Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Quest for Health - The Home Front
In my ongoing quest to regain my previously healthy fitness levels (including reducing that nasty cholesterol), I purchased a piece of home exercise equipment this weekend, the Gazelle Edge. This is the basic Gazelle model, a cable-based elliptical type thing. The knee surgeon I had to see for my bashed-up knee recommended elliptical training for its nonimpact features, and it seems to be working. It was less than a hundred bucks and seemed worth a shot.
It's great, at least for me. It really does fold up easily and slides alongside the bureau when I'm not using it, and by doing the various styles they recommend in the manual, I've been getting a good workout on it. Okay, it's only been four days, but I've used it every day so far (twice on Saturday), for 45-60 minutes each session.
For me, the key was the environment. I put it in the guest room, which is where all my clothes are (The Girl requires the full use of the storage space in our bedroom, plus the hall and office closets), and I picked up a cheap DVD player to hook up to the TV in that room. Of course, the TV I had in there (which was hooked up to nothing) didn't work since it's old enough that it only had a coaxial input, while the DVD player had no coaxial output. Fortunately, The Girl's drumming TV in the basement music room is only hooked up to a VCR via coaxial, has additional input jacks, and is the same size, so I swapped them and everyone's happy. Now I have my geeky DVD library of stuff The Girl doesn't particularly care to view (Firefly, Angel, The Sound of Music, Tomb Raider), and I watch movies while I work out. Fabulous!!!!
Now I've also found that Netflix has added another feature, that allows you to split your queue into multiple queues for the household. We're on the 5-movie at a time plan, so I'm going to allocate 1 movie at a time to Exercise. I'll put all the selections that only I want to see, and when I return one, it will send another one from that queue. When we return one from the Household queue, it will send another one from that queue. Now there's no chance that we'll get three Babylon 5 DVDs at the same time, while Under the Tuscan Sun is languishing, waiting to be shipped. Everyone's happy, life is good.
|
It's great, at least for me. It really does fold up easily and slides alongside the bureau when I'm not using it, and by doing the various styles they recommend in the manual, I've been getting a good workout on it. Okay, it's only been four days, but I've used it every day so far (twice on Saturday), for 45-60 minutes each session.
For me, the key was the environment. I put it in the guest room, which is where all my clothes are (The Girl requires the full use of the storage space in our bedroom, plus the hall and office closets), and I picked up a cheap DVD player to hook up to the TV in that room. Of course, the TV I had in there (which was hooked up to nothing) didn't work since it's old enough that it only had a coaxial input, while the DVD player had no coaxial output. Fortunately, The Girl's drumming TV in the basement music room is only hooked up to a VCR via coaxial, has additional input jacks, and is the same size, so I swapped them and everyone's happy. Now I have my geeky DVD library of stuff The Girl doesn't particularly care to view (Firefly, Angel, The Sound of Music, Tomb Raider), and I watch movies while I work out. Fabulous!!!!
Now I've also found that Netflix has added another feature, that allows you to split your queue into multiple queues for the household. We're on the 5-movie at a time plan, so I'm going to allocate 1 movie at a time to Exercise. I'll put all the selections that only I want to see, and when I return one, it will send another one from that queue. When we return one from the Household queue, it will send another one from that queue. Now there's no chance that we'll get three Babylon 5 DVDs at the same time, while Under the Tuscan Sun is languishing, waiting to be shipped. Everyone's happy, life is good.
|
Posted by Rogueslayer at 10:09 AM 
