Supposedly the following page allows you to check any given keywords with both a regular search, and an "unfiltered" search (taking off the sandbox effect and other penalties). I'm no SEO expert, but I found something interesting when I used it for my own personal keywords...
http://roberttaft.com/no_filter.htm
For KWs "Fitness Plans", "Workout Plans", "Online Personal Trainers", and a mess of other kw's, I'm within the top 2 positions on the unfiltered search (HealthyGo). However, I'm not even within the first 10 pages on those keywords on the normal search. My site has been up for nearly a year, which leads me to believe I really have been penalized or sandboxed, because I don't get SHIT from google, but for these same keywords and plenty of others I get on avg. about 70 uniques a day from yahoo (not much I know, but if only Google would stop being a bitch that would significantly increase)...
Any SEO experts know the validity of this tool?