If you’re new to fitness trackers, or you’ve bought one but then lost interest in it, you may well have noticed that while they can help you monitor a range of activities and a rough estimation of the calories you’re burning, they’re typically missing a vital ingredient: the actual impact of what you’re doing for your fitness.
Type ‘Best activity trackers 2015’ into your browser and you’ll find a variety of devices that count your steps, the distance you’ve walked, and give you an educated guess on how many calories you’ve burnt as a result. They may also take into account whether you’ve been walking quickly rather than slowly, or climbing steps instead of walking on flat surface. The more sophisticated the tracker, the more features you can expect – such as telling it you’re cycling, running etc. so this can be added to the plethora of nice-to-know information, including features to monitor how many times you’ve moved in your sleep and/or some even providing instantaneous “one-off” heart rate readings.
But what if your exercise regime doesn’t fit easily into these basic categories or if you’d like to know what is actually happening to your body during your training? What if you’re doing HIIT training or cardio exercises at the gym that get your heart pumping, but add virtually nothing to your step count? You could find your tracker gives you more credit for your journey to and from the gym than the exercise done when you’re actually there!
Every cardio intensive exercise does really count, whether done in or outside the gym, and they are the key in getting your fitness level rising.
Unfortunately fitness trackers focusing on activity tracking are not analysing the effect your training has on your actual fitness level, as they fail to measure the physiological transformations going on in your body. Heart rate monitors with sophisticated analytics capabilities are – without forgetting how important it is to get accurate continuous readings to base the information on, overcoming the “garbage in – garbage out” syndrome. With PulseOn your heart rate is transformed into meaningful insights into your training without the uncomfortable chest strap!
