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| Image courtesy of underconsideration.com |
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas break and I wish you all a very happy new year. I spent my break eating too much, drinking too much and being a couch potato. Inevitably it’s the New Year so I will be following the trend and trying to regain my fitness, eat healthier and drink a lot less. Luckily for me I received a new Fitbit Charge 2 to help my efforts.
I haven’t used a Fitbit before but my mum and girlfriend have the original one. They are always trying to make me go for walks with them in order to get their 10,000 steps and I never really understood the motivation for it until receiving one for myself.
In order to utilise the Fitbit watch you will need to download the app, which is fully compatible with iOS, Android & Windows phones and can be synchronised with ‘My Fitness Pal’. The app provides a dashboard of today’s steps, distance walked, heart rate, calories burnt and active minutes. This is all customisable as is the display on the watch. It also adds a competitive edge when you have your friends group wearing the watch as it keeps a running total of steps for the week. You’re able to taunt and motivate them too which is a little added fun.
The Fitbit charge 2 has really come along since the original watch, the new design looks slick, the battery life lasts up to five days, it comes with a customisable screen and you can change the straps. To run through the watches features you simply press the button on the left hand side.
In my opinion one of the best features is Exercise. If you know you are performing some exercise; be it the gym, a run, tennis, football you can go to the exercise feature and it will capture the distance you have travelled, heart rate, calories burned, overall time of workout and the impact the workout has had on your day. All of this is displayed in a really easy to view graphical display which I found brilliant. These workouts are all stored on the app and you can access them at anytime if you wanted to use them as a benchmark.
The exercise feature can be customised on the app to show your 7 most common workouts, the list of workouts is a little limited as it only includes two sports which are Golf and Tennis. However if you are doing an activity such as football, rugby etc. you can just use the ‘Workout’ or ‘Run’ option.
If you sit in an office all day like myself you may find the hourly activity feature really useful. This feature will set you little goals every hour in order to give you a short break from staring at the dull spreadsheets your brain is being frazzled by and give you that boost you needed to tackle the rest of your working day.
So if you’re looking for a device which provides you with health stats personalised to you and wish to make a healthier change in the new year, why not treat yourself in the January sales and purchase one of the Fitbit range.
