This is the time of year when many people start making resolutions for next year. Increasing physical activity is popular; valuable goal.
If you're looking to get more active in 2024, you may have invested in or are considering purchasing an activity tracker.
But what are the benefits of an activity tracker? And is a basic tracker enough or do you need a fancy one with lots of features? Let's take a look.
Why use an activity tracker?
one of most powerful predictor Whether it is active or not you are watching How active you are.
Most people have a vague idea of how active they are, but this is often inaccurate. When people start consciously tracking the amount of activity they're doing, they often find that it's less than they thought, which motivates them to be more active.
Although it is possible to self-monitor without an activity tracker (just by writing down your actions), this method is difficult to maintain long-term and compared to devices that track your every move 24/7. Accuracy is also much lower.
You can see if you're meeting your goals by tracking your steps and “active minutes.” Physical activity guidelines (150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week).
You can also track progress on your personal activity goals and see your progress over time. All of this would be difficult without an activity tracker.
Research shows that the most popular brands of activity trackers are generally reliable when it comes to tracking basic metrics, such as: step and Activity time.
But wait, there's more
Many activity trackers on the market today track a variety of other metrics that manufacturers tout as important in health and fitness monitoring. But is this really the case? Let's look at some of these.
resting heart rate
This is your resting heart rate, usually somewhere between 60 and 100 beats per minute. As your health improves, your resting heart rate gradually decreases, especially if you do a lot of high-intensity exercise. The risk of dying from any cause (all-cause mortality) is much lower if you have the following diseases: low resting heart rate.
Therefore, it is useful to monitor your resting heart rate. Activity trackers are great at tracking your heart rate, but you can also easily measure your heart rate by monitoring your pulse or using a stopwatch.
heart rate during exercise
Activity trackers also measure your heart rate when you're active. To effectively improve their fitness, professional athletes focus on keeping their heart rate within a certain range.zoneTherefore, it is important to know your heart rate during exercise.
But if you don't have a specific training goal in mind and just want to be more active and healthy, you can exercise at a level that's comfortable for you and not worry about your heart rate during activity.of the most important thing It means that it is active.
You can also use a dedicated heart rate monitor strapped to your chest to more accurately measure your actual heart rate. compared An activity tracker that you wear on your wrist.
maximum heart rate
This is the maximum heart rate your heart can beat during activity, and it cannot be maintained for very long. Maximum heart rate is not affected by exercise or fitness level.
most activity trackers If you don't measure accurately Anyway, it's probably best to forget about this.
VO₂max
Muscles need oxygen to work. The more oxygen your body can process, the harder it can work and the healthier you will be.
VO₂max is the maximum (max) volume (V) of oxygen (O₂) that you can breathe in one minute, expressed in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute (ml/kg/min). Her VO₂max for inactive women and men will be less than 30 ml/kg/min and 40 ml/kg/min, respectively.
A reasonably good VO₂max is in the mid-30s or higher for women and in the mid-40s or higher for men.
VO₂max is another measure of fitness. well correlated All-cause mortality: The higher it is, the lower the risk of death.
For athletes, VO₂max is usually measured on a treadmill in a laboratory while wearing a mask that measures oxygen consumption. Instead, the activity tracker looks at your running speed (using a GPS chip) and heart rate and compares these measurements to other people's values.
If you can run fast at a low heart rate, your tracker thinks you're relatively healthy and your VO₂max is high. These estimates are not very accurate Because they are based on many assumptions.
However, the measurement errors are fairly consistent. This means that if your VO₂max is increasing over time, you're likely getting healthier.
So what is the take-home message? Look at the number of steps you take each day and the number of minutes of activity you complete. Even basic activity trackers measure these factors relatively accurately.
Unless you're serious about exercising, there's no need to track other metrics or pay a premium for an activity tracker that records them.
Corneil VanderanotteTeaching Research Fellow: Physical Activity and Health; CQ Australian University
This article is republished from conversation Under Creative Commons License.read Original work.
