Personal trainer walking and dancing on TV

Pedometers can be tricky things. And fancy pedometers can be a real pain ! If you position them wrong on your clothing they will not pick up your movements accurately, and then there is always the possibility of accidentally resetting it or knocking it off and into someplace you just don't want to retrive it out of. Yet they are a tool to help us measure our progress, keep on track and become better people than we currently are, so we use them.

Over the weekend, I got the new Personal Trainer Walking for the Nintendo DS. It has the game/software and two pedometers for you and a buddy to wear. It straps on your waistband or tucks in your purse, and at the end of the day you point it at the DS and it uploads your data. From that it tells you how many steps you have taken, your movement patterns and suggestions on how to better yourself. Very convenient ! Except, there is a big drawback. No way to calibrate it to step length. Not eveyone has the same length of stride, and therefore there is no way you can measure distance.If it cannot calibrate stride but simply goes by movement, a ride down a very bumpy stretch of road in your car could register as 1,000 steps. Yesterday I had a pretty active day with cleaning the house, and i kept making numerous trips between rooms to grab and put away things. Yet at the end of te day, my pedometer said I only took 435 steps for the whole day. Come on ! I take double that each day just running to the bathroom ! According to the manual, it only counts activities of 10 seconds or longer ( definately longer than 10 seconds to get to the bathroom), and if worn in certain positions it may not be accurate. Yesterday I hooked mine onto my underwear insteat of my pants because I did not want the thing to go flying off into the toilet or something when I was making one of these inevitable mad dashes because you have 30 seconds and if you don't there will ne another mess to deal with moments. So I will try wearing it on my pants today, and see what the day brings.

I watched another episode of Dance Your Ass off last night, and I still don't get it. Oxygen Network seems to need a course in learning how to portray drama. In last nightas episode, the show opened with one contestant falling into a raging fit, tossing all contents of the cheat cabinet into the trash and screaming. Yeah, made you look. But it did nothing to show what lead to the rage. What happened that pushed her over the edge ? They had a short interveiw with her durning where she said that the food represented all the times she had been treated like a fat girl, but never showed what was the event that brought this so in her face. I just did not get it, so after the first two dancers, I turned it off figuring there are better uses for my time. Sorry Oxygen...you have a lot to loearn about tv drama.