“Put a personal trainer right on your iPod - mixed with your own music.”

Working out with a personal trainer can help you to achieve your fitness goals. However a major problem is that most people don’t have the time or money; Podfitness is the new option that could change the way many people work out. This is the new online service that will put the personal fitness trainers for celebrities like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton right on your iPod. The Podfitness website claims that you will get a personal and customized workout based on your specific goal, music preference and of course, trainer preference. The website doesn’t explain how the technology works, which made me want to try it out even more. I finally downloaded and installed the software when I got home, here’s a review.

Setup Experience The program was about a 15 MB download and installation was a breeze. Once you get this program installed and you log in for the first time, it prompts you to create a fitness profile and then proceeds to take you through the steps in creating your customized workout. The workout selection process is basically a 3 step process.

Step 1 you choose your goal from a list of goals that matches your fitness profile. Each goal has a basic description on what it’s about and explains that you can change your goal at any time. I chose Body Shaping since I kind of want to somehow shape my beer belly into a six pack.

Step 2. Once you’ve selected a goal, you then choose a trainer from the list where they have a picture and short bio for each and every trainer (there are quite a few). You can choose from a premier trainer or a featured trainer, I think the premier trainers are the celebrity trainers. I choose David Kirsch because he looks like a smart guy and he’s trained supermodels like Heidi Klum and Linda Evangelista. As soon as you select your trainer, they show you a list of workout programs that this trainer has for the goal that you selected. Every trainer has different workout programs for your goal, some have 3 or more programs, some only have 1. In this case I choose a program called Beach Bootcamp because it sounds hardcore and I love beaches. Oh I forgot another thing, in addition to your trainer, you get an assistant trainer which can be either a male or female. The assistant trainer helps you out with workout details like counting your reps for you.

In step 3, after you’ve picked your trainer and workout program it shows you the iTunes playlists. From there on you basically choose one of your playlists to mix the trainer’s program into. Picked my Techno playlist since this is the playlist I am currently listening to while I’m working out. The mixing part is a little tricky but the only thing you have to remember to do before clicking on “mix” is to click and drag all the songs that you want to be mixed with your customized workout program into another area. Since my workout program is about 55 minutes long, I selected some songs that matched up to be about 55 mins. After that you just click on “mix” and the program downloads the customized mix from the Podfitness server and then proceed to mix and encode the program. This process takes about 2 or 3 minutes and after it’s done, your iTunes will have a new playlist named Podfitness. If you read all that, you might think this program is complicated to use. Actually, before downloading and trying this out, I thought it was going to be hard to use just by reading what the website said. My experience using the Podfitness software was a different story, it is a piece of cake. They made the steps and explainations so simple that almost anyone can do it (except for the tricky part in mixing). However, I think you have to be careful using this software if you have a really old computer. When this program was mixing the workout with my songs, I noticed that it was sucking up a lot of CPU power from my computer. I went through it without a single glitch but keep in mind that I have a new and fast machine.

Listening Experience I was as anxious to hear my customized workout as I was in installing Podfitness. So naturally, I played my new workout program as soon as it was done, I didn’t wait to take it the gym. Here’s my verdict for the listening experience, absolutely awesome! The sound clarity was great but that’s no surprise because it’s an iPod. However, hearing your own music fade in and fade out as the trainer is talking to you about the workout program is just amazing. Sometimes when you’re doing your workout and your assistant trainer is counting, your premier trainer will remind you to keep your back straight in the right side headphone, it’s like he’s actually standing to your right and talking to you. Podfitness has really impressed me, I can’t wait to take my day 1 program to the gym on Monday. I think this is going to be huge in the fitness world because over half of the people at my gym are wearing iPods when they work out. Now that I’ve experienced the software, I will do another quick review of my workout experience with Podfitness. By the way, they have a free 3 day trial going on right now.

EDIT: Podfitess.com currently has a 21 day free trial.

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