A popular fitness tool and accessory are fitness trackers/the Apple Watch. These smart devices are worn on your wrist and are able to track health and fitness progress for you, not only during your workouts, but during your daily activities. Every fitness tracker has slightly different functions so it’s important to get the one that is right for you. However, common features of most fitness trackers are tracking steps, distance traveled, number of calories burned, and heart rate. These features come with a few benefits that will help you in your daily life!
Accountability
Research has shown that wearing a fitness tracker can increase the user’s activity levels up by 30%. Fitness trackers have the capability to give you reminders throughout the day if you are being inactive to get some form of physical exercise in whether it be a workout or a walk.
Fitness trackers allow you to not only stay accountable of yourself but if you choose to you can share your steps or workouts with friends and “compete” against one another. This feature allows personal accountability but allows you to keep your loved ones or friends accountable as well.
Daily Motivation
The fitness tracker itself or its app allows a visual presentation of your progress. It will show your calories burned, steps taken, and time of being active throughout the day. The visual display will push you to work harder towards your goals or show the progress past the goal you’ve done. The fitness tracker will also remind you how close you are to your daily activity goals and how sometimes a short brisk walk can help you achieve those goals.
Setting Personal Goals
Everyone’s fitness journey is different whether it be for weight loss, training to run a marathon, or building muscle. Fitness trackers allow you to create daily goals for yourself. These goals can be the number of steps to take a day, number of calories to burn in a day, or timing your runs. The possibilities are endless, and you can customize them for yourself. By setting these goals you are able to see your progress towards your goals to keep you focused and motivates you to achieve your goals.
Stay Connected
Fitness trackers are able to connect to your phone by Bluetooth. You can set your phone to the side and workout with ease knowing that it will automatically sync into your phone. You can allow notifications to come through on your fitness tracker allowing you to not miss a thing without having to have your phone in hand!
Monitor Heart Rate
The underside of your fitness tracker has the technological advances to be able to measure your pulse and your heart rate. This allows you to know the intensity of your workout and keep you in the heart rate range to burn more calories. By being able to monitor your heart rate it also keeps you safe by knowing when you’ve workout has become too intense and you are overdoing it.
Eating Healthy
Sometimes your fitness tracker will have in its own app or through connection of a third-party app allow you to track what you eat and drink. Nutrition plays a big role in a healthy lifestyle so it’s important to track it as well as your physical activity. Tracking your food intake can keep you accountable to eat healthy as well as track your caloric progress, whether you are trying to increase or decrease your calories. You can also track your water intake to make sure you are getting the right amount of water every day.
Tracking Sleep
Adults on average need about 7-9 hours of sleep daily. If you are not sleeping enough it can impact many areas of your life like your metabolism, energy levels, mood, and cravings. By tracking your sleep, it will allow you to make healthier sleep choices over time to make sure you are resting enough for the next day ahead.
