Picking a Fitness Tracker
Picking a Fitness Tracker, you don’t actually need a conventional fitness tracker in order to track your fitness. Instead, you can measure your pulse with your fingers and you can measure your weight loss by standing on a pair of scales. When you look at it that way, you realize that ‘fitness tracking’ has been around as long as the exercise itself
Another great tip is to log your workouts, your diet, and the way you feel with a pen and paper. This is an excellent tool as it allows you to spot correlations and potential causes for the way you feel. You may notice for instance that you feel worst on the days you drink milk –perhaps you’re lactose intolerant!
If you opt for a fitness tracker though, then the most popular options on the market right now include:
Picking a Fitness Tracker , many of these come in different varieties and let you pick and choose the features you want. The most crucial features to look for are:
- GPS
- Heart rate monitoring
- Step counter
- Calorie counter
- Sleep monitoring
Our recommendation to picking a fitness tracker is either the Microsoft Band 2 (which some people find a little uncomfortable) or the TomTom Spark.
You can also make use of a few apps to get more fitness tracking on your phone.
- MyFitnessPal –This tracks your calories and makes it easy for you to input the amount you’re eating and precisely what’s in your diet
- MyRunKeeper –For tracking runs
- Endomondo –For runs
- Bodyspace –For ‘social fitness
The Lesser-Know Fitness Trackers and options That Do Awesome Things – Picking a Fitness Tracker
When you think ‘fitness tracker’, you probably think Fitbit, Jawbone, or perhaps Microsoft Band (my favorite). All these devices do basically the same thing: they measure your steps, your calories burned, your sleep, and maybe your heart rate.
But that’s not all that fitness tracking is and that’s not all a fitness tracker can do. There are actually some much more interesting trackers out there with the potential to provide much more valuable data that’s relevant to the specific way you’ll be training or your particular goals. Read on and we’ll look at some of the best and most unusual trackers out there. Once you start employing a few of these, you’ll be able to learn much more about your body.
Atlas
Atlas has the ability to identify specific movements and can tell whether you’re doing a squat, a curl, or a push-up. There’s no need to tell it which move you’re doing and that means you can launch straight into the next move without stopping to tell it anything. Of course, the move needs to know by Atlas for it to be tracked but the community is constantly adding new ones.
GymWatch
GymWatch can measure the amount of force you’re generating during workouts. This is great for the gym but unfortunately, it can register movements on its own and it requires you to stop to tell it what exercise you’re doing after each set and rep
Cue
Cue isn’t released yet but when it is it promises to give you information about your blood from the comfort of your home. This includes a reading of your free testosterone as well as vitamin D –two very useful figures.
DNA and Blood Tests
If you can’t wait, you can actually send off a blood sample to get a report detailing markers in your blood or interesting facts about your DNA. This, in turn, allows you to see your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to fitness and/or weight loss
Skulpt
Skulpt can measure muscle ‘quality’ which tells you how dense the muscle tissue is.
Healbe GoBe
Healbe GoBe is a controversial device that promises to be able to read the amount of glucose in your cells and thereby give you an accurate indicator of the calories you’ve consumed during the day. If it works, it’s game-changing. Unfortunately, the jury is still out at the moment.
Moov Now
Moov Now offers coaching right in your ear and can tell you things like when to reduce your stride during a run.
We mentioned that you could use fitness tracking to literally guarantee weight loss. So how is this possible?
The answer is simple: you use fitness tracking in order to calculate precisely how many calories you’re consuming and then to compare this with precisely how many calories you’re burning off. When you subtract the latter from the former, you’ll be left with the difference. If this is a positive number, then you have a calorie ‘surplus’. That tells you that your body is collecting and gathering calories throughout the day and eventually these have to be stored somewhere –so they get turned into fat.
On the other hand, if you’re burning more than you’re consuming, then you’ll have a calorie ‘deficit’. This then means that your body needs more calories just to get through the day than you’re giving it. So what does it do? It looks to your fat stores and it burns that fat to provide usable energy.
If you know precisely how many calories are coming in and going out then, you can know for certain whether you will lose or gain weight over time. There is no arguing with this –it is very simple math.
The problem for a lot of us is that we don’t realize where we are gaining the most calories, where we are losing the most weight or where we are making mistakes. Sometimes you feel like you’ve had a ‘good diet day’ when in fact you’ve taken in a bunch of calories through a soda drink and you’re in a surplus.
Tracking lets you precisely monitor this so you know exactly how to achieve your goals.
But what about carbs and protein you ask? Isn’t it true that you can lose weight by keeping your blood sugar down?
Maybe. Sort of. Sure, there is some truth in the fact that different calories affect the body in different ways, but this all gets quite blurry and for the time being, no one knows precisely what the best strategy in regards to meal timing or even if it has a significant impact.
Maybe not all the calories you consume reach your bloodstream. Maybe the thermogenic effect causes you to burn more fat when you eat protein. It doesn’t matter.
In the face of uncertainty, simple ‘calories in/calories out is something you can rely on and that can’t be bargained with. If you haven’t consumed enough calories to gain weight, then you won’t gain weight.