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Whatever be your age, gender or profession, being fit is an utmost necessity. When you are fit you can work without becoming tired or sick. Fitness helps your to do all your household chores with ease. Being fit helps you remain healthy in your old age. Everyone must cultivate the habit of being fit so that you spend lesser on your healthcare bills.
Everyone knows the benefits of being fit. Being fit helps you to remain healthy. Apart from your physical health, regular exercises also help in making you mentally tough. Being mentally tough helps you achieve your goals. Being fit also helps in improving the energy levels in the body. it has been proved that regular exercise helps in generating new mitochondria which are the power packs in your cells. Being fit and healthy will naturally make you happier. It also helps in improving your self-confidence.
With so much depending on your being fit, you must make exercising a habit. Fitness trackers are gadgets that help you know how much you have progressed and what you must do to achieve your fitness.
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Know What A Fitness Tracker Is
Everyone is now talking about fitness trackers. Many companies are marketing these gadgets online. You see people who are walking or exercising, regularly look at their wrists. They are not looking at the time. They are looking at their wearable fitness trackers to see how much more they must walk to achieve their daily goals. These gadgets look much like a watch and is usually worn on the wrist. So, what does a fitness tracker do?
These wearable devices, also called activity trackers, can measure metrics related to your fitness. These include the distance you have walked or run, the calories you have burned and in many cases your heartbeats too. There are many models that can be set to measure your sleep also, because sleep is an important part of being fit. These are usually synced to your smartphone that apps for converting these measurements into data that you can understand and take necessary action.
You can feed your personal details like your weight, normal diet and your habits into these apps. This will help in setting your fitness goals that the fitness trackers will use to tell you how many calories you must ideally lose.
Understanding The Working Of A Fitness Tracker
We have seen what data these fitness trackers can collect and use. But it is essential to know how these gadgets really work. You must know how a wearable device gathers information relating to your movement and health. How do these devices collect these and generate the statistics that you can read on the connected app?
These devices use a three-axis accelerometer to detect your movements. Some of the models also have gyroscope to detect rotation and orientation. Many of the models have an altimeter to measure the height you have climbed whether it is on a mountain or your office staircase. All these data are collected and converted into steps and activities. These are converted into readings in your mobile app. It is the sensors that read the movements and more sensors give you more accurate readings.
These gadgets can also collect your vital statistics like heartbeat and sleep. Many of the premium brands have a bioimpedance sensor that can track your heartbeat. Other models use light that is shined on your skin. This can detect the blood being pumped in the capillaries and thus measure your heartbeat. These can help to check your heartbeat as you do your exercise. This is very useful for people with some disease conditions. The devices also use your wrist movements to track your sleep. This may not be very accurate but can give you an idea of how much you sleep.
Can Fitness Trackers Measure The Calories Burned?
This is one of the most important data that we require to remain fit and maintain our weight. Without knowing the calories burned and how much more you must burn to achieve your targets you cannot plan your exercise or your diet. Do the fitness trackers measure the calories burned? Yes, they do measure calories. They measure the movements that you have made in a day and use the data to calculate the calories that you have burned. There is an algorithm that all these trackers use for calculating the calories burned.
There Is More To Do To Maintain Calories Using Your Tracker
But for this to be useful for you, you must know how many calories you have burned. This requires the activity recorded by the fitness tracker and the data you have entered in the app manually to be integrated. The calories you have burned will depend on your BMR which is expanded as basal metabolic rate. This is the number of calories needed for your normal activities and will depend on your height, weight, age and sex. The BMR is usually half of the total calorie you have burned.
If you are keen to maintain your calories using the tracker, then you must enter the details of food that you consume every day. That will tell the app the number of calories that you are consuming. It will help the app to tell you how many calories you must lose for maintaining your body weight. Once this goal is set, your tracker can help you do enough exercise to ensure that you are burning so many calories in a day.
The Verdict
There is no doubt that fitness trackers can help you with losing or maintaining your weight by helping you consume and lose the correct number of calories. Though none of these devices are highly accurate, they help to guide you with your exercises and eating habits. They also act as a motivating factor for exercising. These trackers keep telling you how much more you must do and this helps to make you exercise more.
