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Do you have trouble opening jars of sauce? Trying to scoop rock-hard ice cream? Throwing gutter balls when bowling with your friends? Our hands are used for interacting with the world around us, and strengthening our wrists is a important matter that should be part of our workouts. The applications that require wrist strength apply to a wide variety of activities even if they are not sports or fitness related.

The SideWinder comes in three varying sizes and weights.

The SideWinder exerciser is a tool developed by Frank Nieman, an Illinois woodsman who was climbing trees for a living. He saw the need for strengthening his crew’s grips for climbing and created the device. It comes in three models of varying sizes and weight which accommodates different hand dimensions and strength requirements.

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I failed ballroom dancing in college. Believe me. I have the transcript to prove it. Having practiced martial arts for years, dancing is still my downfall. Imagine my apprehension when I recently received Zumba Fitness 2 for the Wii.

What is Zumba Fitness 2 for the Wii? It’s a game based on Zumba, the popular dance fitness program. Once you enter the disc, you create a profile, and then you’re ready to go! You can choose to do a single Zumba song, a full Zumba class, or create your own custom routines. Zumba workouts vary in length and intensity that you can choose for your own needs. Included with the game is a promotion to try out a weeks’ worth of Zumba classes for free at a 24 Hour Fitness location.

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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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