How To Improve Your Overall Health By Wearing A Fitness Tracker Daily
Not staying active can have a wide range of adverse health impacts on both the body and mind. Whatever the case may be in your life, staying active should be one of your top priorities! With that said, many individuals feel they have no idea where to start when it comes to being active. Luckily, you don’t have to be at the same level as professional athletes to see the results you are looking for. In fact, seeing significant health benefits is as simple as wearing a fitness trackerto count steps, log exercise, and many other perks. Health benefits of fitness trackers range from very specific and measurable to broad and indirect. Curious? Check out this awesome list of the benefits of wearing a fitness tracker.
Tracks Healthy Progress
When most individuals start a new fitness routine, they have a goal in mind. This goal might be something specific - such as trying to lose twenty pounds - or may also be as general as increasing self-esteem. Regardless of your goals, one critical element of maintaining a routine is to keep track of your progress, which is infinitely made simpler when wearing a fitness tracker. You don't need a top end device like a Fitbit as just about all of them will count your steps for you. Many models will also track heart rate during exercise, log specific workouts, count calories burned, et cetera. The historical data is excellent for seeing how much progress you have made towards your health goal.
Promotes Accountability
If you were wearing a fitness tracker, you would have the data you need to increase your goal to walking ten thousand steps today instead of your nine thousand steps from this time last week. In fact, many fitness trackers will buzz to remind you to work towards beating your previous scores. If you have a friend who also wears a fitness tracker, there is the added accountability to each other if you choose to compare data. Some fitness tracker manufacturers have caught onto this and now include a feature to add and challenge friends in their fitness tracker smartphone and computer apps. Your data tracked includes your heart rate, which has a significant impact on overall health.
Provides Safety During Exercise
Exercising without a fitness tracker can mean overdoing it for many people, particularly those just starting a new routine or those who have specific health conditions. There is no real way to tell just how hard you are pushing yourself without a way to track the data, which is where fitness trackers come in handy. Remember, there are models out there able to track heart rate, both resting and during physical activity. For those who suffer from a heart condition, this feature opens up the possibility of exercise, since it gives them a convenient way to track their heart rate. Who doesn't want the best results from their exercise routine?
Reach Target Heart Rate
Of course, the heart rate monitoring feature doesn’t just promote safety during exercise. It also means more effective exercise because the flipside of overdoing it is not exercising efficiently. You have to raise your heart rate to burn calories! Fitness trackers give you the ability to easily reach the target heart rate for burning calories, which varies based on age. According to the American Heart Association, the target heart rate for the average individual should be within fifty to eighty-five percent of their maximum heart rate, which is roughly two hundred twenty minus the person’s age, depending on exercise intensity.
Counting Calories Burned
To lose weight you have to burn calories, which means you need to boost your heart rate. However, just making your heart race does not give you an accurate idea of how many calories you are burning, which means losing weight is going to be difficult. Wearing a fitness tracker provides a log of how many calories you have burned during exercise and even a daily total. Thus, if your weight loss goal means you need to burn five hundred calories a day, your fitness tracker will let you know when you have hit your goal, or identify where you are be lacking. Of course, the calories you burn are only part of the equation when it comes to health.
Tracking Food Choices
Exercise is not the only part of a healthy lifestyle—food is the second essential piece of the puzzle. Losing weight, or maintaining it, comes down to the right balance of eating healthy food in appropriate portions and getting enough exercise. So you need to know what you are eating to make a difference. You can track your food on your own with a pen and notebook, but fitness trackers make it incredibly easy to input this data into their accompanying apps. These apps often have extensive databases of food already, which means you don’t need to manually input calories each time you log an item.
Account Of Sleeping Habits
The effects of sleep deprivation vary from individual to individual, based on habits, how much they are getting, sleep quality, how long sleep deprivation goes on for, et cetera. Typical results of not getting enough sleep include increased stress, lower productivity, higher risk of depression, lethargy, and susceptibility to physical illnesses. In short, your sleeping habits are a critical part of your overall health!
The majority of fitness trackers out there also include a function to track sleep, including how long you sleep, how deeply, and how many complete sleep cycles you reach in a night. This data helps you assess if you need to adjust your sleeping habits, and better identify what might be disrupting your sleep and how significant the impact is.