Hey #fitfam, welcome back and to our new visitors, thank you for coming! This week we’ll be discussing fitness tracking information and deciphering the most important details from the loads of data your phone, watch, or fitness tracker may be collecting. I’ll start by saying that each person will find varying details to be important to them as an individual, however, some details should be important to everyone. If you suffer from a specific medical condition and/or have been given guidance by a doctor, I recommend you follow their advice. That said, here’s the few items that I find to most helpful.

1 – Step tracking/distance tracking – This information is helpful because it can serve as a semi-accurate gauge of activity level and as motivation to keep moving even though you may not have desire to do so. Think of the first time you got a step tracker and were told to hit 5,000 steps…you likely too may extra steps to check off that goal.

2 – Heart monitor – This is a great tool to determine your resting heart rate and your active heart rate and usually your exercise session data will show a distinction between resting, aerobic, and anaerobic heart rate so you’ll be informed on exactly when you’re burning the most calories possible.

3 – Active Minutes – The CDC recommends 150 minutes per week of activity for adults, averaging to roughly 21 minutes per day. Tracking this data can help you build a foundation for exceeding the recommendation and aggressively working to double or triple it.

Be careful with tracking data, you can easily become obsessed with trying to meet benchmarks that may not be feasible from time-to-time and it will frustrate you. Always maintain a healthy relation with collecting and processing your data.