Fitness tools to help you reach your goals

Hello there.  As I was contemplating a topic for this post, I thought about what I could write about to help you in the realm of health and fitness. 


Here are some tools that you can use on your own, with your trainer, or your doctor:


I hear a lot of people ask about heart rate.  Do you know what your Resting Heart Rate is?  What about Max Heart Rate?  This tool from the American Heart Association teaches you how to find your heart rate.  It then shows you where you should be training for your age.


Heart Rate Tool


This one is mainly for competitive lifters.  However, this is also good for everyone just to see where your at at different stages of life.  This isn't to hard when you have a crew that your working out with.  I usually don't, so it wouldn't be sound for me to attempt on my own.  This tool allows you to do what you are comfortable with and use that to determine what your 1 Rep Max is.  1 Rep Max is the total amount of weight you can lift one time.  This is courtesy of Bodybuilding.com.


1 Rep Max Tool


This one is for determining your Lean Body Weight.  This is your total body weight less body fat.  This is also from bodybuilding.com


Lean Body Mass


Have you ever wondered how many calories you are burning mowing the yard?  What about painting the kids rooms?  Here is a tool that helps you figure out how many calories are burned with different activities.


Amount of Calories Burned

In the know: how accurate is your activity tracker

On May 24th, an article was released in the Journal of Personalized Medicine in which a group of scientits from Stanford University wanted to answer this exact question.  They tested seven different wearable bands that monitor both heart rate and energy expenditure (calories burned).


The seven pieces of equipment were the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2.  To verify accuracy for heart rate, they compared them with a medical-grade electrocardiograph. The calories used was estimated with an instrument for measuring the oxygen and carbon dioxide in breath -- a good proxy for metabolism and energy expenditure.


Results:  For heart rate, all the devices were withing a 5% margin.  This is good since heart rate is measured directley and uses a simple formula for everyone.  If you wear one of these devices for this purpose, you can share this information with your doctor with confidence.


For the calories burned, results are not so good.  The most accurate one was off by 27%.  The worst one was off by 93%.  They believe the reason for the wide discrepency is that the manufacturers use their own algorithm to figure out calorie expenditures.  Unlike the heart rate formula, they are not one size fits all.  There are multiple factors that vary by individual, for example fitness level, weight, height, age to name a few.  So if you are using this to see how much sweets you can have, I would recommend to just have a sensible meal of a protein source, a couple of vegetables, and a bit of healthy fats. 




Journal Reference:

1. Anna Shcherbina, C. Mattsson, Daryl Waggott, Heidi Salisbury, Jeffrey Christle, Trevor Hastie, Matthew Wheeler, Euan Ashley. Accuracy in Wrist-Worn, Sensor-Based Measurements of Heart Rate and Energy Expenditure in a Diverse Cohort. Journal of Personalized Medicine, 2017; 7 (2): 3 DOI: 10.3390/jpm7020003