It’s officially summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and if you’re in this part of the world there’s a good chance that you’ll be hitting the beach, lake, or pool soon. And if you’re like me, when it comes to walking around in that bathing suit (or birthday suit for those crazier mytreo.net readers) you’ll have a good bit of sitting around over the winter to atone for. So what to do about that? Duh…get exercise. But staying motivated in a routine can be hard and hitting the gym is just a means to an end anyway. You want to maximize the benefit you receive from the weight room and minimize the time you have to spend there so that you can get back to sipping cold frosties by the pool. Wouldn’t it be great if your Treo could help you do that? Well, with this software it can.

MySportTraining is one of the coolest, most useful programs I have come across since I’ve had my Treo 650. As I mentioned in another review, I take my Treo 650 to the gym and use it as an mp3 player and workout log. In the first few weeks I did this I tested out several different methods of saving my workout information – everything from a collection of different programs to just using Docs-to-Go and an Excel spreadsheet. None of them really did what I wanted them to so the search continued. Finally, I came across this little gem.

First of all, this thing’s got more features than a Woody Allen film festival. You can log your aerobic activity, strength training, weight, blood pressure, sleep cycle, even your activity level and mood on workout days. For most of these logs you can produce awesome 3-D color graphs that let you easily monitor your progress. To make data entry simple, the program comes stacked with a slew of preset activities and exercises and entering your own custom ones is a breeze. While not completely compatible with the 5-way navigator, it works pretty well for doing the most repetitive tasks like entering activities and information within workouts. As an example of the developer’s attention to detail, the program is able to log and display in either Imperial or Metric formats and has a good selection of other preferences that can be adjusted to just about any situation one could think of. The screenshots below show just a couple of the ways you can review or enter information.

By far one of the neatest features of MST is the interactive muscle chart (see below). Don’t know how to work that Latissimus dorsi?…Don’t know if you have a Latissimus dorsi? Not only can you click around on this screen to find out what and where that is, as you do, a list of pre-defined exercises that work each muscle group pops up. Clicking in one of these dialog boxes brings up a workout log with a simple diagram of how to do the selected exercise complete with fields to enter your set, rep, and resistance information in once you’re done. I wouldn’t rely totally on this feature to plan your workout, but it’s great if you need a quick reference for a new exercise.

Memory-wise MST weighs in at about 500K-600K depending on how big your workout and activities databases are, but if you’ve got a SD card there’s probably no need to worry about that. While I couldn’t find any official statement regarding SD compatibility on the product’s website or in the user manual, I’ve been able to run MST from a card for the month or so that I’ve been demo-ing it with no issues using PowerRUN.

Overall, I find this program to be an excellent program and there’s not much I don’t like about it. However, there are a couple of things that others may consider drawbacks that should be mentioned. First, as I touched on before, the 5-way navigation support is not universal. Personally, I give the developer(s) a pass on this one though, as the complexity of the program would make it nearly impossible to make every option accessible via the navigation and menu buttons. Second, and a little more importantly, it’s not possible to use your PC to view your activity data unless you by a separate Windows version of the software which costs more than the standalone Palm OS version (US$34.95 and US$24.95 respectively.) Compare that to other products like Workout Tracker which do include such a feature for less than the price of one of the versions of the MST software and you have to question why the MST’s developer(s) couldn’t integrate a simple limited function option to allow users to view their data in Excel, for example.

Despite these minor flaws, MST’s features give it an amazing amount of flexibility and usability. No, it won’t get you dressed and drive you to the gym, but it does just about everything else to help you achieve your training goals and get you to that stage that almost everyone who is exercising is trying to reach - that point where, when you look in the mirror, you have this uncontrollable urge to shout “Jump back! I wanna kiss myself!” (and freak out whoever may be in the house with you at the time). Check out the full-feature demo of MST here and see for yourself.

Disclaimer: MST will not actually make you James Brown.

Screenshots courtesy of www.mysporttraining.com

Filed under: Software reviews