crank arm and sends speed, distance and cadence data to an accompanying app — either one of two developed by its parent company, Pafers, or a handful of popular third-party cycling apps, like Strava or MapMyRide. It’ll also work with ellipticals (though it obviously attaches differently, since ellipticals don’t have cranks).

Runtime stands out above other run-tracking iPhone apps thanks to its great design: it’s not – like most other apps – fugly as hell. It also use the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro to track you even when you’re walking.

Jawbone has announced the UP24, a tweaked version of its troubled UP activity-tracking wristband. It’s mostly the same, with a cool futuristic look and $150 price tag. The difference is that it now uses “Bluetooth Smart,” which lets it communicate with your iPhone in real time to send alerts and notifications.

But what’s really interesting is that it now has a rather useful IFTTT channel.

Narrated running is probably the best way to describe the new Story Running feature embedded in Runtastic’s updated app, but the outfit’s new Libra scale is more interesting.

Warning: Sarcasm follows.

“Are you drinking enough water?” asks BluFit. Well are you? This is how to tell:

1. Are you thirsty?

If the answer to the above question is “yes,” then you should drink some water.

I’m kidding, of course: BluFit is in fact a totally legit gadget that makes it easy to track how much water you drink. What is it? It’s a water bottle that connects wirelessly to an app on your iPhone.

Seriously.