A trainer at your fingertips

Want to calculate your BMI, heart rate or caloric needs? With a fitness cellphone, all that is easily accessible.

We are all about our cellphones. We have them pasted to our ears or the palms of our hands, buy them pricey designer outfits and continually replace them with newer, sleeker models as if they were trophy spouses.

So, when I got word of a cellphone that could enhance my fitness routine, it didn't seem that outrageous.

The camera flip phone, the result of a partnership between NEC and Fitness magazine, comes with a body mass index calculator, a target heart rate calculator, a list of calories burned for various exercises, and caloric needs based on height, age, weight and level of activity. Users can also access and download the magazine's personal fitness planner, which offers customized workouts, meals, tips and recipes.

It's not the most original of ideas - many people already use their personal desk assistants to monitor workouts, and some cardio equipment can even link up with PDAs to keep track of routines. But far more people have cellphones than PDAs.

The rub is that many gyms in L.A. have outlawed cellphones, fearing that some people might take unflattering or unclothed pictures of fellow members and post them on the Internet. The ban isn't a total loss - most people wouldn't consult their phone in the middle of a Spinning class anyway.

To see how useful the fitness phone is, I logged in and got my personalized workout after answering a series of questions, including goals (slimming down or gaining power - evidently one can't do both), how much time per day and how many days a week I want to strength and cardio train, what kind of cardio I like to do (aerobics, basketball, elliptical trainer, tennis, etc.) and my weight. I was also asked whether I liked to do barbell squats, which I felt was getting a little too personal.

A question about preexisting limitations allowed me to check off chronic knee, back or shoulder pain - hardly enough to cover the gamut of problems people have. But a disclaimer says the question attempts to weed out some of the exercises that may be affected, not all, and that the workout may need "further modification."

The plan I received isn't incredibly innovative - on Tuesday, I'm expected to do an hour on the stair climber; on Wednesday, I'm supposed to do barbell chest presses, flat bench dumbbell flyes, close-grip pulldowns, bent-over barbell rows, hyperextensions, knee tucks and crunches. Oh, plus the elliptical trainer. If I'm at a loss as to how to do any of the strength exercises, clicking on them produces a description.

While it helps to have the weights outlined for me, and handy to have it on a cellphone, it's nothing I couldn't have gotten from a gazillion books or videos. I've also been exercising long enough that I tend to keep my workouts simple and in my head - today legs, tomorrow back, throw in some cardio.