Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Day 78: Matt vs. Life Fitness Web Site

Life Fitness has supplied more gyms with exercise equipment than you can shake a stick at.  I have seen Life Fitness machines in everything from my old apartment gym in Florida to hotel gyms to the one I am currently a member. 

Every time I step up to one of these machines I see a USB port.  After looking at this for over a year I decide to do a little research and find out what this port can be used for.  I have noticed the machine ask me if I would like to save my progress and certainly there has to be more to it than that.

It took me several searches on the internet to find the LF Connect website where you can sign up for an account.  This allows you to do numerous things including: Creating a Workout Calendar, Creating Custom Workouts, and Tracking Your Progress.

The first thing you have to do is create a workout.  You do this by clicking on the center My Workouts button which gives you access to your Workout Library.  Then you have to add a workout.  When you go into the add workout menu you have to select  Custom Interval Workouts and then either home or professional  and what type of machine you plan on using. 

I chose Exercise Facility and then Treadmill.  From here you have two main choices they are: Speed Interval or Heart Rate Interval.  I chose Speed since I will be using guidelines set by Kelly’s personal trainer.  From here it was pretty simple to set up the work you.  Simply put in the total time you plan on working out and the intervals. 

Although in the end I did find the website easy to use it took me several minutes to find what I was looking for and nothing is really explained it’s almost as if they expect you to know exactly what you are doing when you use their site.  If I found it slightly confusing at first I imagine someone with only mediocre computer skills would be totally confused in trying to figure the site out. 

I would suggest a Brief Tutorial section with links to YouTube on how to operate the site.  It would make it much more user friendly. 

With that being said I finished my workout and now needed to load it onto a USB drive, which again took me a minute to figure out but was quite simple after I discovered how to do it.  The work out is downloaded in a zip file which I unpacked and loaded onto our USB drive. 

At the gym neither of our treadmills found our workouts.  I am assuming that I needed to load the zip file and not unpack it but it would have been nice to have some brief explanation.  After all that we were unable to use our custom workouts and I will try it all again on our next gym outing.  We did save our progress to the USB drive. Now I have to figure out how to load them. 

Daily Recap:
Matt: 30 Min Tread Mill I chose a random setting like running up foot hills

Kelly:  30 Min @ 9AM with Personal Trainer and again @ 6PM with me 30 Min Tread Mill using the personal trainer’s custom workout  

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