What You Need to Know When It Comes to Tracking Your Overall Health

Tracking your health and keeping on top of your overall fitness and wellbeing is a vital part of staying healthy. After all, you can’t improve what you can’t see, right? If fitness and health tracking is important to you, getting yourself a Fitbit might be a good idea. 

The company kicked off the health tracking revolution in the mid 00s and quickly became synonymous with tracking your steps, heart rate, and a whole load of other health indicators.

But what exactly is a Fitbit, and what’s the point of collecting all this information about yourself? Put simply, Fitbits are wearable health tracking technology that monitor information on your lifestyle to give you a better idea of your overall health. 

A discreet tracker, such as a Fitbit Luxe, for example, measures steps, activity, sleep, and heart rate, as well as call, text, and calendar notifications. More advanced trackers, such as the Fitbit Sense, can track blood oxygen levels, high and low heart rate, as well as electrodermal activity which may indicate your body’s response to stress.

Knowing and understanding this information can be vital for your overall well being. Studies show that people who track their health will move significantly more than those who don’t – up to one and a half kilometres per day. What’s more, they have long-term potential to keep you motivated with your fitness; it’s effectively a watch that puts motivation on your wrist. 

For anyone interested in boosting their health, fitness trackers can be key. Here’s what you need to know about tracking your health. 

Why Keep Track of Your Health

Researcher Liana Laranjo from the University of Sydney says that “continuously monitoring your progress and receiving feedback from an app or tracker can lead to significant changes in overall physical activity.” 

Her team conducted one of the first studies on the impact that active feedback from fitness trackers has on people’s overall health. They found that having consistent reminders and notifications on their activities motivated people to move and do more than a more passive tracker which simply gathered information. 

Over the 13 week study, people using these active trackers consistently outperformed those who passively kept an eye on their fitness – even up to a year after they first started using them. 

Study co-author Bruno Heleno says that the extra work and motivation to keep exercising caused by the active reminders to do so could have seriously beneficial impacts. Increasing their activity puts them at a lower risk of developing things like heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer. 

What to Keep an Eye On  

Right now, people are living increasingly sedentary lifestyles. With work, TV, and social media playing such huge parts of our lives, it’s little wonder that 67 per cent of Australian adults are considered obese or overweight. That’s a figure that’s climbed from 63 per cent in 2013 and appears to be associated with aging. As people get older, they tend not to exercise as much as they might have done due to stress, work, and being generally more time-poor than young people. This is critical because the older we get, health becomes more of a concern. 

It’s one of those gradual decline things that can quickly get out of hand if you’re not aware of it. While you may not have time to get to the gym every day (or even every week), keeping an eye on things like your overall daily step count is a great way to make sure that you’re getting a good amount of exercise. 

It’s hard to know where to start if you don’t have the information on hand (or on wrist) to work from. Knowing how many steps you do on a normal day might surprise you, as it can be vastly less than the recommended amount. 

Similarly, knowing the quality of sleep you’re getting can be vital to managing overall stress levels. There’s a tonne of info out there about how poor quality sleep can affect your everyday performance and your mental health. Getting to bed at a reasonable hour is just the start of it, as interrupted sleep can almost be worse for you than lack of sleep. Knowing whether or not this is an issue is a big one. 

These are just the basics but a great place to start in getting a clearer picture of your health.

How to Start Tracking Your Health 

If you decide that tracking your health might be something you could benefit from, it’s best to ease your way into it. 

Choosing a fitness tracker or watch can be a little complex since you might not already know exactly what you want. Thankfully, Fitibt has a quiz that helps you work out which tracker might be best for you based on your goals and preferences.

When you’ve got your tracker, you’ll want to get a bit of a baseline to understand where you are initially. Wearing the device for a week or so without doing anything out of the ordinary is a good way to get an initial snapshot. 

Once you’ve got this pattern established, it’s time to look at what might need to be improved in order to meet your fitness goals and improve your overall health.  

If increasing your activity and trying to combat sedentary habits is one area that you want to improve, the 10,000 step challenge is a classic way to fit more exercise into your day. Fitbit also offer a premium subscription packed with tools to help you achieve those fitness goals.

10,000 steps is about eight kilometres or an hour and 40 minutes of walking each day. Over a week, that’s enough to burn 2000 to 3500 extra calories per day. That’s the equivalent of about 2kgs of body fat. If losing weight is your goal, here might be a good place to start. 

Fitbit measures over 20 different exercise modes, so you won’t just be confined to walking around the block. Track your next gym session, or your heart rate on your cycle to work, and take your Fitbit into the pool with you in confidence when your next swimming laps. 

Take it with you wherever you go and let the device give you a clearer picture and understanding of exactly where you are and how to get to where you want to be. 

If tracking your overall health is important to you, the new Fitbit Luxe might be perfect for you. Fitbit Luxe tracks activity, sleep and more, plus its sleek bracelet design pairs effortlessly with even your most stylish outfit.

Find out more and shop other Fitbit devices at Fitbit.com.