by Chrystal Mahan

Created on: December 16, 2010

I’m a writer. I sit at my desk 8-10hrs or more a day.  My home office is pretty comfortable, but the hours pass by so quickly that I often have to force myself to take a break or stop for a meal. My meal plan and exercise has fallen to the wayside ever since our UFC trip.

I have these bouts where I will be on the treadmill for months, every day, with weekends off. Then, something will happen and I will not do it. Then time passes and I have to start all over again. I need consistency, and I need something easy. I still plan to enjoy my treadmill, when I actually use it, but I needed to find something to help me by being a multi-task product.

About 5 years ago I had a program installed on my home and work PC. I can’t remember the name, but every 30 minutes to an hour (you set the time) it would pop-up and you would follow along with the exercise. This particular program was based more on stress relief, stretching, and so on to help with strains and repetitive injuries. It was enjoyable and it did help. There were eye exercises, neck rolls, shoulder rolls, back stretches and leg stretches. Even arms! It was a bit cartoonish, but it worked!

I searched all over the internet for that program. For the life of me I can’t find it! I wish I could remember the name or how I found it.

I tried searching the internet for alternatives. Download.com gave me a few results, but most of the programs seemed old and I am running Windows 7, so I did not want to take the risk. Besides, who wants to download a program from 1997?

After a long search that came up empty (I am on a budget so $29.99 for software isn’t going to work for me.) Yesterday I installed the Break Pal program. I found it through download.com. I started to search for other reviews, so far, so good. I decided to give it a test run for myself.

To date there are only 12 exercises in the basic free program. For some, this might be enough to change things around every few days. For me, someone who has days where there are long hours requiring more breaks, I might need some more variety.

Basically Break Pal is based on a timer system. It is a small program that you set the interval. I had it set to 30 minutes, but today I had to switch it to 45 because every  30 minutes got to be to large of a distraction. I found myself forgetting where I had left off and had to spend more time trying to remember than if I would have just finished writing! You can set the timer for any interval you

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