If you’re trying to lose weight, an activity monitor can help by telling you how many calories you’re burning.
Some are more accurate than others, but in general the monitors work pretty well for walking and running.
If you want to compare activities on the other hand — say weight lifting versus running — you may be out of luck. Continue reading Activity Monitors Inaccurate for Weightlifting
When I was a kid, my parents had one argument for why I should keep my shoes tied: If I didn’t, I would trip and hurt myself. In the five decades since getting that warning, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone trip on an untied shoe lace.
But I’ve come close to crashing my bike when my laces got caught in the chain. And just last year, my son’s team lost a soccer game when a defender paused to tie his shoe, allowing an attacker to slip past him and score. I’ve also seen players lose their cleats in the middle of a match. Continue reading LaceLocker Keeps Your Shoes Tied
A treadmill desk can do a lot for your health. But only if you have access to it.
That’s the main lesson I take away from a new study published this week in Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Office workers shared treadmill desks for 12 weeks. They each only averaged 45 minutes a day on their shared treadmill desks.
That wasn’t enough to make fat people skinny. So some observers have said this shows that treadmill desks are useless.
So you’ve got this thing that’s supposed to count every step you take. Based on that, it can tell you how many calories you’ve burned, and therefore maybe how much you can eat for dinner.
But what if it’s wrong? What if you’re a lot more active than it says… or a lot less? Mitesh Patel, too, was wondering about the accuracy of pedometers. Continue reading Researchers Test Accuracy of Pedometers
Sports compression garments are popping up everywhere. You may have seen them at the gym or running trail: those sleeves, shorts and socks made of stretchy fabric, sometimes in bright primary colors.
And you may have wondered if they’re just the latest in stylish sports wear or whether they actually serve some purpose. Sports medicine researchers are wondering that, too. Continue reading Sports Compression Garments May Help Recovery
Sports injury genes could change your future.
Imagine this scenario. You try to register for your hockey team as you do every year. But the league has a new policy: All players must report to a health center to get their mouths swabbed. A couple of days later, you get a call. “You’re positive for ApoE4. We’re sorry, but because of liability rules, you can’t play in this league. In fact, you shouldn’t play hockey anywhere.” Continue reading Do Sports Injury Genes Determine Your Fitness?
Bad news, folks. I have exceeded my maximum heart rate.
Surprisingly, I am still able to write this newsletter, but how much longer I can continue, who can say? My wearable devices do not produce that reading.
After last week’s adventures with RunKeeper, I thought I’d experiment with some other monitoring devices, hoping to gain deeper insight into my fitness. Continue reading What Wearable Heart Rate Monitors Can Tell You (Part III)
An avalanche of fitness monitoring devices has poured onto the market in recent years.
I wondered how people in the fitness business are using them, so I polled a bunch of people I know. I was particularly interested in how heart rate monitors are figuring in the mix. Heart rate monitoring figures prominently in recommendations about prescribing exercise routines, but I found my own results pretty confusing. Continue reading How Fitness Experts Use Monitoring Devices (Part II)
Until yesterday, I was feeling so good. I had overcome my knee pain and started running again, loving it like I never did before. I was bounding up the hills near my house, fit and powerful.
Did I really need to know that I was only doing a 10-minute mile?
That information came to me courtesy of a cell-phone app I just downloaded, RunKeeper. It’s part of a new era of devices that continually monitor all our bodily functions, aggregate the data, store them in the cloud, analyze them using artificial intelligence, compare them to the data of our friends or celebrities, and make them publicly available.
I am not exaggerating. On assignment for Medscape, I spent three days in Silicon Valley last week at Health 2.0 Fall Conference, a celebration of digital health technology. The meeting included a fashion show of health monitors inside pendants, bras, shirts and wristwatches. “We envision a world with sensors all over the place,” said Christopher Glode, Under Armour vice president of connected fitness.
There was June, a bracelet that measures sunlight exposure and tells you to put on a hat. There was Sensoria smart socks that correct your gait. There was Medtronic’s Guardian Real-Time glucose monitoring device that literally gets under your skin.
There was also an embarrassing moment when Continue reading What Exercise Monitoring Device Should You Use? (Part I)
Just fill in your email address here. (We hate spam. We won’t share your information with anyone. And you can unsubscribe easily at any time.)
