While it’s obvious that preventative medicine is far better than managing a health crisis, only a small percentage of the population appears to make the effort to do much about following a wellness routine. This resistance to taking better care of their health is not always due to indifference. It’s often due to the potential difficulty of staying on top of a regular exercise and diet routine and getting enough sleep every night.
Ironically, people who are flourishing in a thriving career, earning a good living, and enjoying a well-earned high quality of life are often the least likely they to take the necessary steps to ensure that they also enjoy abundant health and vitality. Instead, successful business people are most likely to be stressed out, dogged by too many things to do and too little time to get it all done.
In response to this need, tech has evolved to remind people about various health steps they need to take. For instance, how much time they need to be active, how long they need to sleep to avoid sleep deprivation, or how many calories they can eat without gaining excess weight.
If you’re a busy person who tends to lose track of some of the things you need to stay healthy, here are two popular examples of better-living tech that you might want to consider using:
1. Join virtual health and fitness classes.
When you get home from work after a long day, the idea of heading out to the gym after a quick dinner may not appeal to you. Besides the problem of overcoming inertia, your resistance to going to a gym might be due to bad weather, heavy traffic, or arriving at the gym when it’s at its busiest. However, imagine how you’d feel if the gym could come to you? If all you had to do was walk into your bedroom or living room to have a great aerobic workout, would you be more inclined to improve your cardiovascular health?
Through the use of streaming video, which you can watch on a smartphone, tablet, computer, or TV, you can join a variety of spin classes (new classes are added each week) to burn fat and build muscle. You’ll feel as if you’re in the studio as you follow along with the class. Class length ranges from 20 to 60-minute sessions. To follow along, all you’ll need is any Indoor Cycling bike, which you can find brand new for as little as a few hundred bucks or as much as a few thousand for the luxury models. The classes aren’t staged and you’ll be joining real participants having an actual workout, not actors pretending to work up a sweat.
2. Keep track of how much you’re walking or jogging.
Walking is one of the best low-stress ways to lose weight and maintain a healthy metabolism. Yet, there is a huge difference between just going for a stroll and going for a walk, both in terms of time and intensity. Jogging is a little more intense, but it is also another excellent way of boosting your metabolism and burning calories.
How do you know if you’re walking or jogging enough each day? Even if you know the distance around the neighborhood you walk or jog each day, will you be keeping track of how active you are each week and each month? How will you remember if you skip a day because you just had too much going on or were a bit under the weather?
The solution to encourage people to stay active each day is to get wearable tech. According to the American Heart Institute, you should take at least 10,000 steps a day to decrease the risk of heart disease. Through the use of a slim wrist band which doubles as a watch, you can keep track of how many steps you take each day, as well as monitor your caloric intake, keep track of how much water you drink, and how hours of sleep you get every night. Although wearable tech can also be used to track the number of steps you take for more strenuous activities, like weight-lifting, it works best for walking, jogging, running.
All the activity monitored by your wrist band is sent to an app with user-friendly charts. The app can be accessed either on your smartphone or PC. To keep users motivated, the devices often employ gamification elements like a leader board to compete with your friends and badges for accomplishments. For instance, when you win the Italy badge, it means that you’ve walked the equivalent number of miles it would take to walk across Italy, a distance of 736 miles.
A Friendly Reminder
When it comes to taking better care of your health, making use of sports accessories help can make a huge difference. Whether you’re keeping pace with people bicycling in a studio or keeping track of how many steps you take each day, you automatically become more conscientious when you’re not as active as you should be.
