The best fitness technology to help you keep fit

Everyone wants to get fit, stay active, and eat right, but it’s not the easiest thing to do. Sometimes, taking ½ hour out of your day for a run is almost impossible, and it’s even harder to say no to that cheeseburger when you’re starving and haven’t had time to eat.

Thankfully, we have access to fitness technology that keeps getting better and better. With the latest fitness technology, you’ll know how active you are, how many calories you’ve burned that day, and whether you’re meeting all of your fitness goals.

I’ve set fitness goals over the past year and I’ve met them, and I couldn’t have done it without my favourite pieces of fitness tech. Here’s a look at what you can bring home right now to help you meet your fitness goals.

A fitness tracker helps you stick to your goals

A fitness tracker doesn’t just keep track of your activity during the day; it motivates you too. Just looking at the tracker on my wrist gets me off the couch, because I know it will tell me at the end of the day how much (or how little) I managed to move.

There are a lot of different fitness trackers available, and because of that, it can be a little overwhelming choosing the right one for you. My best advice is to find one with a long battery life, on-demand heart rate monitoring, and GPS to keep track of where you’ve been. The Fitbit Versa 2 has all of these features and more.

There’s also the Garmin Venu GPS Watch. It has a beautiful AMOLED display, and in addition to the usual stats, it will monitor your heart rate, pulse ox, and respiration. It also has 20 different sports built-in, so you can easily track your favourite activities.

If you’d like a fitness tracker with a style to spare, the Samsung Galaxy Smartwatch is a high-tech smartwatch wrapped up in a gorgeous vintage body. It’s made of stainless steel and Gorilla Glass DX so it’s durable, and it gives you real-time heart rate monitoring, speed, pace, calorie tracking and more.

Make your weigh-in smarter with Withings Smart Scale

I weigh myself once a week. It’s part of my keep fit/healthy eating workout plan, and although there have been times when what the scale tells me isn’t what I want to see, it’s part of what keeps me on track.

But you can make that weigh in a little less painful and more motivating if you have a smart scale that analyzes not just the number of the screen, but what’s going on in your body too. My scale of choice is the Withings Body Cardio Wi-Fi Smart Scale & Body Analyzer, and while it will tell me my weight, it will also tell me what my body fat, water percentage, and muscle mass is.

That means if you’re standing on the scale and it’s gone up despite your best efforts, you don’t have to wonder if you’re bloated or whether or not you’ve lost inches. The scale will tell you if you’ve lost body fat, and it will upload all of that data to your smartphone via Wi-Fi so you can look back and review it.

The smart scale is one of my biggest motivators for keeping me on track because I no longer want to give up standing on the scale. I can see that I’ve made progress, one way or another, and that keeps me keep going.

Keep fit with meditation

I know, it’s a little hard to carve out the time to meditate. I read a book about it a few months ago when I started working out, and it all sounds great on paper. But finding a quiet corner in a houseful of kids or when you’re commuting in traffic for an hour every day? It can make it hard to put meditation into practice.

I know that the idea of ‘being present’ during a busy day is actually really important if you want to keep fit and meet your fitness goals. When you really focus on your meal, you do feel full for longer, and when you take the time to quiet your mind, you find the motivation to keep going until you’ve reached the finish line.

That’s why I recommend including meditation as part of your fitness journey, and if you need a little help getting into the zone, tech like the Muse brain-sensing headband can get you there.

Muse will give you feedback on your brain activity, heart rate, breath and body movements, and can guide you to a calmer place every day. It’s not a fitness tech device per se, but it helps you relax, reduces stress, and gets you into a space where you can focus on a healthy lifestyle.

I haven’t tried it myself, but after struggling to learn to meditate over the past few months, I can definitely see the benefits of this device.

Before or after a busy day you can calm your mind and relax with sounds of the beach or nature. Muse can actually measure when your mind is wandering or whether it’s active or calm, and it will send you signals you can use to guide you. It can even track your meditation skills over time, and that tracking can help improve your mental and physical health.

You might not have thought of meditation as a part of fitness, but I think anything that helps you stay on track and get fit is worth the effort.

These are just a few fitness technology devices you can use to keep fit and meet your fitness goals. You can find these and more on Best Buy right now.