By: Brit DeLong
[dropcap]The pedometer has gotten a makeover. For years, pedometers have helped track an individual’s daily steps as a measure of how much one walks or moves throughout the day. Enter the wave of comprehensive fitness trackers and the average pedometer is a thing of the past as new devices such as the FitBit, Jawbone Up, and Nike FuelBand offer users a way to track a multitude of areas like calories burned, percentage of active minutes in a day, and quality of sleep. Because these trackers can so precisely break down a user’s day in various ways, the devices can you help you see exactly where you may be slacking if you’ve hit a fitness rut.[/dropcap]Consider the following ways fitness trackers can help enhance your workout and you’ll be running to the nearest store to get your own:
Fitness trackers hold you accountable. Those that have struggled with weight loss often get discouraged because they think they’re doing all the right things with limited results. Sometimes, they might not have an accurate representation of the type of activity they engage in or the quality of that activity throughout their day. Fitness trackers can help highlight these discrepancies.
Fitness trackers can address issues such as inconsistent activity levels throughout the week and inadequate exercise levels during a workout. What this means is that fitness trackers can show a user that just because they are walking on a treadmill for an hour doesn’t necessarily mean that they are utilizing the activity to the best of their ability in order to burn the desired amount of calories to lose weight. Trackers might point out that a user burns few calories during these walks which could lead that person to conclude that they should up the speed or incline on the treadmill in order to maximize their results.
Those that track exercise might lose more weight. A 2008 study from the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that those studied who tracked their dieting habits regularly lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t. The same logic could potentially be applied to fitness trackers.
When you systematically track your complete daily activity, you see areas you need improvement in and you are more able to target and fix those issues effectively. For example, you might think you reach your desired 10,000 steps a day but in reality you might only be clocking in at 5,000. Or, you might aim to burn 1,000 calories a day only to find you are only burning half that. Thus, using a tracker to identify deficient areas in your activity level can help you create a plan to overcome hurdles.
Tracking your progress can motivate you to achieve your goals. Fitness trackers allow you to chart your daily statistics and therefore gauge your progress in obtaining activity goals. Let’s say your goal is to run a 5K in a half hour. By using a fitness tracker you can monitor trends in your running patterns such as the fact that you slow down two miles into your run, which prevents you from reaching your goal of completing 3.1 miles in a half hour. You might try different tactics to modify your behavior and your fitness tracker will be able to tell you whether these changes are helping you progress.
By strategically gauging how far along you are in achieving a goal by using a tracker to see your progress statistically, users are more apt to be motivated to reach their goals. Like with the example of the 5K runner, if you know that you are only two minutes away from reaching your half hour goal time, because the statistics from you tracker have charted this for you, you will be much more apt to continue training to reach your fitness milestone.
Fitness trackers can help address potential health issues. For those that are looking to achieve significant health-related goals such as losing 50 pounds or reducing one’s blood pressure, fitness trackers can allow users to chart progress or lack thereof which might help doctors diagnose potential problems. A patient can go to their doctor with graphical proof from their tracker and say, “Look, here are my results from the last six months that I’ve been using my fitness tracker. I’m exercising and eating right and still not able to lose weight.”
By being able to obtain long-term evidence that a workout regimen isn’t helping to address certain issues naturally, health care providers can move forward in finding other ways to help patients.
Ultimately, fitness trackers help take the guesswork out of workouts and empower users with real time details of their daily activities. If you know exactly how much you are or are not moving throughout the day, you can more successfully adjust your actions accordingly to break out of a fitness rut.
To determine which fitness tracker might be best for you, consider the reviews and ratings from some of the articles below: