What is Fitbit?
“Fitbit is dedicated to helping people lead healthier, more active lives. We take a common sense approach to fitness, and believe that the key is to make it easier for consumers to be more active, eat smarter, and get enough sleep — in short, that small changes to your daily routine can add up to big results. To that end, we aim to create innovative, inspiring products and online services that harness the power of new technologies to make people more aware of their everyday activities and motivate them to do more”.
“If you want to turn fitness into a lifestyle, the One™ is for you. For starters, it never rests. During the day, it tracks your steps, distance, calories burned, and stairs climbed. Come nightfall, it measures your sleep cycle, helps you learn how to sleep better, and wakes you in the morning. The One™ motivates you to reach your goals by bringing greater fitness into your life — seamlessly, socially, 24 hours a day”.
Fitbit Partner Applications – LINK
There are websites, tools and a bunch of application partners recommended by Fitbit to help you increase your level of personal fitness. For example : Lose It and MyFitnessPal help enable weight loss by using a calorie counter and synching with the Fitbit One to track calories burnt.
Premium Membership – LINK
The Fitbit Premium membership enables the subscriber to conduct personal analysis of food logs, activities, and sleep records and benchmark their performance against all other Fitbit users. Set out below are the Premium features:
- “Get More Active or Lose Weight with Fitbit Trainer – Fitbit Trainer reviews your current activity level and creates a personalized 12 week fitness plan that pushes you to gradually increase your movement
- See In-Depth Analysis of YOUR Data – Personalized reports give you easy-to-read analyses of your week’s data and recommend targets for the following week.
- Rank Yourself Against Your Peers – Increase your motivation and set new wellness goals by comparing your weight, activity and sleep with others.
- Track Multiple Facets of Your Life – Set up a custom tracker to easily identify and monitor areas you’d like to improve, for example how many times you eat dessert each week”.
To what extent will Fitbit One motivate you to improve your well-being in 2013?
The Fitbit One [£79.99] will enable you to maintain an upto the minute record and track improvements in your personal fitness level.
The Fitbit One only provides limited readings in the small device display window however there is much more data that is being collected for richer personal analysis.
“Your data belongs to you. Fitbit will always offer a free account” however it is important to note that the free membership does not provide the Digital Trainer, Activity Reports or Benchmarking available in the Premium subscription.
So you really need a Premium account [£39.99] to get the most out of your personal fitness regime.
Fitbit One and the rich Premium features mean that you do not need to commit to expensive gym membership contracts to improve your well being.
Fitbit One will definitely help motivate you to achieve your New Year resolution to get in better shape.
Alternatively you can download the free iPhone app from Fitocracy which makes fitness a more fun, more addictive experience but still requires a physical workout or visit to the gym.
Last word – if you are one of the increasing number of individuals who are telecommuting / remote working then it is not worth recording the steps you take to your home office however Fitbit One still adds value by monitoring your sleep activity.
James Park – Fitbit CEO (soundbite from recent European trip)
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