Fitness tracker recommendations?
My employer is now offering a credit toward the purchase of a fitness tracker, making the most popular ones essentially free. I am considering taking them up on their offer, but I am not quite sure what to do with the gadget. Like many office drones, I need to eat less and exercise more, but it is not obvious to me how a tracker helps me in that effort. My guess is that a wearable device gives a more precise count of calories burned than traditional online estimates or manual activity and intake tracker apps such as MyFitnessPal (which I've tried - meh). So what? There is still the pie-hole / craft beer side of the equation to consider. Not clear how a fitbit helps there.
I suppose I have some curiosity to compare tracker biometrics with the displays on the elliptical machine or the stationary bike, not to mention some real-time data from the odd yoga class or middle-aged pickup hoops run. But again, so what? What do I do with it? Who cares if the tracker knows the GPS of the local Y or how far off the grid I hit a golf ball into an adjacent cow pasture or McMansion backyard?
The other bias I have is that I don't wear a watch and prefer not to wear anything on my wrist. (Telling time is what a phone is for, not talking to people! Duh...)
I am paralyzed by the dozens (hundreds?) of choices and vendors that are out there. I appreciate the chance to tap into the DBR collective for guidance and recommendations. Thanks in advance.
"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, Dad..."
this might be more feedback than you care....
My company decided to join Virgin Pulse. You can't sign up individually; only through setup with your corporate HR. Our company decided they wanted to get their employees moving more. Have walking meetings, go to the bathroom on the other side of the building, walk in from the parking lot from the farthest spot, taking the stairs, etc. Theory is the fitter/healthier the workforce, the less need be shelled out for health insurance premiums, short / long term disability, etc.
This program gives incentives that is driven primarily by how many steps you take a day. The corporate goal is to get a participant to average 7000 steps a day. Many of our employees could not believe they could get 7000 steps a day - you can tell the sedenary types who watch TV as soon as they get home! You rack up points based on the number of steps (10 points per 1000 steps, max of 140 points a day for steps), reading Daily Cards (20 points each, two a day), tracking Healthy Habits (10 points each, max of 30 a day, to track things like "Did you drink 8 glasses of water today?" or "Did you brush your teeth with your other hand?" or "Did you workout today?" - there's are over a hundred of these things - you pick a habit that you haven't embraced / developed yet and try to make a transition.) There are various bonus points that kick in for things like having over 7000 steps a day for 10 days in a row, or 10000 steps 10/20 days in a row.
You accumulate points for a quarter (Jan-Feb-Mar, Apr-May-Jun, etc.). During the quarter, if you score 500 points, you get $5. 3000 points, another $5. 7000 points, another $10, and 12,000 points, another $20. For a total of $40 per quarter. This is real money - you can exchange the dollars to buy all sorts of sport fitness gear or accessories at the VP store (head phones, wrist bands, or exchange dollar-for-dollar for any number of gift cards - we always go with Amazon gift cards - or cash to your bank account).
For people like my wife and me (or is that "myself" or "I"), we are already active in many ways that we didn't need the incentives of Virgin Pulse. I train for Tough Mudder, she does Barre3 4-6 times per week, we take a walk together 3.5 miles after work almost every day (with 600ft elevation gain), we easily clear 12000 points in just under two months and get our $40. But for many folks at work who tend to be sedentary, this is for them. We do it to champion the effort and get other people to move more. Virgin Pulse even has a social network feature where you friend each other and you can see daily step counts of how your friends are doing. Often, we get people who we cross in the hallways and they say things like "I'm going to pass you this weekend!" It's all fun.
You can use your smart phone to track steps and then upload it to VP. But our program also kicked in $25 to help pay for any tracking device on the VP site, from the lowend VP Max tracker (size of your thumb and maybe two fingers wide; this is what I have) - it's just a pedometer and can also track hours slept during the night - to higher end ($250>) brand name products.
If all you want to achieve is track how many steps you take in a day, your smartphone already does it, but you could spend as little as $25 to get a really nice pedometer and just toss it in your pocket or around your neck and never have to worry about whether you remember to bring your phone with you - some people hate carrying their phone when out running.
To me, this VP program is fun for the whole company. Individually, my wife and I don't need it (though the $40 x 2 = $80 per quarter is kinda nice to get).
Maybe you can talk your company into enlisting programs like Virgin Pulse.
Okay, so much for a low-end assessment of a tracker device...
All the other posters have given you some great feedback on various devices.
What is it you want to do to get exercise (and supplement your efforts with your tracker)? How you answer that question will help you decide which gear(s) to amass.
When I started training for the Tough Mudder four years ago (I've run 3 so far, doing the 4th in September here), I had to pick up running. Never run before in my life on any regular basis - I hated running. I came to learn how to run via Matt Fitzgerald's "80/20 Running" book and various other sources that running can be tackled in many different ways. I decided on a Garmin 310XT (a huge brick compared to all other wrist devices with GPS) because it can also be used for biking and swimming (intended for triathlete type activities). I biked to/from work for a while so my thinking was I would track my biking efforts as well. I got the generic Garmin heart rate monitor (strap around the chest; you get used to it) to go with it. My goal was to track distance (how many miles am I running each week, etc.) and do heart zone training. Heart zone training is all about keeping your heart rate in a certain window (e.g., 120bpm - 130bpm) for some duration of time. The watch will vibrate/beep at you if you run too hard, or not hard enough. When I do the 80/20 running, you are suppose to run slow enough in the 80 phase that you can actually carry on a conversation without having to take deep breaths - Fitzgerald calls it the Ventilatory Threshold. For me, that's when my heart rate doesn't exceed 120. So, trying to run slow enough to keep your heart from beating too fast is tricky without a heart rate monitor. It's so slow it's almost like walking! But adapting to the 80/20 regimen, I've actually improved my 5K up through half marathon times!
I also use the heart rate monitor when I do the high-intensity interval training (HIIT). I can see how quickly my heart is recovering. The more fit you are, the more quickly your heart will come down to normal after a particularly high-output effort. Over time, I have seen my recovery improve. And it's because I can see it in the graphs after I upload my workouts to the Garmin Connect site. Plus, even though you can kind of figure it out yourself, I can see which HIIT event really gets my heart going, which weight training exercise gets my heart going. I was very surprised that bicep curls really gets my heart rate up, and so do some of the plank excercises!
I believe many of the products, Polar, Garmin, etc. have websites that track a lot of details about your workouts. You can track your gear as you run or workout. The pure runners will change out new shoes when they hit a certain number of miles - I do that at 300 miles. There's a social network aspect as well where you can see what your friends/family are doing. A quick little story... My daughter tracks and we compete against each other to see who put up the most miles for a given week. One particular week, we were pretty close to each and towards the end of the week, I was about half a mile in total distance behind. Both of us were averaging somewhere around 4-5 miles a day. On the last day, I thought I would put in 6 miles so that I can pass her. As I'm closing in on 6 miles, I told myself "Do 7 just in case." so I ran another mile. Then I'm not sure what made me do it, but being the competitive Dad that I am, I decided to go 8. Surely my daughter wouldn't be doing 8 today (she is in Boston, I'm in Seattle). My daughter was thinking along a similar line about running a bit farther on this last day. She didn't check to see how far I went on the last day, but she had the same mind set of doing more than the usual 4-5. She decided to blow me away by doing 7. Then after 7 miles, decided to kick in one more mile just to be sure to really "stick it to Dad." Well, even though I put in 8, so did she and she won that week.
From a really fun aspect, I kept track of where we've been on vacation. For example, we recently did a 3-week trip to London, Paris and Amsterdam. Being a bit of a map nut in the first place, we tracked everywhere we walked while on vacation. We tracked where the taxi drove between Heathrow and our hotels, Charles de Gaulle and the hotel, etc. It's fun to revisit where we were on a given day during our trip and we can see exactly where we walked, what street we turned on, etc. We tracked how fast the Thalys bullet train chugged between Paris and Amsterdam.
The tracker device with a heart rate monitor is great for helping you figure out how to train more efficiently or alter your training. The calorie count has more advanced calculations based on the inclusion of your heart beat patterns. The tracker device without the heart rate monitor is really only going to track distances and steps and where you've been. And the caloric burn is more of a generic formula - about 100 calories per 1 mile moved no matter how fast or slow you do it. The ellipticals and other machines typically use a generic formula as well. You'll get completely different calorie burns readings on your tracking device (with or without a heart rate monitor). I tend to believe in what my 310XT and heartrate monitor measures and calculates.
If you're not a numbers geek, then you don't really need a tracking device at all, even if your company is going to help you pay for one.
But there are plenty of choices as you know if you need something to help you define/alter your training based on your goals (losing weight not being one of them). Maybe walking 7000 steps a day could be your goal!
If you want to set new personal records in races, having a device helps, but not necessary. In a way, these tracking devices only seem necessary for runners. If you don't run, you probably don't need one of these devices.