YOUR 2024 BRAIN BRAWN MINI RESOLUTION SPECIAL EDITION: FITNESS TRACKERS

Fitness Tracker Benefits & Considerations
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At this point in your exercise journey, you may be considering a fitness tracker but perhaps you are confused about which is the best option for you. Your decision will depend on your personal activity and what features are important to you. Below are a few considerations to contemplate before heading to the mall or firing up the computer to make your fitness tracker purchase:
 

• 24/7 heartrate tracking—this provides valuable information about your heartrate not only during exercise (i.e. how hard are you working?) but also at rest, which can then be reviewed with your physician. For example, an elevated resting heart rate can indicate dehydration, inadequate sleep, changes in certain medications, too much caffeine intake, and excessive stress.
  
  Some of the newer techie versions even provide heartrate variability (HRV) data, which is a metric with growing interest because it’s a measure of how quickly your body recovers from stress.
  
  
• Sleep tracking—many devices have the added feature of tracking your sleep. They can provide information about your tosses and turns, wakefulness and sleep quality. Critically, it will also tell you how much sleep you actually get because time spent in a bed doesn’t necessarily equate with the number of hours slept. A bonus feature is when you don’t have to tell it you are heading to bed, it just “knows” when you have hit the hay.
  
  
• Steps—daily steps are considered an important metric for maintaining health. Note that some devices aren’t sensitive enough to weed out activities like knitting or typing from actual steps, so do your due diligence with your research and read the reviews. Also, most phones track steps, but then you miss out on the data when you aren’t in possession of your phone and, as mentioned, the number of overall daily steps is an important metric.
  
  

• Calories—a word of caution: if you are trying to lose or gain weight, then do not rely solely on fitness trackers! They can over or underestimate your daily expenditure by as much as 1,000 calories. Trust us, we were crazy enough to try wearing four devices at once for the purpose of comparison.
  
  
• GPS—if your physical activities take you outdoors, the GPS feature may be good to have, not just for directionality but also for speed and elevation. Typically, you can download your workout to an app or website to see the 3D map of your activity (pretty cool stuff!). 
  
  
• Time recording—something to consider, for example, if you swim, you may wish to record laps. If you run, you may wish to record splits. Or if you do HIIT (high-intensity interval training), you may wish to have an interval counter.
  
  
• Waterproof—of course, this is a good feature if you’re into water sports or tend to sweat excessively.
  
  
• Battery Life—it’s a bummer when you realize your tracker is out of juice and your data wasn’t captured. But keep in mind, longer battery life usually comes at a higher price.
  
  
• Body placement—in addition to the wristwatch fitness trackers, there are also alternative versions such as bicep bands, clothing clips, and rings available on the market. The original fitness trackers were a chest strap connected to a watch (and later versions to an app on your phone). These are still available and provide the most accurate exercise feedback but are not practical for 24/7 use.
  
  
• Smartwatch—do you want to leave the phone at home? Have one device for fitness and also for calls, texts, wireless payments and emails? If so, then a smartwatch may be a good option for you.
  
  
• Teams, apps, logging, etc.—many fitness trackers will connect to an app or website. What will you do with this information? If you want to compete against other people for motivation, join a team for support, or track or log your progress, then it’s a good idea to preview different fitness trackers’ options and app or website interfaces.
  
  In the Settings tab on your smart phone, you can see which devices sync with our app, CCP Motivate!
  
  
• Cost—more features and longer battery life come at a higher price. An entry-level tracker can cost about $70, whereas a fancier version can run as high as $1,500. A more recent entry into the market, Whoop, gives you the device for free but charges a monthly membership fee for the data and the app. This is an interesting option if you just want to try something on for size for a while.

 
We hope this information will help you narrow down your for those of you looking to purchase a fitness tracker. If you’d like some more guidance, feel free to contact your Motivated Mondays Coach Michele at [email protected].
 
We’ll see you next week when we kick off with a new mini resolution. Until then, have a great week!