You may be wondering “What does a smart watch actually do?” At the most basic level, smart watches are an extension of a smart phone. They receive notifications, answer phone calls from your wrist, allow you to use apps and tell time. By wearing this device on your wrist (which you actually sometimes forget that you’re wearing the monitor throughout most of the day) can greatly affect your life in a positive way by keeping track of your day to day behaviour. This can help users obtain critical information about their lifestyle in order to make better choices and changes.
- Resting Heart Rate
One of the greatest advantages of wearing a smartwatch is being able to keep track of your resting heart rate. Having this information all throughout the day can tell you a lot about your health. Your watch will need to have a built-in heart monitor feature to measure your RHR. While the monitor will increase the price of your watch – it is definitely worth the extra $$$. The average adult should aim to have a RHR of between 80 to 100 BPM (beats per minute). If you are an athlete or an extremely fit individual your RHR could be as low as 60 BPM. A lack of physical exercise will cause your RHR to be higher forcing your heart to work harder than necessary. Your watch will use your RHR statistics and contrast them to your maximum heart rate in order to determine your recommended fitness training heart rate zones and making your workouts more effective. Measuring your RHR will also give you a more accurate daily calorie burn count.
2. Nutrition
Smart watches have mobile apps which in order to calculate calorie burning rates effectively, you must take careful and honest note of your calorie intake manually. Apps go as far as to help users log their food by providing easy bar code readers, calorie information by brand, and geographic location. Apps by brands like FitBit can detect your individual log history and help to pick up on patterns and make food entry easier. Depending on your nutritional goals, identifying daily calorie deficit goal and adding this information to your smartwatch profile will help create effective alerts, warnings and ultimately help you stay on track.
3. Exercise
The best smartwatches will measure your physical activity depending on the type of exercise you are carrying out. It is not the same to run for 30 minutes than to lift weights or do the elliptical for half an hour. Keep a more accurate track of how many calories you burn, your exercise intensity and your progress throughout the year.
4. Sleep
Yes your smartwatch can even help you reach the recommendation of 7-9 hours sleep a night. A watch has the capability of automatically keeping track of when you are sleeping simply by monitoring your movements. This information can be stored in your watch and help you understand more about your weekly sleep patterns in order to make conscious health choices that could improve your lifestyle. Taking control of the amount of hours you snooze will improve your mood, help you remember more, increase your life expectancy, lower stress and control your weight.
5. Water
Women are recommended to have 1.6L of fluid per day for women (about x8 200ml glasses) and 2L of fluid per day for men (about x10 200ml glasses). This may seem like a simple task but majority of adults aren’t getting enough water. It is highly recommended that you ensure that your brand of smartwatch you’re going for has a water log feature. With a couple of clicks you can keep track of how much water you are drinking. Keeping track of your water intake with your watch can help increase energy, relieve fatigue, eliminate toxins, improve skin complexion and could even decrease your headaches.
A smartwatch can help promote self- awareness and develop healthy habits you may not have even known needed some improving. For may people a dedicated tracker like the FitBit is the way to go, but by forking out a little extra coin, you can get may more health features with a smartwatch.