Everything is becoming digital these days, and the saying ‘there’s an app for that’ rings true in most cases. Just think about your daily life, how many times do you reach for your phone and log into an app for something? I’m guessing that would be a considerable amount of time in your day.
One of the most rapidly growing and most popular digital apps nowadays is in the form of a fitness tracker. Now, this can be a device you wear, or it can be an app you input information into, but the general aim is the same – to track your physical activity in order to assess goals and see how you can jig around your daily fitness aims.
Do they work?
Well, that’s an entirely personal viewpoint, but there is certainly evidence that fitness trackers help to motivate individuals, which generally results in an increase in physical activity. Is that a bad thing? No way!
There are many different devices on the market now which you can buy to monitor your activity, and most of them are sync-able with mobile phones and tablets etc (you can look here https://mobilemob.com.au/
Pedometers are perhaps the oldest fitness tracking piece of equipment around, and these are generally worn on the arm or hip (often attached to trousers or shorts), to count the number of steps taken in a day. It doesn’t matter whether you walk or run, the information is the amount of steps, although if you run you’re generally going to be taking more. When worn correctly, and that’s the key thing, pedometers can be very effective and really do push an individual to try and better their score from the day before – it’s all about motivation. New technology is digitalising pedometers, to make them more accurate.
Calorie counters are also a form of fitness tracking, but the jury is out on how accurate they are. This is because how fast you burn calories is an individual deal, and it’s down to the person’s BMI, their metabolism, and how accurate the information regarding the number of calories is. Despite that, it does give a general guideline, and again, is a good way to motivate a person who is following a weight loss plan.
iPhones and smartphones in general all come with a plethora of all singing, all dancing apps regarding fitness, giving you advice and monitoring equipment for any physical activity you do, such as a sporting activity, and tells you how much you may have burnt during that particular session.
Now, whether you believe that fitness tracking devices are really worth the money or not, there is no denying that they do have a part to play in health and wellbeing. If you can push a person to be more active, through wanting to better a score or level, then this can never be a bad thing.
Maybe it’s time you downloaded that app!