‘If you feel fitness is expensive, try illness’, I read this in one of the gymnasiums I visited few days back and instantly believed it. People have started realising importance of fitness in their life and how its important to do preventive rather than breakdown maintenance. ( We Indians are known to believe in breakdown maintenance rather than preventive one ) There is an increase in cases of lifestyle related diseases such as Hypertension, Cardiac Arrest, Diabetes across the cross section of urban as well as rural population. Most of these threats to a healthy life can be avoided by just being watchful and careful about life style. Forming good healthy habits is a very important factor in staying fit and the same can be achieved easily by adopting the technology which is evolving fast around us. Most of these trouble makers such as hyper tension, heart disease are known arise from disproportionate weight and lack of daily exercise to keep your fit and in order. Though we vow to reclaim our fitness every time we get our health stats from routine pathology checks or when we get snubbed by our family physician however we rarely become successful in maintaining the tempo. Today I am going to introduce you to some technology based gadgets and services which would help you to commit yourself. I have always believed that measuring your efforts can bring out radical change in the expected output my belief stands true in the case of fitness related efforts as well.
Nowadays we are surrounded by gadgets, smartphones, tablets and laptops. Most of us carry at least one of these gadget with us wherever we go and we can use the same to measure so many things related to our efforts to stay fit. Let me show you how am I using my smartphone to get the best results out of my efforts to stay fit
I am using iPhone 5S which comes with a separate motion processor dubbed as M7 processor. It helps me to track my steps and therefore everyday I can measure how many steps I have taken and try to maintain the goal of achieving 10,000 steps. Its a very simple app which lets you know near exact status of your daily step count and it keeps you motivated to complete those 10,000 steps.
The next App which I use is Runkeeper, it helps me to track my daily walks with the map of each walk, distance travelled, speed of my walks and approximate calorie burn in the free version and if you buy the premium version it gives you lots of data points to analyse your activities. You can also view all this data through a web browser. This app gives you detailed analysis of your walks, your speed per kilometre, the total ascent or descent you make during these walks and all this data is very useful to understand how are you progressing to achieve your goals. There are also training plans designed by fitness experts and one can choose those plans to achieve certain goals. I have been using this app for past two months and barring a couple of failures it worked great for me.
The next App I use is Water Minder it helps me to measure and track my daily water intake. As you know its very important
to keep your body hydrated and it is correlated to your fitness. Most of the time in the past at least I was not drinking enough water hence I started using this App. Based on your height, age and weight the App suggests the ideal daily water intake and you can add data to the app as soon as you gulp a glass of water. You can also schedule reminders so that the App reminds you to hydrate your body at prescribed intervals.
Now these are some of the Apps which helps you to track your efforts to stay fit however the constraint is these apps work on a smartphone and you need to carry this smartphone with you every time. At times most of these smartphones exhaust after a busy day and they stop monitoring certain actions such as steps or your walks. To balance out these deficiencies the concept of wearable fitness gadgets got evolved. Now you have quiet a few number of wearables which can help you to track your steps, exercise, sleep and such related activities.
Fitbit is one of such companies which brought a wearable band which measures steps as well as sleep and transport the data to an Application on your smartphone. Such wearables reduce your dependence on smartphones to measure your activities.
Recently I have subscribed to really unique combination of Wearable + App + Coach kind of ecosystem. The name of this company is GOqii and you can find more about them at http://www.goqii.com. Its an amazing service wherein not only you wi
ll be able to measure all your activities but can also get timely advise and suggestions based on your efforts from a human fitness coach who would constantly monitor your stats. The data from your wearable device would get synced to the App and then the same would be sent to your fitness coach. Its indeed an exciting concept and workable model wherein your can expect good output for your efforts. I have enrolled for the program and once I start the same I shall update about my experiences in my next blog till then stay put and stay fit !!!!
mandyisms 