Smartwatches and other fitness-tracking wearable technologies have become incredibly popular in recent years.
These days, countless manufacturers offer products designed to help us track our workouts, exertion level, and progress.
The question is, how do these devices help us, and are they worth the money?
Let’s discuss.
What Are Fitness-Tracking Wearables?
Fitness-tracking wearable products are designed to provide data that can help you better understand your training, the effort you put in, and if you should make changes.
A popular fitness-tracking item is the heart rate monitor. The two most common options are those you wrap around your upper torso (chest straps) and wrist (optical heart-rate monitors). Wearing such an item is beneficial for tracking your heart rate before, during, and after your workouts to determine things like:
- Effort
- Fitness
- Cardiovascular capacity
Smartwatches are another popular fitness-tracking wearable. While not designed for fitness uses alone, smartwatches are great because you can use them to track training duration, log workouts, monitor heart rate, and much more.
What Benefits Do Smartwatches And Similar Devices Offer?
A notable benefit of smartwatches and similar devices is that you can track your workouts more easily. Smartwatches allow you to track your heart rate, caloric expenditure, and other valuable metrics that hint at your overall performance, exertion, and progress. Similarly, many smartwatches allow integration with apps like Fitbod, Strong, and such, allowing you to log your workouts and access your data from your phone or computer later.
Another benefit of smartwatches is that you can track your activity level through steps taken. That way, you can more easily ensure that you’re active enough during the day and reach the recommended 10,000 steps.
The third notable benefit of smartwatches is that you can track sleep quantity and quality, providing essential data for how you’re recovering at night. Based on the data, you can make changes to improve your sleep, progress quicker, and stay healthy.
Plus, some smartwatch models are completely waterproof, which means you can use them for swimming to track valuable metrics, set timers, and more.
Fitness-Tracking Wearables: A Passing Trend or Here to Stay?
Smartwatches are here to stay. These devices receive huge updates annually, and the demand is only getting bigger. Smartwatches will likely become a huge part of fitness and make the entire experience much more pleasurable, thanks to their ever-improving pairing capabilities and tracking.
Plus, thanks to the rapid innovation, fitness-tracking wearables are becoming more affordable, which will expand the market, allowing more people to take advantage.
Conclusion
Fitness-tracking technologies are relatively new, and many people see them as nothing more than a gimmick. But, as you can see, these products can offer numerous fitness-related benefits to the consumer, making it easier to track workouts, log your activity, and have fun.
Plus, technologies like smartwatches make it so that you don’t need to take your phone with you everywhere you go, which can be nice if you want to de-stress with a nice workout in the gym or at the local park.