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| Fitbit Alta HR |
I replaced my watch with the fitbit. I have a couple of alarms set for different times throughout the week and it does that no problems. You set the alarms on your phone and at the specified time the Fitbit starts to vibrate. You don't even need to be anywhere near your phone for the alarms to work, you could leave your phone at home and the watch will still vibrate at the correct time whilst you are at work.
The fitbit tracks how many steps you take throughout the day and you can always check that on the fitbit itself at any time by tapping on it twice to wake it up and then tapping once to scroll through the different information available. You can customise what information you want displayed and in what order on the app on your phone. It also has a G sensor in it so it often detects when you've moved your wrist to a position where you would normally read the time on a watch and wakes itself up.
I have mine set up to remind me every hour between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, if I haven't taken at least 250 steps. At 10 minutes to the hour, the fitbit will vibrate and display a message telling me I need to take some more steps to reach the 250 step goal for that hour. Unfortunately you can't change the 250 hourly step goal but it is still good as sometimes I get stuck into something and I lose track of time, this reminds me to get up and away from the computer. Sometimes I just walk to the kitchen to refill my water bottle and others I need to go a little further, but you soon figure out how far 250 steps is around your workplace. Some days I seem to get a reminder every hour and others I am doing over the 250 steps each hour anyway so it leaves me alone. The Alta HR also displays your heart rate (hence the HR) in its name. I don't actually look at this very much during the day but what it means is that it can calculate roughly how many calories you've burned and how long you've stayed in the "fat burning zone".
The fitbit automatically detects different types of exercise but I haven't found it that reliable. When I mow the lawn, it detects it as "Outdoor Bicycle". If I walk around a lot at work, and go up and down several flights of stairs opening doors and such as I go it can sometimes detect it as "Sport". You can go back in and edit and delete the detected activity, so I usually update the times that I've been mowing the lawn as I figure that it is technically exercise and I delete some of the other just walking around the office entries. I'm guessing that as I'm overweight that my heart rate goes up faster than a healthier person which is why it incorrectly thinks I'm exercising instead of just going about my business.
When used with your phone, the Alta HR can GPS track your exercise and show you a map of where you went, how far you went, how long you were exercising and things like that.
In the app you can track things like what you've eaten and how much water you've drank but I found that a little too much of a chore. It is pretty clever, you can scan barcodes off food products and it will usually detect it and update the nutritional information for you, or if it doesn't recognise it, you can add it yourself. You can also put in things like Big Mac or Large Red Apple and it will know what you mean.
I'll be putting my weekly weight into the app too so I don't forget where I started and so I can see any trends developing. Writing this blog will help me with that too, but if I wasn't writing it down here, then I may forget what I weighed in the previous week.
Each week fitbit email you with your weekly stats and you can look them up at anytime on the app.
I'm pretty happy with the results of last week, I did 68,318 steps, my previous best week as far as steps goes was back in late Jan early Feb with 67,569 steps. My three month daily average is currently 6,043 steps per day, so this should go up and by the end of October I'm hoping my daily average will be over 10,000.
I wear the fitbit in bed each night and it tracks my sleep for me, I have a goal of 8 hours sleep each night but I only ever get that on the weekends, I'm not really concerned as long as I'm not feeling too tired at work, my weekly average is usually somewhere around 7hr 30min. I try to go to bed around 9pm and my alarm goes off at 6am on weekdays, so you'd think that I'd be getting plenty of sleep. I usually read for a bit before going to sleep and the fitbit tells me that I'm usually asleep somewhere between 9:30pm and 10pm but I wake up several times each night, sometimes I'm awake for a while and other times I think I just roll over and go back to sleep almost straight away.
So that's what I use my fitbit for, I'm sure you could do more with it if you wanted to. I didn't go into some of the features I've never even played with like "Female Health". I'm not sure why this is even an option for me when my account is clearly set up as a male, but you can hide features that you don't want to see. Out of curiosity I've opened the female health option up just now and it states "Fitbit can help you track you period, fertile window and symptoms like cramps and headaches". So I'll be hiding that again right about now and I'll continue to be happy that I'm a bloke.
There are challenges that you can set with your friends and some which are just personal challenges. I don't really get into them but I'm sure they help some people stay motivated.
As far as charging it goes, I charge it once a week, usually on a Sunday night between dinner and bedtime and it lasts the week, it is usually warning of a low battery by that time too. The only time I take it off is to shower or if I need to get my hands wet, or when it might get dirty like when washing the car or cooking dinner.
Bomber.
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