Rows - Each entry row represents one session of one exercise. The rows are grouped into days. You start with three rows per day; however, if you do more than three different exercises in a single day, you can change the number of rows per day by using the little "Option to Change . . ." form. The number of rows is for your convenience -- set it to whatever you want. You can leave rows blank. A blank row or rows has no effect on the result. In fact, if you are like most of us, you will probably leave a lot of rows blank.
Days - The form defaults to 28 days. You can change this to any number between 1 and 56 days (i.e. 8 weeks) on the "Option to Change . . ." form. However, the dates on the form will always start yesterday — if you want a true result reflecting your actual exercise, starting yesterday will force you to use "actual reality" rather than "perceived reality". The days are also designated "Day 1" through "Day 28 (or whatever the last day in your period is)". You can (and most people will) leave all of the rows in a day blank. This will count as a "day without exercise" in the result.
The number of days you choose is the period of time over which your exercise is averaged. So if you picked a 7-day period and had one exercise for 70 minutes, the results would show that you had averaged 1 day of exercise per week and 10 minutes of exercise per week. If you had chosen a 14-day period with the same single entry, the results would show an average of .5 days of exercise per week and 5 minutes of exercise per week. And if you had chosen a 1-day period, the results would show an average 7 days and 490 minutes exercise per week.
The first box in each row is "Notes". You can type whatever you want to in the "Notes" box; it is virtual "scratch paper". Notes are not transmitted to the program and have no effect whatsoever on the results - you could put your grocery list or "I like Ike" in it if you want. We included this section to help you organize and remember exercise in the past. When you submit the form, anything written in the Notes will be thrown away (although you can probably recover it by using the back button on your browser). So if you want to keep your notes, you need a copy of them. See "Backup", below.
The second box in each row is "Intesity". Intensity is a number between 1 and 10, which reflects the amount of energy used by the exercise. The higher the intensity, the more calories you have used. In fact, it very closely approximates the total number of calories burned by each 1 pound (.4536 kg) of body weight in one hour, while engaged in the exercise.
The lefthand column of the page contains an alphabetical list of @ 270 exercises, in alphabetical order, with their "intensity" value. Find your exercise and copy the intensity into the Intensity box. If you cannot find your exercise, you will have to use your judgment by looking at similar exercises. For your convenience, a second list if the same exercises, in order of lowest to highest intensity, appears under the Form.
In this box, fill in the actual minutes of exercise you got. If you want to include warmup or cooloff periods, the more exact method is to enter them in a separate row. The faster method is to approximate by adjusting the number of minutes. So if your exercise is running at 8 mph (6.1) and you warm up with a 10 minute jog at 5 mph (3.6) and cool down with a slow 5 minute walk (2.1) and 10 minutes of stretching (1.1), you might just add 5 minutes to your exercise time to approximate the warmup/cooldown.
We very strongly suggest that you save your work in another format, so that if something goes wrong, you won't have to start over. A power blink could restart your computer, an internet glitch could reset the webpage, a webserver problem could drop the page, or the software on our web server could get corrupted (which has happened to websites a lot bigger and more sophisticated than ours.)
The slowest but safest method is to write down notes on a sheet of paper. If you have some computer expertise, saving the file to your computer should be very fast and quite safe unless there is a glitch while your are working. Also fast, but also somewhat vulnerable to server, internet, and power glitches, is to print out the form. Such glitches are rare, but they do happen.
