Every year, people make New Year’s resolutions that involve improving their fitness levels, being more involved in their wellness, or just getting more exercise. And inevitably, every year people’s resolutions wane or they find that they just can’t meet their goals.
There are a few reasons for this: boredom, biting off more than they can chew, and overall lack of motivation as the year progresses. But whatever the excuse has been in the past, there are many new fitness devices to make it easier than ever to keep up with exercise goals and New Year’s resolutions.
Here are five fitness tools to help you stick to the plan in 2015.
1. Webracing
NetAthlon’s Virtual Interactive Fitness Software, Webracing, offers ways to keep your brain engaged while exercising. How it achieves this is unique. If you’re a biking enthusiast, enjoy skating, skiing, running or rowing, you can virtually join in athletic events going on anywhere in the world. You can go head-to-head with other athletes in real-time, as part of their Socially Interactive Virtual Reality, or if you prefer solitary exercise, that is an option as well.
Here’s a demo of what they have to offer:
Their high resolution 3-D graphics create a believable world that you wouldn’t mind visiting. The software supports a long list of treadmills, exercise bikes, as well as rowing machines. They also offer Ultra Coach training software, which gives athletes the ability to check on their performance while using the NetAthlon software.
Their products are available for home use and in gyms or fitness centers. Their suite of products has something to get just about everyone ready for a virtual visit while getting fit.
2. Smash
If you’ve resolved to improve your tennis game, Australia’s Smash has come up with a band that tracks how well (or not) you do certain things that you set as your goal(s). Their Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign attempted to raise the capital needed to get off the ground. The lightweight device employs a sensor, which gathers hundreds of detailed measurements per second, and tracks how consistent and accurate your first versus second serve, forehand, volley, etc., are.
This device also has a social-side: you can challenge other players, comparing how you did compared to friends who use the device. While the device may not take the place of a coach, it is meant to help you stay motivated.
3. Shine
This video below about the Shine device highlights what makes it so unique. The disk is worn on the body while exercising, whether running, biking or swimming. It keeps track of what you’ve done to get closer to the goal(s) that have been set. The disk is flat, grey in color, but the closer you get to completing your goal(s), the disk emits a circle of lights. Syncing the disk to an iPhone (it’s the only smartphone it works with), is very simple. Place the disk on the iPhone and watch the disk upload the data.
4. Motorola’s Moto 360 Body
A top five review wouldn’t be complete without a review (or two) of a smartwatch. There are several on the market that do roughly the same things (monitor heart rate, etc.). But Motorola’s Moto 360 Body stands out. It has 4GB of storage and runs on Android OS. Its 49g weight means even though you know you’re wearing a watch while exercising, it’s not so heavy as to be unobtrusive. That’s very important after a 25-mile run or ride.
Starting at $249, it’s meant to inspire you to be more fit and healthy, tracking how many calories you’ve burned, and how many steps you took to burn them. It syncs with Android smartphones and has a battery that lasts all day long on a single charge.
5. FINIS’s Swimsense Performance Monitor
For swimmers, there are several apps that help track your heart rate, swim strokes and other metrics to help you learn and grow better as a swimmer. FINIS’s Swimsense Performance Monitor does all of this and more, as a watch, for around $170. Like the Moto360, its light-weight makes wearing it unobtrusive while working out under water.
Using accelerometers (a device that measures proper acceleration), magnetometers (a type of instrument used to measure the magnetization of the magnetic field at a point in space) and patent-pending proprietary algorithms (a step-by-step procedure for calculating data) to identify and analyze how your swim session went.
Performance is analyzed on the device with information regarding pace times, distance (meters/yards/laps) gone, stroke count, stroke rate, and calories burned across the major strokes (freestyle stroke, the breaststroke, the backstroke and the butterfly stroke) are tabulated. This data, when uploaded to the site, gives the wearer up-to-date as well as historical data about the workout or training sessions.
Hopefully, these fitness devices will help couch potatoes everywhere find a way to keep their New Year’s fitness resolutions in 2015.