The latest word on effective cardio exercise is that you should go for short, intense intervals rather than waste hours on the Stairmaster. Shorter workouts, you say? Good with us, but what about the gear to go with all that? The Airun Plus shoe is designed for the HIIT exerciser who wants to track his BMI and caloric burn rates all the while controlling shoe weight. The built-in Smart Technology controller records BMI and calorie burn results while the weighted insoles can be added or removed based on your needs. Weight and speed information comes from a sensor in the right shoe, while the entire kick is designed with shock absorption and safety in mind. Ready to buy? If you're serious about your body, these things will run you £112.50 ($224) and they come all the way from England.

For every gimmicky workout product that comes along like the push-up counter or talking grip master, there's also one such as the Nike+iPod or Entertrainer which actually seem to prove useful or motivational. Well you can add the upcoming Informance sunglasses from German lenscrafter Rodenstock to that list, which take your regular sports shades and tack on a tiny LED display that shows stopwatch or pulse data from a wirelessly-linked watch. Developed in cooperation with the UK's Cambridge Consultants, the display projects a 160 x 120 pixel image through a wedge-shaped prism, occupying 12% of the left eye's field of view in a reportedly unobtrusive manner when peering straight ahead. Look for actual products to hit the market sometime in 2009, for an estimated €700 to €1.000 ($990 to $1,400).

It's not like Sony's PSP hasn't flanked the top of a steering wheel before, but the X-Bike Sony PSP Kit takes the handheld into the world of exercising like never before. Of course, we're not sure if this newfangled motivational tool will help you melt off the pounds like other systems we've seen, but the half-hearted attempt to integrate the PSP into an exercise bike allows users to watch movies (or fitness tapes) whilst burning calories. Interestingly, the product page doesn't mention the possibility of gaming, but we see no reason why the uber-coordinated couldn't mash a few buttons while maintaining their balance on the bike, so feel free to drop your $100 if you know you're in that elite crowd.

[Via Joystiq]

While we've seen a number of individuals turning to Nintendo's Wii to shed a few pounds, the next wave of exercise equipment seems to be filtering in. Just weeks after seeing Motivatrix's MX9 Workout Master, five companies have come together in an effort to "develop a communications protocol to establish a connection between home healthcare devices from different manufacturers so that they can exchange information with one another." Mitsubishi, Citizen, Sharp, Tanita, and Hitachi have jointly designed the standard as part of a Japanese healthcare project, which will be "used when interconnecting healthcare equipment such as blood pressure meters, weight scales, and blood glucose meters with home gateway devices." Notably, the protocol can applied to both wired and wireless configurations, and if all goes as planned, it should be rolled out en masse to manufacturers in the Spring of 2008.

[Via DigitalWorldTokyo]

As anyone who's managed to get their hands on a Wii will no doubt have already discovered, it's relatively easy to work up a sweat and lose some pounds using Nintendo's little white box. Now, the real life activity that's required to succeed at virtual Wii Sports has been picked up on by a personal trainer from Glasgow, Scotland: Zander Urquhart found that kids and adults alike don't mind doing exercise when it's accompanied by on-screen actions by the player's Mii, and is using the Wii specifically as an exercise machine. Zander is apparently the first fitness expert to have seen the potential for the Wii in the field of personal training, but we have a strong feeling he won't be the last. Even if the idea doesn't catch on, we suspect he'll have a healthy stream of geeky customers coming into the gym as long as the Wii stock shortage continues to exist (which, judging by the sporadic shortages of the 10 month old DS Lite, could be some time yet). Be honest with us: have you lost any weight thanks to your Wii?

[Via The Raw Feed. Image credit]

Dance Dance Revolution has certainly helped pave the way for the health-conscious set to exercise whilst gaming, and even the Wii has sparked an outbreak of get-fit kids who endure hours of Wii Sports just to melt off those pounds, and now Motivatrix is hoping to get its exercise / gaming machine hybrid into your fitness room in place of that not-so-thrilling elliptical. The MX9 Workout Master mimics existing DDR systems in design, but it manages to feature a number of internal games inside to keep your workout sessions fresh. Additionally, the machine not only recognizes fancy footwork, but built-in sensors can understand arm flailing as well, and you can even "jam out to your own music" while breakin' a sweat. Most interesting, however, is the fact that its also an internet-enabled machine, meaning that exercise freaks across the land can compete against one another, giving even the least motivated individuals something to work for. No timetable was noted as to when we'd see these things hitting sporting goods sections, but until we get a crack at "Calorie Killer," we'll just stick with Simmer Down Sprinter.

[Via CNET]

Sure, we know there's swarms of you out there who'd take a few hours in The Slim Machine instead of being forced to run around your block or pump some iron, but here's a relatively fair compromise. The Wii Weights prototype is nothing more than your average strap-on wrist weight coated in white and stamped with that (likely trademarked) Wii logo, but let's face it, if you've got to burn the calories, you're better off doing so whilst playing Wii Sports. Ideally, the weights would range from one to four pounds, and should do some serious sculpting on your array of arm muscles if you make it a habit to game with these on. So if shedding nine pounds over the holidays training as a Wii athlete just wasn't encouragement enough for you to participate, just imagine the additional pounds that'll vanish (and the muscles that'll surface) when adding these bad boys into the mix.

[Via Crave]

While some folks are struggling just to stay out of the hospital when getting too amped up playing their Wii, Mickey DeLorenzo, a 25-year-old living in Philadelphia, decided to meld exercise and gaming together and further substantiate the most obvious research study of the year. His Wii Sports Experiment started in December of last year and ran for six whole weeks, and while he sought to keep his eating habits constant, he devoted 30 minutes per day to Wii Sports and monitored his weight, BMI, calories burned per session, body fat percentage, heart rate, and physical soreness. Mickey started out at 182 pounds, and after a month and a half of Wii workouts, whittled his weight down to 172 pounds, which he found quite amazing considering that this was the first substantial loss he had attained in over two years, and he never even cut back on the Eat 'N Park cookies (or similar). Moreover, according to The American Council on Exercise, he went from the "acceptable" category to the "fitness" category, and seemed to gain a huge boost of self-esteem in the process. So if the Subway diet just doesn't mesh with your taste buds, and you're desperate to find an excuse to game it up instead of going for a jog, be sure to hit the read link for all the encouragement you'd ever need, and click on through for a bit of footage from the entire process.

[Via SMH]

While it's no surprise that children are gaining weight at an alarming rate these days, there's always the Dance Dance Revolution workout or the entirely more evil MealpayPlus route, but now Gymplay is offering up a fitness-based middleman to keep kids' heart rates up while gaming away. Crafted solely for Sony's now antiquated PlayStation console, the appendage acts as a liaison between the controller and your system, requiring the child (or adult, actually) to continually exercise at an "adjustable rate" determined by the lieutenant parent in charge. The Step2Play will only allow the controller to function if the youngster onboard is keeping those paddles moving at a satisfactory pace, and supposedly targets the "calf and leg muscles" -- but we can envision a good bit of hostility being created when little Johnny finds this accessory waiting under the tree. Although we can't imagine any sane child enjoying this torment as much as the (presumably staged) children are in the photo above, you can give your offspring the gift of motivation for a staggering £115 ($218).

[Via Uber-Review]

Watch out Apple and Nike, because Sony's got a new set of Network Walkmen waiting in the wings that pack a pedometer right into the players themselves, eliminating the need for a separate kit and expensive pair of sneakers. Although it doesn't sound like the cigar-shaped, 2GB NW-S205F and 1GB NW-S203F will offer the same online experience as you'd find at the Nikeplus website, you're still getting calorie, step, and distance counter functionality right out of the box, along with a stopwatch and FM tuner -- plus an armband to keep everything secure. The nano still holds the edge in screen quality -- and capacity, obviously -- as the new Sonys sport but a one-line OLED display. Pricing here is pretty attractive, with the black S205F and silver S203F going for $150 and $120, respectively, when they hit stores in either September or October.

It seems that Apple may have plans for incorporating the iPod into your workout other than just the integration with Nike sneakers, as a newly released patent shows that the company has invented a method of adjusting the pace and style of music playback while you exercise. Incorporated into a model called the iPod Sport, perhaps, this technology would use an accelerometer to gauge the pace of a person's workout, and encourage them to "take it to the max" by either increasing the tempo of a particular song (though hopefully not to the point where all your tunes sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks) or automatically changing to a faster-paced track. This is all well and good, but how about throwing in some Bluetooth while you're at it, cause the wire dangling from that runner's head in the illustration has got to go.

[Via Unwired View]