Monday 20 January 2014

Post #CES fitness and @PolarGlobal

Hi all

I thought I would deviate from actual gadgets and take a holistic look at fitness for this week.

Fitness, diets and living healthy has always been very prominent in our current lifestyle. Nike with their Fuelband kicked off a the craze of fitness trackers, which was then emulated by the likes of Jawbone, Fitbit and others. During 2013 many of the larger brands (not just sports brands) jumped on board with some form of smart wearable device from Adidas to Polar and also Sony. Judging by the amount of companies showcasing wearable tech at CES it seems that 2014 will see an avalanche of these fitness trackers and smart wearable devices.

At their core these fitness devices capture movement in all 3 axis, which will show times of activity, non activity and sleep. They come with apps that allow the manual tracking of food, water consumption and some offer the gameification and social element.

Whilst it great to have a understanding of how active we are and how much sleep we get I feel the area of weakness that all these devices have is that they do not offer a base understanding of "how we are". Most of us will simply gauge how much we weigh and try to loose weight.!

Put it like this, when you join a gym you don't normally start busting some heavy weight, no you typically have some form of assement to capture a "base reading" then comes "target setting / what so you want to achieve" that could be improved fitness, weight loss or running 10Km.

With that in mind I have chosen to try out a few different methods to capture my "base" and then from there set my "targets". I will be blogging these in the next few posts.

So why am I telling you all this.? Simply put I feel that most folk will be perplexed by the amount of wearable tech being offered and if you don't know "what your goal is" then how do you know what piece of tech to buy.

Going out and dropping 450€ on the Polar v800 may seem like a great idea, but unless you are targeting triathons and training leading up to them, this may not be the best piece of tech for you. Taking nothing away form the v800 its a superb piece of kit.! But you may be better off with a sub 100€ Polar Loop.

Thanks

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