Digital arm candy: Unlocking fitness goals with tracker wristbands

What do Garmin Vivofit, Jawbone UP, Misfit Shine, Fitbit One/Flex, and Withings Pulse have in common? They are a number of wearable fitness trackers or fitness bands available in the market designed to keep you healthier, or at least more updated in keeping track of your daily steps, calories burned, heart rate, and other health indices. Think of them as highly evolved pedometers that can help you push yourself a little more toward achieving your fitness goals.

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Bad habits are just too hard to break, especially when it comes to maintaining the ideal weight or keeping solid with athletic training. The willpower can be swayed if not checked and motivation can dwindle. That is why fitness trackers fill the void as constant digital companions that record your fitness progress and remind you when it’s time to do pool laps or more kilometers.

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What’s even more beneficial is that these fitness bands can be synchronized with your smartphone or personal computer. This feature makes them even more powerful devices for storing data, providing stats about your caloric intake, sleep cycle, etc., and generally just helping you improve your life.

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Most of the fitness bands in the market resemble chunky arm bands designed for men; however, thriving competition among large and small digital corporations have forced out fashionable yet highly functional fitness bands for the female demographic. Some even offer fitness trackers in pendant form or as minute devices which can be attached to the belt or inserted into side pockets.

Make sure to further research on this device if you plan to own one. Everybody has different fitness goals and needs and the market has numerous options for fitness trackers to suit your personal requirements.  

Kevin Foote is all for health and fitness. Are you struggling to keep your New Year’s fitness resolutions? Learn more health and nutrition tips here.

REPOST: The 7 most important fitness tracker measurements

With new tech wares being developed to keep track of our vital signs and biometrics, staying fit just gets easier. Popular Science lists down 7 must-have fitness trackers.  

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In early 2015, Apple will release its first major product since 2010 -- a health tracker dubbed Apple Watch -- that will reportedly log a litany of biometric information using 10 different sensors. The wrist device has the same aesthetic as the Nike Fuelband, FitBit Flex, and the countless other fitness bands already available. With a rising number of wearables hitting the shelves, you’d better know what information is vital and how to make the most of it.

1. Step Detection

An algorithm translates an accelerometer reading into distance traveled and helps estimate activity level and calories burned.

Healthy Range: About 10,000 steps per day

2. Pulse

A sensor opposite an LED monitors fluctuations in light transmitted through your finger. The rise and fall of light indicates heart rate.

Healthy Range: 60 -- 100 beats per minute

3. Heart Rate Variability

A heart rate monitor measures the variation of beat-to-beat intervals. High variability is indicative of good health and a high level of fitness.

Healthy Range: 18 -- 44 percent variability while resting

4. Blood Oxygenation

A pulse oximeter detects the light absorption of hemo-globin to see how much oxygen reaches your extremities. That data helps athletes determine whether they’ve recovered fully from a workout.

Healthy Range: 95 -- 99 percent

5. Body Temperature

A thermometer that sits against the skin assesses surface temperature. Abnormal spikes or drops are early warning signs of sickness.

Healthy Range: 97.6 -- 99.6 degrees Fahrenheit

6. Sleep

Sensitive 3-D accelerometers detect small body movement during the night. When paired with continuous heart rate monitoring, it offers a rough idea of sleep stages -- light, deep, and REM.

Healthy Range: 7-- 9 hours of sleep

7. Blood Sugar

Sensors measure glucose in skin fluid using infra-red light or low-power radio waves. For diabetics, it’s a pinprick alternative. For others, it’s a way to see how diet affects health.

Healthy Range: 80 -- 140 milligrams per deciliter


Kevin Foote believes it's okay to indulge in roast beef and pumpkin pie, as long as you sweat it out the next day. Follow him on Facebook for more fitness talk.

Better sore than sorry: A guide to high-intensity interval training

Since the holiday season is upon us, it’s time to get busy not only with overflowing food but with intense workouts as well to fight the belly bulge. An effective workout for this is the HIIT.

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) involves doing a short all-out workout followed by short periods of active rest to make the body work harder than it does during a steady-state cardio.

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Here are six tips to start HIIT strong:  

1. Start slow and steady before build up

If you are new to intervals, it’s best to start with one or two high intensity sessions (exercises focusing on arms and lower body) per week and increasing in time as you go along. This will allow enough time for your body to adapt to increased workload.

2. Mix exercises that you love

Use intervals to supplement the workouts you already know and love to give a boost to your steady-state cardio. Mix in lifting, pilates, yoga, and other endurance training. This will give a fresh routine and prevent mental fatigue.  

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3. Establish a plan

Like any training programs, interval exercises should be planned. Try an interval training regimen like the Tabata Protocol or The Little Method to maximize the workout’s benefits and ensure your progress.

4. Always set the clock

Use a proper stopwatch or a smartphone app for interval training to manage the time of each and every exercise you perform. It can be tempting to go beyond the set time limit, but it’s much better to stick with the time allotted to avoid fatigue.  

5. Go hands-free on the treadmill

To increase the body’s oxygen use, which will eliminate more fat, do not use hand rails when running or jogging on a treadmill. Reduce speed if you have trouble staying on the belt.  

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6. Make small changes to prepare for big challenges

Tweak your old routine intervals by increasing your incline on the treadmill, lifting heavier weights, and increasing pace while doing jump rope.  

Kevin Foote, a health and fitness expert, raves about getting ripped with HIIT. To keep trim by good nutrition and exercise, subscribe to this blog to learn more.

REPOST: Medicine Balls Are Ancient Fitness Tools That Keep Bouncing Back

Medicine balls are weighted balls that are often used for strength training and fitness development. They are ancient wellness tools that have remained basic fitness equipment in these modern times. The following Reuters article discusses their versatility and significance:  

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(Reuters) - Medicine balls, the fitness tool as ancient as Hippocrates, have bounced, slammed, tossed and twisted their way into today's trendiest workouts, fitness experts say.

The durable, versatile spheres, which can range from 2 to 25 pounds (0.9 to 11 kg), fit into today’s most intense regimes, from boot camps to interval training.

Alonzo Wilson, creator of the New York City fitness studio Tone House, uses medicine ball exercises to strengthen and condition, and to boost team spirit.

He said the people who seek out his brand of extreme athletics often find medicine balls less daunting than his resistance harnesses or cords and ropes.

“They make people feel comfortable,” said Wilson, a former professional athlete. “We use them in partner throws, to hold and turn, to touch the ground with. Slamming the ball down while (jumping) in the air elevates the heart rate.”

In a fast-moving workout, he added, the balls allow freedom of movement.

“With a lot of machinery you’re kind of stuck,” he said. “But with the med ball you can run, jump, grab it, slam it and hold it while not staying in one spot.”

Daniel Taylor, the author of “Conditioning to the Core,” believes versatility is the secret of the medicine ball’s successful trickle-down from elite athletics to everyday workouts.

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Taylor, head strength and conditioning coach at Siena College in Loudonville, New York, said at the most basic level it is a user-friendly weight for people who are nervous about weights.

"A pushup executed with a hand on a medicine ball will train stability,” he said. “Throw or slam it (from overhead or against a wall), it can train power efficiently and well.”

But novices should start in the lighter range, advises Deborah McConnell, master trainer at equipment manufacturer Life Fitness.

She said the balls reappeared with the rise of boot camp and small group training classes. Ancient drawings date the medicine ball to almost 3,000 years ago, when Persian wrestlers trained with sand-filled bladders.

In ancient Greece, the physician Hippocrates is said to have stuffed animal skins for patients to toss for “medicinal” purposes. Gladiators used them to prepare for the arena.

The last great medicine ball revival was in the early 1900s.

"There was a game called the Hooverball, like volleyball with a medicine ball tossed over the net,” said McConnell about the trend that started when President Herbert Hoover’s physician suggested his overweight patient use the ball to shape up.

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Chris Freytag, a health and fitness coach with the American Council on Exercise, said the latest comeback spurred a rebirth of other weighted balls.

The medicine ball is like a heavy basketball and made to bounce, she explained, while the slam ball is made to slam without breaking and the deadweight ball is sand-filled and does not bounce.

“Now it’s this chic thing,” she said, “maybe because it feels more like playing. You’re not going to toss a hand weight.”


Sports and nutrition expert Kevin Foote champions fitness as the pathway to a healthy life. Subscribe to his blog for more health and wellness articles.

REPOST: Shaking up the wearables

The road to fitness is not an easy one to navigate. Only those who are truly determined get to see the result of all their hard work and sacrifices. But these days, we have innovations like digital fitness trackers that are designed to help us accomplish our fitness goals. But are we effectively utilizing these gizmos? The Economist explores the topic further in the article below.

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WHEN an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 struck Northern California on August 24th at 3.20am, it not only shook the ground—it also shook people awake. Strikingly, it is possible to identify the tremblor's epicentre by measuring the disrupted sleep suffered by thousands of people in the area who use a bracelet pedometer and sleep-tracking device made by Jawbone (see chart below). The company spotted trends in how long it took people to return to their slumber, and noted that 45% of people within 15 miles of the epicentre were unable to go back to sleep at all.

Image Source: economist.com

The fitness-tracking devices—often called “wearables” or “wearable computing”—emerged on the tech scene a few years ago. They promised to transform the burgeoning field of personal electronics: calculating the number of steps walked, calories burned or hours slept. After all, as computers get smaller and closer to people's bodies, gadgets for self-tracking seemed the next logical step beyond the smartphone. By 2013 they were a $238m market around the world, with products by Fitbit, Nike and Jawbone accounting for 97% of all smartphone-enabled tracker sales. Yet despite the fascinating data that can be collected from them, like patterns of behaviour during an earthquake, the devices still have a long way to go to match the early optimism that surrounds them.

The immediate problem is their limited appeal. They are primarily aimed at fitness fanatics, yet well over half of all Americans do not exercise regularly, and thus have little interest in the product. Fitness trackers also fail to keep the attention of those health-conscious consumers who do go out and buy them. Strikingly, one-third of users discard their devices after six months, according to research by Endeavour Partners, a consultancy. Some industry insiders speculate that the true number may be much higher than that. Wearable fitness-trackers are just not as addictive as smartphones and the like, it seems. The novelty of being able to track your steps, calories or other metrics is appealing at first, but swiftly wears off. Use a fitness tracker regularly, and you get pretty good at guessing the numbers.

Next, it is unclear at what pace the technology will evolve. The computer and smartphone industries advance quickly because there are many players and their products are indispensable. Not so self-tracking wearables. The uncertainty over the commitment of hardware-makers was underscored in April, when Nike fired the majority of the team responsible for its device, called FuelBand, and cancelled a new version of the product scheduled for release later this year. It shelved other similar projects as well, and said it would focus on software and fitness-tracking apps (which run on smartphones) instead.

One measure of a wearable device's success is whether you would turn around for it if you were halfway to work—as you would for a smartphone. Yet market research suggests that consumers are not willing to make an about-face and fetch their fitness trackers. In fact, Sonny Vu of Misfit, a wearable-computing company, expects the market for fitness trackers to contract over the next few years.

Some still hope that more capable wristbands, like “smartwatches”, might be the right interface to collect bodily data that is then sent to the smartphone (or perhaps one day replace the smartphone). Apple is said to have such a device in the works, and has hired people from Nike, presumably to work on it. The difficulty will be persuading consumers to make room for yet another device in their lives.

Self-tracking gadgets will probably only become a mainstream market once they shed their image as computerised jewellery or conversation-starters for fitness freaks and data geeks, and start collecting much more useful information related to health, such as vital signs and a wearer's biochemical changes. The data might be analysed to uncover health trends or to spot diseases before their full-blown symptoms appear. One can even imagine health-insurance companies offering discounts on premiums to people who wear the gadgets, just as car-insurance firms do for drivers whose cars are equipped with wireless devices that track where and when the car is on the road. By that time, the impetus to wear the self-tracking devices will be practical, not simply recreational. But until then, wearing a fitness tracker is a step further than most people are willing to go.  

I’m Kevin Foote, originally from Denver, Colorado, and a proud owner of a fitness-tracking device. You see, I like knowing if I have met my target number of calories burned for the day, all in the name of health and fitness. Do you own one? Let’s trade notes here.

How unplugging can help beat stress and keep people healthy

Stress does not only result from managing difficult situations at home, school, and office. It can also be caused by technology burnout.

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Every day, people spend around 11 hours to do many activities online—from following the news to communicating with friends to playing interactive games. These tasks require a vast amount of time and attention, which can drain one’s energy in the long run. Done repetitively on a daily basis, people could become exhausted and unenthusiastic to go outdoors, meet new people, and follow a healthy lifestyle.

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One way to avoid technology burnout is by unplugging or completely turning off the TV, mobile phone, computer, and other digital devices for a couple of hours a day to perform real-world activities.

Unplugging may not be easy but it is possible. Extroverts can start substituting their lost online time by engaging in social activities, like joining a fitness class or dining out with colleagues after work. Introverts, meanwhile, can make themselves busy by jogging or walking out their dogs to a nearby park. Once people are out in the open and become engaged in activities that keep them moving and having fun, they become energized and motivated again.

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Those who are having a hard time pausing from online activities and following a daily fitness routine can also seek help from a friend, workout buddy, or a personal trainer. Friends and fitness trainers do not just give moral support and a good company, they can also provide genuine advice and fitness plans to follow.  

Kevin R. Foote is a fitness advisor who believes that a physically active lifestyle is important to health and quality of life. Keep updated on the latest fitness news and updates by following him on Twitter.

REPOST: The crucial FDA nutrition label battle you probably don’t know about, but should

Not everyone is convinced on the proposal to tweak the Nutrition Facts label to include the"added sugar" section. Read what other experts say about the changes proposed by the FDA in the article below.

The devil is in the details. (FDA) Image Source: washingtonpost.com

At the beginning of this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made an announcement. For the first time in more than a decade, the FDA was mulling over making significant changes to the Nutrition Facts label (pdf) found on just about every food item sitting on grocery store shelves around the nation. More than five months later, the agency is still hearing vehement support from a number of advocacy groups and vicious dissent from several major food associations, and much of it is about one subtle but crucial proposed addition: an "added sugar" label.

The labeling (as pictured and pointed to above), is meant to communicate how much of any given food's sugar content wasn't in the food before it was produced and packaged. The FDA proposed the addition because, simply put, the American diet has become too saturated in sugar, and sugar, as it turns out, is too often added, rather than inherent, in foodstuffs. "On average, Americans eat 16 percent of their daily calories from sugars added during food production," the FDA noted in its news release. That's a sizable chunk we could all do without, or, at least, considerably less of.

Many health experts agree. "Added sugars exert deleterious health effects beyond empty calories," Frank Hu, a nutrition and epidemiology researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said at a public meeting held by the FDA last week.

But not everyone is so convinced. Namely, just about any and every industry and association such a label might negatively impact.

In a letter written on behalf of the American Bakers Association, American Beverage Association, American Frozen Foods Institute, Corn Refiners Association, International Dairy Foods Association and National Confectioners Association last month, the groups reached out to the FDA in what can only be interpreted as an effort to delay the proposed rule change. At the same public meeting held last week, a representative for the American Frozen Food Institute said he believes "certain aspects of the proposal lack some merit, particularly the addition of added sugar.” Andrew Briscoe, the president of the Sugar Association, expressed reluctance about the additional labeling, too. “There is no preponderance of evidence to justify an added sugar label," he said.

The reality is that Big Sugar is likely reeling in remembrance of what the addition of trans fat to labels in 2006 did to the ingredient (it's now virtually non-existent). Evidence of sugar's adverse effects on health is actually fairly preponderant. Several organizations, including the World Health Organization and American Heart Association, have warned against the harms of excess sugar intake, which has been linked to a number of diseases, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And Americans, as it happens, have been particularly good about over-consuming the stuff.

Per capita sugar consumption in the U.S. is still more than twice the recommended daily amount.

Image Source: washingtonpost.com

 

Part of that is undoubtedly linked to the country's growing appetite for, well, everything. Americans down almost 500 more calories today than they did 40 years ago.

But part of it is also likely due to the preponderance of extra sugars found in today's food supply, and, perhaps more specifically, the varying and increasing ways in which they're being buried in exhaustive ingredient lists and disguised with technical names like evaporated cane juice, fruit concentrate, glucose, diastatic malt and dextrose. There's sugar in just about everything today, and the vast majority of it is added during food production.

An explicit, quantifiable measure of added sugar would help pack any and all potential for misinformation into a single, easily digestible line on the back of food products. Sure, from an industry perspective, an added sugar by any single, identifiable name might not sell as sweet, but that's for Big Sugar to swallow — not the American populous.

For Kevin Foote, fitness and nutrition specialist, there's no shortcut to a lean and physically fit body. Like this Facebook page for more of his health and fitness advice.