Category Archives: Fitness

AFT Reviews, Fit Tech & Gadgets, Wellness

Adidas miCoach Fit Smart review

The Adidas miCoach Fit Smart burst out of the German sports giant’s lab back in 2014, hot on the heels of the Adidas miCoach Smart Run.

Whereas the Fit Smart’s older brother packed in GPS connectivity, the new arrival shunned this feature in order to slim-down and offer a better battery performance.

When we reviewed the Fit Smart just over a year ago we lamented, “It’s neither a specialist GPS running watch nor an everyday activity tracker – it lies somewhere in between and, as a result, it falls short of being a device that we’d highly recommend.”

But now, thanks to an update that brings step tracking, calorie counting and estimated distance measuring to the workout-assistant, it is an everyday tracker – hence the updated review.

Read on to find out how it fares…

Adidas Fit Smart: Design and build

Although not as well received as Adidas would have wanted, we at Wareable were quite enamoured with the original miCoach training smartwatch, the Smart Run, and were excited to hear that a follow up device was about to hit the shops.

Whereas the Smart Run was quite a chunky device, with a large strap and oversized face, the miCoach Fit Smart pays its dues, design-wise, to the ever-growing fitness tracker genre that’s dominating wearable tech right now.

It hasn’t completely dumped the idea of a display – although there’s no glass or pixels packed into the Fit Smart – instead you’re looking at a 34mm silicone strap that hides a 17 x 11 LED matrix display. Alongside this basic yet effective display are a row of neon LED strip-lights, which we’ll come back to later, and two physical navigation buttons. There’s also a main action button below the display.

The silicone strap lets your skin breathe quite effectively and the clasp sits pretty comfortably on the underside of the wrist. At 50g it’s hardly going to weigh your arm down either.

The Fit Smart comes in two colours: black and pearl. It’s the latter colour variant that we took for a test run and, although it looks pretty futuristic when the plethora of LEDs are lit up, it is susceptible to looking a little bit grubby after a few training sessions. The black one shouldn’t suffer from this issue, obviously.

It’s sweat proof and is 3ATM water resistant, although Adidas recommends not swimming with it on.

Adidas miCoach Fit Smart: Training

On the underside of that LED display you’ll find the Mio heart-sensor, which we’re told is the same one that was present on the Smart Run GPS running watch and the same one you’d find onboard Mio fitness wearables.

Your heart rate plays a key role in the Fit Smart experience, which is centred around helping you train in specific zones. It’s important to remember that the miCoach Fit Smart isn’t a dedicated running watch – rather a training companion that is designed to work across a range of activities including strength and flex regimes.

During a training session, the colour strip of LED lights light up to tell you what zone you’re in, with five different colours on show – all representing a different training intensity zone. During a free training session it’s up to the user to monitor his or her own zones and adapt accordingly, while during a set training session, the LED display will tell you to increase or decrease intensity in order to hit the desired level. You’ll also feel vibration alerts as well when you need to step it up or ease it off.

It’s a system that works well and the display’s instructions are pretty clear. However, you’re putting a lot of trust into the heart rate monitor’s accuracy and we’re not entirely convinced of its pulse recording skills. When testing the Fit Smart against the TomTom Cardio and the old miCoach Fit Smart, we found that our levels varied greatly across the devices, with the Fit Smart and the TomTom being much more in-tune with each other.

Getting a heart rate to register isn’t exactly a speedy affair either – you’ll be waiting around for around a minute before it locks in.

Adidas miCoach Fit Smart: Activity tracking

The biggest criticism we threw at the Fit Smart originally was its lack of fitness tracking smarts; it seemed pointless to have an activity band that didn’t offer basic lifestyle recording.

That’s been fixed, thankfully with the Fit Smart now using its sensors and accelerometer to count steps and estimate distances travelled and calories burned.

You can view your progress in detail on the app – it also tallies with distances covered on other Adidas products synced to you account – or directly on the device itself by tapping the main button.

We found step counting to be a little generous compared to a Jawbone UP3 but, as with all algorithmically created counts, the stats should be used as a guide and not an exact science.

The revamped Train & Run app allow lets you set daily and weekly goals.

Adidas miCoach Fit Smart: Ecosystem

Like the Smart Run, the Fit Smart is heavily tied into the Adidas miCoach ecosystem, which is both desktop and app based.

With the Fit Smart you’ll be using the app (iOS, Android and Windows Phone), which we’re glad to say has had a major spruce-up in time for the new activity tracking update.

Once paired using Bluetooth 4.0, the Fit Smart will keep in sync with the app, sending over details of your latest training sessions and receiving the details of any set workouts that you want to do – you can store 15 different workouts, each with their own intensity zone objectives, directly onto the band. These workouts can customised yourself within the app, or you can select one of the many on offer from Adidas.

Within the app you can also customise the Fit Smart’s display, opting for a single screen showing a specific training aspect (distance travelled, calories burned, heart rate, pace and so on) or a split screen with two dynamics on display.

You can train with the Fit Smart untethered from a smartphone; it works independently. However, with no GPS connectivity built in, the Fit Smart is extremely unreliable when it comes to tracking distances.

There is a 12 minute calibration workout built in to the Fit Smart that you should carry out in order to improve speed and distance recordings, although we found that this made only a minimal difference. Long story short: if you want detailed data on your run you’re going to need to tether to your smartphone and the miCoach app, making use of your mobile’s GPS connectivity.

The device itself has memory enough to store around 10 hours of workout data. You can access your recent history by navigating through the watch’s homescreen.

This homescreen extends to one that displays the time and two that start a new workout. The latter splits into free training and your stored workouts, which are clearly labelled.

Adidas Fit Smart: Extras and battery life

The Adidas miCoach Fit Smart smashes its older brother out of the park when it comes to battery life.

Adidas states that you’ll get five days of use from the 200mAh battery, with an hour’s training a day. We’ve done six 5km runs with our Fit Smart in free training mode, as well as testing out a couple of the set workouts and we’ve still not had to give it a charge. It’s been on standby mode for over a week as well.

It will charge from flat in three hours but the bad news is, like most new wearables on the market – it does need its own charging cradle. This isn’t a moan that’s unique to Adidas though, so we’ll not mark it down for that.

Source : http://www.wareable.com/fitness-trackers/adidas-micoach-fit-smart-review

AFTNews, Fitness at Work, Home Gym

Standing and exercise linked to lower odds of obesity

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Standing for at least one-quarter of the day has been linked to lower odds of obesity in a new study led by the American Cancer Society in collaboration with The Cooper Institute, the University of Texas, and the University of Georgia. The study appears inMayo Clinic Proceedings.

While sedentary behavior (such as watching TV and commuting time) has been linked to negative health effects, it is unclear whether more time spent standing has protective health benefits. To investigate further, a research team led by Dr. Kerem Shuval, Director of Physical Activity & Nutrition Research at the American Cancer Society, examined reported standing habits in relation to objectively measured obesity and metabolic risk among more than 7000 adult patients attending the Cooper Clinic (Dallas, Texas) for preventive medicine visits from 2010 to 2015. Specifically, the association between standing time and obesity was determined through three measures: body mass index (BMI), body fat percentage, and waist circumference. The association between standing and metabolic risk was assessed via metabolic syndrome, a clustering of risk factors that increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

The study found that among men, standing a quarter of the time was linked to a 32% reduced likelihood of obesity (body fat percentage). Standing half the time was associated with a 59% reduced likelihood of obesity. But standing more than three-quarters of the time was not associated with a lower risk of obesity.

In women, standing a quarter, half, and three quarters of the time was associated with 35%, 47%, and 57% respective reductions in the likelihood of abdominal obesity (waist circumference). No relationship between standing and metabolic syndrome was found among women or men.

Researchers also investigated whether physical activity in conjunction with standing provided additional reduction in risk. They found that among those meeting physical activity guidelines (150 minutes of moderate activity and/or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per day) the addition of standing time was associated with incremental drops in the likelihood of all obesity measures and metabolic syndrome in both women and men. For example, men meeting physical activity guidelines and standing a quarter to half of the time had a 57% reduced likelihood for abdominal obesity, whereas those meeting guidelines and standing three quarters of the time or more had a 64% lower odds for abdominal obesity.

While the findings provide initial and important evidence on the potential protective benefits of standing, the study team cautions that their findings should be interpreted in the context of the study’s limitations. These findings are cross-sectional, meaning they capture a ‘snapshot’ in time, so it is unclear whether less standing leads to more obesity or whether in fact obese individuals stand less. Additional prospective studies are needed to determine whether standing has protective health benefits.

Moreover, while obesity and metabolic syndrome were objectively measured, standing and physical activity were not; they were based on self-report which may lead to over estimation of these behaviors. Further, due to the survey measure used in the study, it is unclear whether study participants were standing still or standing and moving. While standing and moving provides extra energy expenditure, standing still is similar to sitting with regards to energy expenditure.

Finally, it should be noted that some studies have found adverse health effects to prolonged standing, such as increased risk for varicose veins. Therefore, additional research into the effects of standing on health is definitely suggested.

Date: November 3, 2015

Source: University of Kent

University of Kent. “Endurance expert: Drugs could help ‘lazy’ people exercise: In what has been described as ‘doping for lazy people’ an endurance expert advocates psychoactive drugs to encourage sedentary people to exercise.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 November 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151103140442.htm>.

AFTNews, Fitness

Endurance expert: Drugs could help ‘lazy’ people exercise

Endurance expert suggests drugs could help ‘lazy people’ exercise In what has been described as ‘doping for lazy people’ a University of Kent endurance expert has advocated the use of psychoactive drugs to encourage sedentary people to exercise.

Together with lack of time, physical exertion is one of the main perceived barriers to exercise. This is not surprising because humans evolved to be ‘lazy’, i.e. to conserve energy. Professor Samuele Marcora suggests that reducing perception of effort during exercise using caffeine or other psychoactive drugs (e.g. methylphenidate and modafinil) could help many people stick to their fitness plans.

Whilst acknowledging that such an intervention is both drastic and controversial, Professor Marcora points out that perception of effort is one of the main reasons why most people choose sedentary activities for their leisure time. Compared to watching television (zero effort), even moderate-intensity physical activities like walking require considerable effort. He says finding a way that makes people with very low motivation to do even moderate exercise, like walking, could be particularly useful.

Similarly, a reduction in perception of effort would be very helpful to the many people who find exercise difficult because they are overweight and/or exercise after work in a state of mental fatigue.

Professor Marcora also states that whilst there is no strong ethical opposition to the use of psychoactive drugs to help quit smoking (nicotine) or treat obesity (appetite suppressants), the negative perception of doping in sport may prevent the use of stimulants and other psychoactive drugs to treat physical inactivity.

Given that physical inactivity is responsible for twice as many deaths as obesity, he hopes that psychopharmacological treatment for physical inactivity will be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.

Professor Samuele Marcora is Director of Research at the University of Kent’s School of Sport and Exercise Sciences. His paper Can Doping be a Good Thing? Using Psychoactive Drugs to Facilitate Physical Activity Behaviour has been published in the journal Sports Medicine.

Source: University of Kent article, “Endurance expert: Drugs could help ‘lazy’ people exercise: In what has been described as ‘doping for lazy people’ an endurance expert advocates psychoactive drugs to encourage sedentary people to exercise.” Science Daily, 3 November 2015.