Fitness trackers, do they work?
By Jay Johnson
See everybody wearing them. People going to the gym, your waiter at a restaurant, the bagger at a grocery store, professors at school, your trainer...but why? Fitness trackers are no doubt a new craze, especially within the past five years to a decade as can be seen literally all around you. In my personal opinion, fads such as this happen for a select few reasons: Keeping up with the Joneses with the new toys, trying something different or new, or actually for the function that it was intended for.
Utilizing my knowledge and history with fitness trackers, I’ve compiled this list of the reasons WHY one should consider buying a fitness tracker. These should be used to determine whether or not it’s worth the investment on your end, or just a choice to buy some expensive digital jewelry for no particular reason:
- You are looking to lose weight: not to be confused with tracking calorie deficit‘s, fitness trackers are a great way to track weight loss, in a way that it is controlled and done properly. Most of them have an application for your phone for access and tracking as well as syncing with other fitness applications
- You want to improve your heart rate
- You are looking to improve times, running, swimming, circuit training, etc.
- You want to track how many calories you burn during weight training, or any type of training that is not cardio related
- You want to track calorie deficit‘s
- Competitive/social network reasons
- Tracking your sleep patterns nightly
Keeping up with fitness plans if it's nutrition, training, or your heart rate progress to ensure that you are on track with meeting the expectations of your plan is a huge plus to trackers as well.
As with anything, tracking progress and having an understanding of where you stand to know where you're going is what it takes for continued improvement. For that reason, I definitely am a fan of fitness trackers and can say that I'd agree with their purpose in helping pursue a successful fitness lifestyle!
