Improve Your Workouts With Fitness Wearables

Maximising the impact of your workouts isn’t guesswork. It’s science. Innovations in fitness wearables are making it possible more than ever before to unleash the power of good data into your fitness plan.

What Types of Data Do Wearables Collect?

Fitness wearables have come a long way from the step trackers of a decade ago. Today, thanks to innovations such as the ascendancy of 5G networks, you can purchase a full suite of highly accurate health wearables at a reasonable price point. 

These health trackers can do it all — from monitoring your heart rate to tracking your caloric intake to assessing the quality of your sleep. Standard wearables are now even able to track one of the most important metrics of overall fitness, the VO2max measurement, which monitors the body’s oxygen use. 

The amount of oxygen consumed when the body is under stress, as during a workout, is an especially accurate measure of fitness and endurance. The metric can also be used to assess performance improvements and even to predict chronic disease risk, including your predisposition to heart disease and diabetes.

Why the Data Matter

Whether you’re enlisting the expertise of a personal trainer or flying solo, you’re not going to get the most out of your workouts if you don’t first set clear goals for your regimen. 

If your goal for your workouts is to improve your cardiovascular health, one of the most important metrics you will need to track is your heart rate. If you find that both your resting heart rate and your heart rate while exercising are lower than when you first started working out, that’s a good sign you’re doing something right. 

In most cases, after all, a reduction in heart rate indicates an increase in cardiac muscle strength and overall cardiovascular health.

Using Fitness Wearables Can Alert You to…

Signs of Trouble

Fitness trackers aren’t just ideal for monitoring your progress over time, but they’re also perfect for alerting you to signs of trouble. 

These monitors can signal you when you’re working too hard, such as alerting you when your heart rate or blood pressure moves into unsafe parameters while you’re working out.

Suboptimal Lifestyles

They can also indicate a potential issue in your lifestyle that may be compromising your workouts. Fitness wearables can detect when you’re not getting adequate sleep, hydration, or nutrition — all of which will undermine your efforts to get fit. 

That means that these handy gadgets are superb for reminding you to practice self-care in all areas of your life — from working out to resting to eating and hydrating well. 

Dips in Motivation

They can also be a powerful incentive when you’re finding it difficult to get motivated to work out. 

You can use your wearable, for instance, to keep track of your sets, reps, and weights over time, giving you a comprehensive record of all you’ve done and how far you’ve come. 

You can also set your wearable to remind you to work out or even to move around regular intervals. These reminders can be exactly what you need if you have trouble staying accountable to regular activity goals.

The Takeaway

Fitness wearables are far more than a fun fad. 

Fitness wearables may well be your greatest weapon in the fight for long-term good health, strength, and vitality. Thanks to innovations both in health technology and in 5G networks, health wearables are more accurate, functional, and affordable than ever before. You can use them to measure your cardio workouts, identify existing or potential issues that may undermine your regimen, and motivate yourself when you need it the most.

You might also like these articles on how to make the most of your home gym and on whether you should create a home gym or get a gym membership.