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Meet Danny Bouman, he starred in a Dutch TV program called Obese last week. Danny weighed 270 kg (!) at the start of the TV program. The goal of the program was to help him lose as much as weight as possible in 300 days. The methods used involved a radical life style change (gone was all the bad food) and daily exercise.

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I’m going on a three week holiday, touring around China and obviously don’t want to ruin the shape I’ve worked so hard to build up over the last few months. So I decided to find out what I could do to stay fit while on vacation.

Image from Nerdfitness.com

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When the Fitness Stack Exchange site had just begun we got a question about What are the downsides of minimalist running shoes? My answer was that there’s nothing inherently bad about them, but as the saying goes: “if the shoe fits, wear it”. The shoes aren’t for everyone, so while it may be great for some, they can be harmful to others.

Now when I wrote that answer I didn’t have any first hand experience with actually wearing minimalist running shoes like Vibrams, so I decided to go to my favorite running shop and picked up a pair.

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Every programmer knows the problem: you curse the weight scale in the morning, because it started moving towards the 200 pounds again… The cause is simple: we sit on your ass all day doing nothing and hardly do any exercise. Luckily, we have some great suggestions for exercises any programmer should be able to do.

Above all else, try to get outdoors more. We spend 8 hours a day working behind a desk and maybe the same amount of time when we get home. Getting outdoors means you get some fresh air and probably means you won’t be sitting and we all know sitting is killing you. more »

I convinced Nathan Wheeler to join the miCoach crowd and get a Pacer and as far as I can tell, he likes it a lot. The first thing I noticed when he started uploading his workouts (I’m his ‘coach’ in his miCoach Circle) was that his heart rate was through the roof.

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As some of you may have seen, I’m quite the fan of Adidas miCoach. It’s a web app that’s integrated into several tracking devices, such as a footpod, a heart rate monitor or any popular smartphone. The version I’m most excited about is the Pacer, because it comes with both a footpod and a heart rate monitor. That way it can estimate your pace based on your steps/minute and the intensity based on your heart rate.

When you start out, you pick a training program of your choice. These range from absolute beginner programs to full blown marathon programs.

I first finished a Losing Weight program several weeks ago, because I hadn’t run for a couple of months and wanted to built up my running endurance slowly, without getting injured. Which happened to be the reason I stopped running the last time (and every time before that… but that story is for another blog post), so I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again! After that I started a marathon program and I’m around 25% into it. The start of the program basically looks like this:

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