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Fitness
Fiture Review: A Snazzy Workout Mirror That Gives The Mirror A Run For Its Money
Within the previous days, you might say you had a house health club if you happen to hung your laundry on a spin bike on the foot of the mattress. Nowadays, new devices can encourage you to work out—exercise mirrors present a gym-like health class expertise led by actual human trainers. The aptly named Mirror kicked off the development, however we’ve cataloged a slew of formidable alternate options in our roundup of the most effective exercise mirrors. For the previous few months, I’ve been understanding with the Fiture, and this new Mirror competitor brings rather a lot to your train room.
Fiture is a real exercise mirror in that it’s a extremely reflective mirror; you should use it to take a look at your outfit while you’re getting dressed within the morning. And while you’re understanding, you may simply see your self—and your type—mirrored again at you thru and across the coach’s video. However the subject is getting crowded, with wonderful choices resembling Tempo, Tonal, Mirror and others to select from. Does the Fiture deserve a spot in your house close to the treadmill? Right here’s what I discovered.
Display Measurement: 43-inches | Subscription: $39 monthly for as much as seven customers, cancel anytime | Set up: Free supply and set up
Finest for:
- A body-length mirror to prepare for work while you’re not exercising.
- A wealth of workouts together with kid-friendly health video games.
- House dwellers and people who don’t wish to put holes within the wall.
Skip if:
- You should have stay courses.
- You wish to hearken to your personal (or not less than recognizable) music.
- You need an all-in-one package deal with weights and equipment.
Fiture Design: A Actual Magnificence
It’s onerous to not examine Fiture to the Mirror as a result of it’s the granddaddy of all exercise mirrors and its slick, mirrored show and clear design strains make this system an in depth cousin inviting comparability. Like the unique Mirror, Fiture is a extremely polished, reflective mirror that works as a chunk of dwelling décor when you find yourself not exercising. Furthermore, it’s a full-length mirror that stands 68 inches excessive—simply shy of six full ft—and the mirror extends right down to all however a foot off the ground. In the event you didn’t comprehend it was train gear, you’d assume it was only a mirror, which implies you may be ok with displaying it in your house.
You don’t must bolt it to the wall, both, which makes it apartment-friendly and appropriate for anybody who doesn’t wish to sink anchors into their wall. There’s a security strap in again to safe to the wall if you wish to, however I by no means had any considerations with the way in which Fiture leans towards the wall.
Let’s get this out of the way in which proper now: Fiture doesn’t use a touchscreen. Nowadays, it looks like the whole lot has a touchscreen, and after months of testing the Tempo, I missed not with the ability to immediately work together with courses and exercises on the Fiture display. As a substitute, you’ll often flip to the cell app to make class decisions and tweak different settings. Would it not be higher if Fiture allow you to contact it? Form of. It will actually make utilizing it really feel extra trendy and interactive. However then the display could be coated in fingerprints, ruining the elegant mirror. So maybe it’s for the most effective.
I ought to level out you’re not tied to your cellphone, although. Fiture responds to gestures—you may browse for courses by swiping your hand to the left or proper, and while you wish to begin a category, simply increase your hand such as you’re asking the coach a query. That’s sort of cool, although actually, it’s typically simpler to make use of your cellphone, and that’s how I interacted with Fiture more often than not.
Whereas the built-in audio system are completely high-quality for listening to your coach throughout exercises, Fiture additionally permits you to join Bluetooth audio system or headphones. Personally, I principally don’t see the purpose. The background music is a boring assortment of generic rights-free tunes, and you’ll’t pipe in music from a streaming service or your cellphone—and even choose the style of music. Let’s hope all that’s going to be improved in a later replace.
Talking of connecting stuff, Fiture barely acknowledges this function besides in its assist information, however you should use your Apple Watch as a coronary heart charge monitor. Even higher, if you happen to join your watch, you may play and pause the exercise out of your wrist.
Fiture Lessons and Exercises: Extra Than You’d Count on
You wouldn’t go to a health club that specializes completely in HIIT courses if you happen to’re extra serious about cardio boxing, and likewise, it doesn’t matter what Fiture’s {hardware} is like if the exercise choice is simply too slim. Fortunately, the service—which remains to be fairly younger in comparison with many different exercise mirrors—has a beneficiant array of courses on faucet. Like a lot of the competitors, it’s $39 monthly, however that buys seven consumer accounts with month-to-month billing that may be cancelled anytime.
Lessons are led by a usually enthusiastic and likable cadre of trainers who principally follow the fundamentals with out sharing a ton of non-public anecdotes or letting their personalities dominate the courses. Content material contains HIIT, power coaching, barre, boxing, yoga, Pilates, cardio sculpting and stretching. You may filter your search from the cell app by class size, issue, physique focus (core, arms or full physique), low affect and gear wanted.
Fiture can also be a completely trendy exercise mirror with assist for rep counting and type correction. In the event you select a category that features the so-called Movement Engine (not all do), Fiture makes use of the onboard digicam to depend your reps and make corrective options as wanted. It labored effectively, however like all exercise mirrors with this function, it may be onerous to learn the onscreen corrections in case your train has you oriented perpendicular to the display, resembling throughout a push-up or plank. On steadiness, although, it is a nice function that works effectively.
Many exercises require gear that isn’t included. You may want dumbbells, for instance, so it won’t be a foul thought to purchase some nice adjustable dumbbells to accompany your Fiture. Fiture gives an non-compulsory $150 Match Package that features a coronary heart charge monitor and set of resistance bands (utilized in some exercises), and at the moment the Match Package is bundled without spending a dime with the Fiture. I’m unsure how lengthy that deal will final and when it’ll have to be bought individually.
Along with the substantial library of particular person courses, Fiture additionally gives a (very) restricted variety of multi-week exercise applications. There’s a 20-class weight coaching program, 10-class barre program, 18-session HIIT and a handful of others—seven in whole. It’s a pleasant begin, however this space actually exhibits the infancy of the Fiture subscription service.
Maybe to make up for that, you can too create customized courses. Utilizing the cell app, you may select HIIT or power, decide a size and depth stage, and in moments have a group of workouts to save lots of and name up anytime you want. You may add extra actions and edit particulars of every—fairly cool. While you run the category, every train is demonstrated, albeit very robotically, with none character such as you’d get with a trainer-led class.
And there’s extra. You may create accounts for everybody in the home (except you may have a really, very large household), so Fiture has rolled out health video games that can attraction to the youthful set. The primary such sport, Tightrope Tiger, is a steadiness and coordination sport the place you management an animated character strolling a tightrope whereas avoiding obstacles alongside the way in which. It’s essentially the most modern use of a exercise mirror I’ve but seen.
All that stated, one factor Fiture doesn’t do—not less than not now—is stay courses. All courses are prerecorded and out there on demand, which might be high-quality for 90% of everybody on the market—it’s actually all I would like, personally talking. However if you happen to thrive on the excitement of stay courses with callouts from the coach in actual time, you’ll wish to look elsewhere.
Fiture Assessment: Closing Ideas
Fiture is a wonderful exercise mirror that advantages from arriving within the second wave, and may provide nearly all necessary options pioneered within the mirrors earlier than it. Not solely is it easy to arrange and unlikely to trouble a landlord if you happen to’re renting, nevertheless it additionally appears far classier than any piece of exercise gear has any proper to be. A large and rising catalog of exercises is on the market in all kinds of classes, and Fiture appears inclined to innovate, like with children health video games, to distinguish itself from different health mirrors in the marketplace.
It will be nice if Fiture provided a full line of equipment like dumbbells, however you may accumulate additional gear as your exercise journey progresses. Within the meantime, Fiture stands close to the highest of the exercise mirror hill. Have enjoyable climbing it.
Fitness
Fitness: Is mindfulness the key to a more enjoyable workout?
If exercise pushes you so far outside your comfort zone that physical activity is associated with pain more than pleasure, there’s little motivation to get off the couch.
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There’s no shortage of rumination about why more than half of Canadians don’t meet the recommended 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week. Lack of time is a common excuse, but there are plenty of busy people who exercise regularly. Access is another often-stated barrier, though most Canadians can safely exercise outdoors or in the privacy of their own home should other fitness facilities not be within an easy commute.
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What’s often ignored is the role enjoyment plays in exercise adherence. For those who revel in a tough workout, the idea some people hate to sweat may seem strange. But if exercise pushes you so far outside your comfort zone that physical activity is associated with pain more than pleasure, there’s little motivation to get off the couch.
Once exercise becomes coupled with discomfort, getting reluctant exercisers to find pleasure and enjoyment in physical activity is an uphill battle. To help improve its appeal, researchers have been looking at the effectiveness of something called “extrinsic strategies” to promote better exercise adherence. Defined as “environmental manipulations of the exercise experience that fall outside of the FITT principles,” extrinsic strategies are more about the mental, rather than physical aspects of exercise. In short, the focus is less about the frequency, intensity, time and type of exercise, and more about the role feelings play in the adoption of a regular workout routine.
To be clear, we’re not talking about taking the effort out of exercise. Extrinsic strategies work on altering the perception of effort. Even more granular, it’s important to alter how effort is perceived during, not after, a workout. There’s a marked difference in how people feel once they wipe the sweat off their brow compared to when they’re grinding it out just hoping to finish. And while some people use the feeling of accomplishment that comes after a tough workout to motivate their return to the gym, others can’t get past the memory of how uncomfortable it felt in the moment.
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One of the extrinsic strategies to improving the exercise experience is focusing on external stimuli instead of how the body feels. Music is a popular distraction, which is why so many exercisers listen to their favourite playlists. Another option is exercising outdoors where nature works its magic at diverting exercisers from the internal sensations of effort. Exercising with a friend or within a group also helps. But contrary to using external distractions to dampen the effort of exercise, is the novel idea of leaning into how your body feels during a tough workout.
Mindfulness is defined as paying attention to what’s happening in the moment while also being open to how the body responds physically and mentally to the current experience. In other words, instead of trying to disassociate from the feelings of effort, mindfulness aims to accept and acknowledge the exertion it takes to complete a workout.
The idea that mindfulness is effective at improving exercise adherence is gaining traction, with initial studies suggesting it has merit, but mostly when exercising at lower intensities. Learning to accept and become comfortable with the feelings associated with physical exertion could be a crucial first step in finding pleasure in exercise.
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A recent study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences recently tested the effectiveness of mindfulness in enhancing the exercise experience. The goal of the research team was to see if mindfulness “could prove a useful pleasure enhancing strategy during exercise.”
A test sample of 34 recreationally active men and women were divided into two groups. One group was equipped with a recording taken from Headspace, a popular meditation and mindfulness app, that focused exercisers on tuning into their body and its movement. The control group was without any mindfulness tools.
Both sets of exercisers were asked to follow a 1.5-mile loop through a local park at a self-selected intensity they could sustain for 20-25 minutes. Heart rate was continually monitored, and study subjects were asked to check in with how they felt at two points during the walk (at 0.5 and one mile).
Results indicated listening to a mindfulness recording led to a more pleasurable exercise experience than walking the loop without. That positive response to exercise continued after the workout finished, another sign the mindfulness guided walk produced the kind of enjoyment that could encourage exercisers to walk more often.
Learning to appreciate the feelings associated with effort is an interesting strategy to introduce, especially to new exercisers who often negatively perceive the physical sensations that occur during a workout. With more practice accepting, instead of tuning out, those feelings, a greater number of novice exercisers could become more tolerant of the effort required to improve overall fitness. It’s also an interesting approach for seasoned exercisers who generally rely on disassociating from the intense feelings of a hard workout.
Acknowledging, accepting and appreciating the effort of being physically active are tools every exerciser can lean into when the going gets tough. More importantly, it could be part an improved strategy to get more Canadians enjoying the 150 minutes a week they spend working up a sweat.
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Fitness
‘WH’ Editors Put These Fitness Gifts On Their Wishlist
Jasmine Gomez is the Commerce Editor at Women’s Health, where she cover the best product recommendations across beauty, health, lifestyle, fitness, and more. When she’s not shopping for a living, she enjoys karaoke and dining out more than she cares to admit. Follow her @JazzeGomez.
Mark Stock is a food, drink, and outdoors writer from Portland, Oregon. He spent years making, selling, and sipping Pinot Noir in the Dundee Hills before a full return to his journalistic roots in 2016. In addition to Men’s Health, he writes for SevenFifty Daily, Sip Northwest, The Somm Journal, The Drake, Willamette Week, Travel Oregon, and more.
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Fitness
This type of exercise suppresses hunger in women more than men, study proves
Find yourself with a bigger appetite on rest days than after logging your hardest workout of the week? Same. It usually takes me an hour or two to feel hunger after an intense session, and while there are plenty of existing studies that have attributed this to a decrease in the hunger hormone grehlin and an increase in the hormone peptide YY, which helps you feel fuller for longer, new research suggests women are more susceptible to this response than men.
Granted, the study was conducted on only a small sample of participants (eight males and six females), but this is the first review to have included women at all, and the findings were notable.
The method was pretty straightforward: participants were asked to fast overnight, before completing bouts of cycling at varying levels of intensity the next morning. These were then followed up with blood tests (to measure amounts of lactate) and self-reports to analyse appetite levels.
Results showed that the females had higher levels of total ghrelin (the hormone that makes you feel hunger) at baseline compared to the males, while they also had ‘significantly reduced levels’ of acylated (AG) ghrelin after intense exercise compared to males. Ghrelin levels were, in fact, much lower in both males and females after intense exercise compared to moderate exercise, meaning that all participants felt ‘less hungry’ after high-intensity exercise compared to after moderate exercise, but this was even more significant for women.
‘We found that moderate intensity exercise either did not change ghrelin levels or led to a net increase,’ the study noted. The authors added that exercise above your lactate threshold may be necessary to elicit a suppression in grehlin. Lactate threshold is the point at which lactate builds up in your bloodstream faster than your body can remove it – it occurs during high-intensity exercise.
Why is this useful to know? The author of the study, Kara Anderson, PhD, says: ‘Our research suggests that high-intensity exercise may be important for appetite suppression, which can be particularly useful as part of a weight loss programme. Exercise should be thought of as a “drug”, where the “dose” should be customised based on an individual’s personal goals.’
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Bridie is Fitness Director at Women’s Health UK. She spends her days sweating over new workouts, fitness launches and the best home gym kit so you have all that you need to get fit done. Her work has been published in Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s also a part-time yoga teacher with a habit of nodding off mid savasana (not when she’s teaching, promise).
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