I was kindly selected by journalist Fiona Outdoors, to try out the fitness trackers , Jawbone Up, and report back my findings.
Now as an active person due to the nature of my job, I thought this would be a handy/interesting tool to see what activity I do in a day.
The gadget itself is a small braclet you wear around your wrist (remove when showering or swimming). You link it to the free app on your smart phone, plug in and see what activity has been tracked.
Sleep/steps are tracked with the Jawbone Up, you can also link sport and diet apps such as Strava, my fitness pal etc to the app to help record other things you have logged. I personally find that all a bit much, I do record the odd jog/walk on strava but half the time Iam driving down the road and have logged a 1 min mile …oooppss not a true reflection on my shuffling pace!
The app taught me that we are recommended by ?? Government? Mr Motivator? Ms Whiplash ? to step at least 10,000 steps a day, this includes your steps to turn the tv on and off , or to visit the fridge again. Every day I wore the device I hit over 100% some days nearer 300% to recommended steps. I let my better half, Keith use it one day he had a fairly sedate day at work, he came back with less than 100%. This surprised me, I am a little more active than I thought. What I did have to consider was days I was doing 1 fast/short run, that would perhaps be physically more tiring for me , than slower longer runs, I would obviously record less steps. So although I would have a smaller percentage , I may have trained a lot harder or more efficiently ??
I slowly like a crazed competitve fiend would become a serial checker of my steps, I started trying to walk up and down the stairs to get to the 300% mark, as lets be honest 297% just isn’t quite as cool as 300%.
If you are someone who is not partiularly active, perhaps works at a desk, I would highly recommend this gadget to keep you literally on your feet and get yourslef a little more active. Give the dog an extra or longer walk, add a longer cool down/ warm up to your Cani-Fit session 😉
I wouldn’t recommend this as an aid for training, if you want to increase mileage or pace for a race perhaps its not necessarily the gadget for you.
The sleep tracker was interesting, the first 3 times, then I got bored looking back at my 3 am wake up pee calls. It will tell you when you are sound asleep, light sleeper or wide awake. Not sure in what way it would aid anyones sleep, but tracks it never the less. Needless to say my sleep like my activity was normally at 100%.
A nice write up about this and other gadgets in todays Daily Record,
Check out Fiona’s blog for more fitness and outdoor reviews
http://www.fionaoutdoors.co.uk/
If you need to up your activity but struggle for time, bring the dog and join us at www.cani-fit.com
