Fitness tracker buyers guide
Fitness trackers are a great tool to keep an eye on your activity, help manage your weight, and bring your attention to your health throughout the day. There are several devices available, and this article will review the top five that we’re recommending.
back to menu ↑What are the best fitness trackers?
Here we will take a look at our best fitness trackers from the hundreds of fitness tracker reviews that we have researched and analysed in great detail.
back to menu ↑What are fitness trackers?
Fitness trackers are devices that you wear on your wrist to track and record several pieces of important data throughout the day. Some of them are specific only to this purpose, whereas others are multifunctional watches, called smartwatches.
All fitness trackers will do the same basic activities:
- Track the number of steps you take, and translate that into a total distance that you’ve walked each day. The few steps that you take making your bed in the morning count! So do the thousands of steps you take if you go for a run.
- Track your calories burned, based on assumptions about your weight, height and age that you enter into the device.
- Track your pulse, which it reads off of your wrist.
Fitness trackers on the pricier end of the spectrum do much more, such as:
- Use GPS to map out your outdoor runs.
- Connect to your phone so you can send texts and receive calls.
- Connect to music apps so you can stream music from your tracker to your headphones.
- Perform multi-sport activities like cycling and swimming.
What are the benefits of fitness trackers?
Fitness trackers can help keep you motivated. Having a step goal each day will give you something to work towards. You can look at the tracker throughout the day to see how far you’ve gone, and depending on the model, you may get notifications if it looks like you are in danger of reaching your goal. Once you get used to the idea of reaching something like 10,000 steps a day, it will become a habit. At that point that you can increase your goal to the next level.
The trackers can also benefit you by improving your sleep. Most people have no idea what happens after they fall asleep. Using any of these trackers, you’ll suddenly have data that you’ve never had before. You’ll see how often you wake up during the night. You’ll see how deeply you fall into sleep. This information can help you understand if any lifestyle changes need to be made to help you sleep better.
Another area of benefit that comes from using fitness trackers is the sense of community that they create. Most of the models on our list automatically connect you to friends and contacts in your phone that have the same technology. If you have a partner and both of you have the same brand of tracker, you’ll be able to challenge each other and motivate each other.
back to menu ↑How to choose the best fitness tracker for you
There are many factors to consider when selecting a fitness tracker. The most important are:
- Price: The options we’ve given above range from very expensive to very affordable. There is a fitness tracker available for almost any budget, so make sure you decide in advance how much you want to spend.
- Activities: Different trackers are better for different activities. If you are a serious runner, cyclist or swimmer, then a heavy-duty tracker like the Apple Watch would be a good investment. If you are looking to reach a step goal but not to get into tough training sessions, then a basic model will be more appropriate.
- Accuracy: The entry-level models have great price points, but may have sacrificed some accuracy in step count or distance tracking. If accuracy is important to you, a model with GPS built in will help.
- Look/Design: Most trackers have options for the colour of the wristband. Higher-end models will also be interchangeable as fashion items as well. This is especially true with models that are watches, as opposed to the slimmer looking trackers.
Conclusion
Fitness trackers have become so popular that there are now dozens of options to choose from. Picking the right one for your needs will depend on how active you are or plan on being, how important the specificity of the data is to you, and what kind of activities you are going to use it for.
Once you decide and make the purchase, in order to get the most benefit from your tracker, you should wear it all the time. By allowing continuous tracking of your steps, your activity, and your sleep, you will be able to see data trends. This will allow you to find out what is going well, and to make decisions about what needs to be improved in your training and your health.
Happy training!
Rich
Rich is an avid bodybuilder who has dedicated over 20 years of his life to the sport. He has a strong passion for health and fitness, living a clean lifestyle with a commitment to helping others educate themselves and fulfil their true potential.
