Fitness has strayed away from simply doing an exercise and simply telling yourself you did good that day. Gone are the days of keeping your pace to yourself now that fitness tech has evolved beyond the confines of a stuffy laboratory. We now have the luxury of logging our stats and sharing them for the whole world to see.
Because of this, we at Fit Engine has decided to compile a quick list of the top 5 wearable tech we’ve seen the first quarter of 2017.
1. Fitbit Charge 2
The Fitbit brand has become a household name in the tracker category. It’s almost as ubiquitous as breakfast cereals. The Fitbit Charge 2 has an integrated heart-rate monitor, intuitive controls, and relaxing breath guidance. It’s one of those staple brands akin to a pair of Jordans.
Onboard features include a stopwatch, exercise tracking mode, heart rate and a new “Relax” mindfulness app. Notifications pop up in a limited way — texts, calendar appointments and phone calls, which scroll slowly across the bottom of the vertical screen. Not great, and you can’t respond to anything, of course, but it’s better than nothing.
2. Garmin Vivomove
The Garmin Vivomove is built to look like an ordinary stylish watch and while it is stylish, it is definitely anything but ordinary. It can track distance, steps, calories burned, and even how much sleep you get! The battery life is pretty decent too, lasting about a whole year with replaceable battery.
Like all of Garmin’s devices, the watch is also waterproof down to 50 meters (165 feet), so you can swim and shower with it (sans the leather strap, of course).
3. Halo Sport
These headphones are not just your ordinary Beats. These are specially designed to stimulate your brain into allowing your body to familiarize itself with the workout more. There are soft spikes on the inside of the headband that feed a bit of electricity into the part of your brain responsible for muscle memory.
4. Withings Steel HR
The Steel HR is updated with not just a continuous heart-rate monitor but also an amazingly long battery life, claiming it can last for up to 25 days. Not only that, the Steel HR also functions kind of like a phone that lights up for calls, texts, and even calendar events. Despite the bulk of the things it can do, the Steel HR is anything but bulky as it looks and feels just like an ordinary wristwatch.
5. Under Armour Athlete Recovery Sleepwear
Much about fitness tech focuses on the ins and outs of training but here’s one that focuses on the most important part: sleeping. Much research has been done regarding the benefits of sleeping as well as the adverse effects of chronically lacking one.
This ingenious project by Under Armour improves sleep quality by means of reflecting heat back to the wearer’s body to mimic what we call Far Infrared therapy,a form of therapy used to improve blood flow and muscle recovery. After all, we get our gains when we sleep so more good sleep can mean more good gains.
