Another holiday season has come and gone with the evidence mostly staying in your body as fat but, if you happen to receive a Fitbit as a Christmas present or bought one yourself, it's time to make full use of the portable fitness system and finally work on that New Year's Resolution about staying fit and healthy.
Losing weight and staying fit is not just a matter of slapping a Fitbit device on your wrist then celebrating when you reach 10,000 steps or so. Like any goal, staying fit and healthy is a continuous challenge and, just like selecting a type of workout that fits your lifestyle and stamina, tweaking your Fitbit to achieve the most accurate results is important.
If you have yet to personalize your Fitbit to achieve the best results, we'll show you how.
Extend Your Fitbit's Battery Life
First and foremost, you have to understand how to take care of your device. Just because you can set alarms and it can sync with online applications doesn't mean you have to keep it that way 24/7. Try to minimize the alarms you set and turn off that All Day Sync in favor of syncing data at the end of the day. After all, your Fitbit keeps tabs on all your activities so, other than battery life, you wouldn't really lose anything by not being constantly in sync. This also guarantees that you don't have to go without your Fitbit for long periods of time while waiting for it to charge.
Righty Or Lefty
Unless you're ambidextrous, a good way to raise the accuracy of your activities is to indicate which hand you are wearing your Fitbit. It might not sound important but if you're wearing the device on your dominant hand, it's only natural that it will track movements and activities that you naturally do with that hand even if it is not related to your fitness goals. An example of this would be when you shake off your right hand to relieve it after writing longhand for hours. By indicating whether you are wearing the Fitbit on your dominant or non-dominant hand, the Fitbit will adjust its sensitivity to discount excess movement or account for extra motions.
Adjust The Accuracy
Just because you are of a certain height and gender doesn't mean you have the same measurements as another person with the same height and gender as you. It also does not necessarily mean that you can walk as fast or jump the same height and distance. However, Fitbit would only compute the numbers based on your gender and height, which may lead to probable inaccurate results. To make sure that your Fitbit is accurate with your calculations, enter your stride length in your Fitbit account.
Drop that ruler, that's not how you measure your stride length because we're aiming for accuracy here.
Do this instead: run or walk on a path which you know the exact distance to and count your steps. For example, Olympian and Guinness World Record holder Usain Bolt takes 41 steps in 100 meters. Then 100 meters divided by 41 means that Bolt's stride length is 2.44 meters per stride.
There are other ways to measure stride length but the one we suggested above would be the most natural way for you to compute.
Customize Your Fitbit
Not all workouts yield the same results so just as choosing the correct workout for your fitness goals is important, customizing your Fitbit to "understand" your goals is necessary. Just how exactly do you do this? Perhaps you've already been using another app to track your fitness habits and goals and you're just using some other gadget to track it. The good news is that Fitbit is compatible with other fitness apps so you don't have to start over.
All you have to do is sync your Fitbit account with whichever app you're using and the Fitbit app will automatically store your data and credit your fitness achievements and carry it over to your Fitbit account. If you want to know Fitbit's compatibility with your existing accounts, you can check it out in its website.
Take The Challenge
Fitbit will present you with challenges that you can take on and even compete with other Fitibit users over. The question is whether you're up to the challenge. You can invite other Fitbit users and compete with them to make things more interesting. You can choose from daily, weekend and workweek challenges as well as determine how many people who accepted the challenge actually reached their goals.
Of course, none of these mean anything if you're not vigilant about your fitness goals since consistency is the key. No matter what device, application, workout and challenge you do and no matter how much money you paid, nothing will change if your resolve to keep fit is about as firm as a marshmallow roasting on an open campfire.
