Fitness should be a big part of your life, it’s important to keep fit and healthy taking care of your body and treating it like a temple as the saying goes. While personal perseverance and accountability are crucial sometimes it’s good to have a little extra support to keep your moving towards your goal.
That is where fitness trackers come in! Wearable technology is all the rage nowadays, we’re moved on rapidly from basic pedometers that just count your steps and now the technology can help you in all aspects of fitness operating like your own personal assistant!
Accountability
The first and most obvious benefit to having a fitness tracking is the accountability that it instills, in essence you can see how you’re improving against yourself. The ‘gamification’ of exercise also helps keep you accountable and most of all FUN.
Add in the social aspects and you have a winning combination. Many fitness trackers offer the option to upload your results online straight from the device with WIFI so you have public accountability keeping you on track too. As well as offering group challenges with people in your local area/on the internet through social network that will add a competitive aspect to your workout.
Motivation
Another key benefit of fitness trackers is motivation, accountability and motivation go hand in hand with helping you stick to an exercise regime over time. Firstly the cost, buying a piece of gear puts you in the mindset to stick with your routine as you’ve already made the conscious decision to invest in yourself. Not only that but you’ll be motivated to beat your past records.
The fact that you’ll instantly have information at your fingertips about your progress is another great benefit to fitness trackers. Back in the good ole days the most you’d get with a fitness tracker is ‘steps done’ via a pedometer but nowadays the technology available offers a plethora of information.
They can now keep track of all sorts of variables such as steps, calories lost, distance travelled, heart rate and REM sleep. If you purchase a tracker with GPS capability you can also map your present self against your past self and be in competition with yourself helping you improve over time.
Goal Setting
This helps with goal setting which is important when creating a new fitness regime. While it’s perfectly fine to exercise when and where you can having a consistent plan you can stick to will help you progress faster and see results.
The best way to set goals is to set goals that you can control, instead of weight loss goals set the amount of steps you’d like to walk in a day or distance ran per hour. This way everything is in your control and result will follow as a by-product of that.
image credit: Flickr/John Biehler
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