Fitness trackers and smartwatches are popular tools for getting a detailed look into your daily activity and health data. These gadgets provide logs of various metrics such as your daily total steps, heart rate, sleep quantity, sleep quality, active minutes, and more.
While knowing more about your habits and your body’s response can be an empowering process, keep in mind that like anything, too much of a good thing is not always best. Here is how fitness trackers can help improve your health and how to best use them for reaching your goals in a balanced way.
1. MAINTAINING MOTIVATION TO EXERCISE
While some of us are hard-wired workout machines that never miss a day at the gym, many others need that extra bit of accountability to maintain a healthy exercise schedule. A wearable fitness tracker can be like a little coach that you strap to your wrist and body, reminding you to stick to your fitness goals.
These bits of motivating data include:
• Monitoring your daily steps
• Tallying your calories burned
• Recording your workout performance
Fitness trackers can help you move more If you have a long work. getting enough movement into your day or week is tricky. Research shows that the average person only gets slightly over 5,000 steps per day, with some reports reporting an average as low as 3,000.
2. KEEPING TRACK OF HEART RATE
One of the benefits of a fitness tracker is that you can use them as a heart rate monitor. Your tracker will let you know if you’re going too hard or not hard enough.
The basic guidelines for a healthy heart rate during exercise are:
•Moderate intensity: 50% – 70% of your maximum heart rate.
•High intensity: 70% – 85% of your maximum heart rate.
3. MONITORING SLEEP SCHEDULES
Wearable fitness trackers can also be used to record our sleep schedules. Most devices do this by measuring various metrics like your heart rate and movement during the night. They can then assess whether or not we’re getting enough sleep and whether or not that sleep is restful or fitful.
Paying attention to your sleep habits is an often-overlooked part of a healthy lifestyle.
4. CALORIE COUNTING AND STICKING WITH A DIET
All wearable fitness trackers and even most phones offer calorie counting programs that detect how many calories you’re burning at any given moment by monitoring your body’s metrics.
5. MONITORING MEDICAL CONDITIONS
Fitness trackers can be about more than just beating your personal high score or counting calories. In fact, they can have a very real impact on those with medical conditions. Many fitness tracking devices can:
• Send irregular heartbeat alerts to those with heart conditions (useful for people monitoring their RPE vs heartrate)
• Monitor glucose levels (when integrated with another device) for those with diabetes
• Send an alert if you suffer an accident while exercising.
