Another cool piece of tech gear in my life at the moment is my Fitbit step tracker. I’ve got the Fitbit Ultra which I notice has just been replaced with the Fitbit One.
Here’s what it looks like:
I bought two of these earlier in the year. One for myself and one for my wife. My plan was to try and increase the amount that we were physically moving during the day. And I thought that I could increase how self conscious I was about my walking and general movements by having some kind of device to measure activity.
After a bit of research I settled on the fitbit. I think now it was the right choice. There has been one problem however. The software that I downloaded to my Mac to synchronise the data from the fitbit is crap. It works for a while, then stops working and I’m continually having to re-download it and reset it.
I love the device though and I now have a goal of achieving 10,000 steps in a day. I don’t actually achieve this every day, but at least I have something to work towards. Some days I do this and more. Like yesterday I managed over 16,000 steps. Usually, I wear it like this:
I honestly think that I’m walking and moving more because of it. I can access a nice visual of my activities and my wife and I typically encourage each other to get out and go for a walk because we know we need to try and reach our goal of 10,000 steps.
I’m hoping that the new Fitbit solves the problem of the crappy software. I see that the new one is also waterproof and has ability to synch via bluetooth direct with my iPhone. I’ve probably still got a few thousands km to go on this one though.
There’s probably a good numeracy lesson here somewhere, but I’ll leave that for another day…
What do you do to force yourself to move more? Any experience with step trackers? Let me know in the comments.
