In these uncertain times it is even more important to stay active and fit and maintain your mental wellbeing. Technology can help you keep track of your movement and fitness as your life may become less active.
We’ve mentioned before about wearable technology and how it’s fast becoming the spearhead of development within health, fitness and living a healthier more active lifestyle. There literally is a gadget out there of some description that will measure a particular metric or multitude of metrics and convert this data into easily digestible information for its consumer.
In this little snippet I’m going to focus on the activity tracking watch. Regardless of brand and style they essentially do the same thing, they calculate things like calories burned, steps made and distance covered however this is all dependent on the information you’ve given the watch in the first place. For the steps or distance it isn’t an issue but for the calorie expenditure your age, gender and current weight are all factors which will effect the figure it calculates as a whole so it is really important that if you are using it to help with your weight loss journey, you also keep it up to date with your current stats.
Watches are really good in our point of view because the watch when used properly know more about an individual than they perhaps know themselves, and certainly more than we as trainers know them initially. They know when the individual is moving or not, sleeping or not, how much movement has occurred, how regularly and for how long. From all this combined with the information you’ve supplied the watch it says you’ve burned X calories. Remembering back to a previous post it takes 3500 calories to burn 1lb of fat, hence a 500kcal daily deficit will yield a 1lb mass reduction over 7 days. The age old question of ‘how many calories do I need?’ Has never been answered so simply. The watch is accurate, certainly more accurate than guesstimating how much exercise you do, and what you see as exercise the watch may not.
For best results we recommend using your watch or tracker, take the average daily expenditure over the course of a week and consume 500 calories less than your expenditure and track your meals using MyFitnessPal. The use of MyFitnessPal will help you stick to your macro splits effectively and accurately which will significantly up your gains.