Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

After so many entries about the XaviX Console, this is the one that is the most exciting. XaviX was showing off a series of their prototypes for products that are due out within the next year or so. The two most interesting are the XaviX Health & Fitness Manager and the XaviX Stepper.

XaviX Health & Fitness Manager:

It looks just like a scale, but the cool thing about it is that it connects to your XaviX Console, documenting not only your weight, but also gives you access to all the information about the physical activity you have done with your XaviX machine. I tend to keep this information on an application on my Palm, but if XaviX was my primary exercise machine, I might be attracted to this product.

XaviX is the one thing that could bring the scale out of the bathroom and into the living room.

XaviX Stepper:

The XaviX Stepper was smack dab in the middle of the XaviX booth. All day long, they had a girl on it exercising. I told her I wanted to play with it and she eagerly hopped off, exclaiming, “I’ve been playing for 17 hours. I have lost two pants sizes since I got this job.” I eagerly took over for her and played with all the games. The software runs you through a variety of games that get you to use the stepper quickly for cardio-vascular training or use your coordination to step at the appropriate time. I played with many of the games. Most of them were the cutesy type that I love in Japanese gaming. Think Monkey Ball with a ferret and a stair stepper. That might give you an idea of what this game was like.

Even though it was a prototype, they had an idea what would come with the game. They have created wrist weights for the upper body workout and the stepper for the lower body workout. The stepper did not have a resistance setting on it, so if you got to the point where the stepper wasn’t doing it for you anymore, you would have to move on to something else. The game showed the girl on the stepper making movements with her arms where I was supposed to follow along. Just like with the Jackie Chan J-Mat, I had a hard time stepping correctly and moving my arms. That’s a part of coordination that I just haven’t gotten down pat yet.

The cool thing about the XaviX Stepper is that it’s small. It’s smaller than any other stepper I’ve ever seen, even the one from Brookstone that was so popular a couple of Christmases ago. That would make it very easy to store in the living room. The lack of a resistance knob, however, is a severe drawback to this product. My heart rate easily went into the high intensity range while I was playing this game, but if I did it every day, I might find that it’s a medium intensity workout. A resistance knob would extend the life of this workout product.

Just like the other XaviX games, this one keeps track of how much exercise you have done and allows separate people to enter their data.

The software for this machine was still in its beginning stages. It never crashed, but it did have some strange translations:

If only I knew what that phrase meant, I might not have to exercise so much. It’s kind of frustrating to think that the knowledge that I seek is right there in a bad translation…

Click here to visit the XaviX Website:

• XaviX Website