Should You Consider A Smart Pedometer?

Whether you’re just getting started with your journey into fitness or you’re a veteran in training, you may be wondering about some of these smart pedometers that have come out on the market to help you track your training efforts. Are they something you should invest in? Or are they just another fitness gimmick that you’re best off passing up? Let’s go over some of the key factors that you should know.

The Benefits

When looking at these pedometers, there are definitely some benefits to using them. First, they will help you monitor your miles travelled, calories burned, or other bits of information that can help you determine just how hard you’re working. Since progressing with a fitness routine is all about doing more than you’ve done before, this can be useful to ensure you are moving in the right direction. Furthermore, for some people, ‘seeing the numbers’ does serve as a great motivational tool. With a pedometer for instance, if you are aiming to increase your daily step count and come to see that at the end of the day, you’ve done more than the day previously, this can inspire you to keep at it. These devices tend to do a good job at making people more aware of their lifestyle habits outside of their normal workout sessions – which can often go overlooked at times. Likewise, with weight loss, it does come down to calories in versus calories out and while calorie counting for your intake is something that’s been done for years, it’s only recently we’ve discovered these devices to more closely track the calories out part of the equation.

The Drawbacks

This said, these devises don’t come without drawbacks. First you have the accuracy of them. Especially with the calorie expenditure calculators, these can be overestimated quite considerably for some individuals – at times up to 15-20%. This in turn could lead you to consume more than you should, derailing your results. Likewise, if you come to rely on your tracker for motivation during a workout session and one day have to go without, you may not feel as compelled to get the workout in, which again is going to derail the progress that you see.

Using These Effectively

So keep in mind that while these devices can definitely be used to help accelerate your progress and keep you motivated to continually push forward, don’t come to rely on them too much. Still put forth good information to establish a proper diet and workout program as well so that you have the theory in place to help with natural progression.