How Wearable Tech can Assist with your Fitness Goals

Wearable Technology #1 Fitness Trend 2020

Are you constantly checking your steps? Sleep time? Monitoring your heart rate? How many people in the gym do you see wearing some type of trackable tech? Well, if your answer is none or not much, you’re going to start seeing a whole lot more over the next few months. It is estimated that wearable technology, also known as wearable tech, is circa a $95 billion industry and will continue to rise. It has also been predicted that there are 835m people currently utilising these devices which is expected to hit 1b by 2022. [1] So what is the future of wearables?

What is Wearable Tech?

These include: 

• Smartwatches
• Activity Trackers
• Wristbands
• GPS Tracking Devices
• Heart Rate Monitors
• Hearables including microchips and smart sensors
• Smart clothing, such as shirts that capture motion and heart rate and running pants that can that track cadence and stride length.
• Smart rings
• Smart glasses that measure vision performance and can detect concussions.

What do these tracking devices do?

Wearables will help you track your daily step count, calories/kilojoules burnt, monitor your heart rate, remind you to breathe every hour, sitting time to get you up and stretching on the hour, track your sleeping patterns, and will even give you a daily/weekly report to allow you to compare and benchmark your progress. You can also monitor different types of workouts including HIIT, running, cycling, walking by calories burnt, distances, and maximum heart rate during each workout.

The devices themselves actually do the data collection, the real fun is when you can see and graph over time what's happening. This is usually done on an app or even on a computer and some gadgets are clever enough to email you your daily results, some will even annoy you by telling you that you haven't moved enough in the last hour, eg apple watch series 5. Whatever direction you decide to take, there are so many benefits to be had.

What are the benefits of wearable tech?

Do this daily, and you'll be able to track progress over time. Why not find the areas you need to improve on? It would be great to get the most out of your everyday for the benefits of your health and wellbeing. This may include adjusting sleeping patterns, starting with ensuring you are getting the right about amount of sleep, and more extensive in how much deep sleep vs. light sleep are you getting and how is this affecting your mental state throughout the day.

Tracking your number of steps may motivate you to get moving on days you’re just lounging around or even step out of the office and go for a walk at lunch. Tracking calories and workouts, will allow you to check how you're doing during your training sessions, as well track your progress / fitness levels over time to inspire you to continually improve.

Keeping an eye on your heart rate be it max heart rate, target heart rate or resting heart rate, will also give you a pretty good idea of your stamina, endurance, fitness and wellbeing in itself. Are you above or below average? What does this mean for you? How can you change your everyday? Start with the little things.

Heck, you may have already had a full medical test and know exactly what your benchmark is, particularly if you have had blood tests. It's awesome when you are able to monitor how effective your daily fitness habits are when you are measuring them against improvements in your blood tests right?

So what’s your so what P92?

Okay, SO we are not here to sell you a piece of wearable tech. Nor do we know which one is the best to buy. Are we advocates of wearable tech? Yes. Do we expect you to go out and buy one? No. Not if you don’t want to anyway. There are other ways you can track progress. And it doesn’t have to have a price tag associated to it.

You can still keep it humble and modest with a pen and paper if you’re really keen on tracking your progress. Or maybe just use notes on your smartphone. Even the health app that comes with the phone. Excel works too.

Whatever the method, keep the madness. Want to start a food journal? Want to keep an exercise log? Track how much water you’ve had today. How much sleep you got last night. Log it. Do it yourself. It’ll only take a few minutes. Make it habit. Okay, steps, heart rate, calories – maybe not.

Start with the 80%. If you like what you’re seeing and you’re keen to get deeper insight and analytics. Get data to drive it. Get with the tech. We live in a data driven generation right? How do we drive insight to action. It’ll only start getting more advanced as time goes on.

GAME ON P92.

We’re going to set up some challenges that are going to get you eager to wake up and get yourself moving. We all like winning right. We’ll use a leader board. We’ll catch you off guard. We’re going to use monthly challenges to get you to status “better” in no time.

Maybe it’s not about beating someone else, actually, we believe that the person you should compete against the most is yourself. What better than creating a better version of you? If you can track where you started on day 1 vs. day 30 and there’s an improvement. You’re already winning.

RULES
*We’ll get specific per challenge.

• We’ll keep it fair. When we absolutely need to, we’ll change the benchmarks based on demographics but we don’t discriminate. 
• You have to be in it to win it.
• Day 1 means day 1. No excuses.
• You will have to prove it. There are multiple ways you can do this.

That’s pretty much it. If you have any ideas / feedback, we’d love to hear it. We’ll incorporate it. We choose you because a greater me, means a greater you!

Choose you! Choose P92!

You game? Let's do this. 

Statistics [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/487291/global-connected-wearable-devices/

Top Fitness Trends Source 2020