Why use an Activity Tacker? Follow @CoachFabs

As I was talking with a customer I wanted about Activity trackers I thought about writing a small blog post as to why I consider the information provided by these devices fairly important to give you a better idea into why they might be a great tool in your arsenal as you plan and execute your fitness plans.

After doing research for a few months I decided to purchase the Polar Loop from Amazon. Every tracker seemed to have benefits and drawbacks, but for my needs this one seemed to be the best option.

Some of the reasons where

- Chest Strap Integration

- My Fitness Pal Integration

- iOS and Android Compatible

I also added the H7 Heart rate Monitor which is a bluetooth device that allows you to accurately track your heart rate as you workout, there are many people that dislike wearing the chest strap, but from all the reviews and blogs I read it seemed to be the most accurate reading over that done on your wrist.

The integration to My Fitness Pal is a fairly new thing, and it has been done with many other activity trackers in the market. 

My Fitness pal allows you to set a fitness goal (Gain Muscle, Reduce body Fat), allowing you to set your percentages of Carbs, Protein and Fats. 

It also has a very easy search function to find foods and their nutritional content so you can enter meals in no time.

This Free application allows you to track your food daily, showing you how many calories you should take in order to reach your goals, now the beauty of the integration with the fitness trackers is that it will update the number of calories based on your exercise as well, if you look at the image below it has automatically updated the number of calories I need to consume based on my exercise. In my case I am trying to add mass so it is telling me I burned 423 calories which I need to consume to be able to still put on mass.

Activity Tracking 24/7

Another great thing about activity trackers is they can give you insight into what your day looks like and how good of a night sleep you got. There are so many other graphics that show your weekly, monthly and daily goals and how you are tracking towards success.

Tracking Training Output

Whenever talking with one of my clients the question always comes up, how are your workouts going? Different workout Types have different goals, I believe we should all be training with a variety of workouts to be able to target different areas of our fitness ability.

Below are three samples of my workouts, three very distinct target zones, this gives me great insight as well into what I can be doing better on my workouts, am I hitting the right target zone ? Am I working hard enough ?

Weight Training

The goal of this type of workouts is to build muscle, the majority of time should be spent on target zone 2, the pace I set for it on my workout was ok, but I can slow it down a little and make sure I contract more on each set.

Cardiovascular Training (Cardio)

The goal of this type of exercise is to burn more calories, helping your body to go into your fat stores and burn fat reserves, the desired target zone for this type of workout is between 3 and 4. From the target zone training information I see I spent way too much time on zone 2, that is not the goal, so I can definitely step it up there.

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) 

The goal of this type of workout is to, among other things, increase your anaerobic threshold, get you fit and go it fast, average workout is between 20-30 minutes long and your goal is to go at a very high intensity, we are talking between zone 4 and 5, but trying to push zone 5 at a higher rate. So you can see from the graph I did hit the goal, but there is still room for improvement in hitting the zone 5.