Fitness
The Best Fitness Trackers for All Types of Activities
Notable features: Fabric band, sleep tracker, no screen display, membership required, 1.5-meter water resistance, no GPS | Battery life: 5 days | Connectivity: iOS and Android compatible, Whoop app
This discreet black strap doesn’t have a screen or any type of display, but if you’re looking for a fitness tracker to give you a holistic view of your overall health, I’d recommend giving the Whoop a try — especially if you’re focused on performance. It measures your strain, or your daily exertion, and gives you a recovery score, which is a combination of metrics measured by the strap sensor (heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep performance, and respiratory rate). Whoop says the higher your recovery score, the more prepared your body is for physical activity. I like using this strap not only for tracking my daily activities (you can’t view your stats during the activity because of the lack of a screen — only on the app afterward) but also for all the time I spend not doing them, such as when I’m resting and sleeping. While other fitness-tracking apps will simply tell me how much sleep I got, I found Whoop’s reports to be much more detailed. It will not only tell me how much time I spent in deep sleep and how many times I woke up, but if I have a less-than-ideal night of sleep, it will calculate how much more sleep I need the next night to make up for poor sleep quality. Its heart-rate sensor will also tell me how much time I spent in a high-stress zone during the day, which is helpful to know throughout the workday. All of this granular tracking might feel exhaustive, but for athletes who geek out on metrics, the Whoop can offer much more data beyond step count and heart rate.
Lots of top athletes (including professional basketball player Sue Bird and Citius Mag founder Chris Chavez) use the Whoop strap. It’s also a good choice for weekend warriors looking to maximize their fitness. Rex Chatterjee, creative director of the digital-media firm Dune Road Lifestyle and a former competitive bodybuilder, says Whoop gives him a holistic view of his body’s current state, and Rachel Lapidos, senior lifestyle-and-beauty editor at Bustle, likes how, compared to a tracker that only measures steps or distance, Whoop provides more personalized feedback on her workouts. “With the recovery score, I feel like I’m doing my body more of a favor since I know that if my score is low, I should take it easy rather than push myself, and vice versa,” she says.
Anthony Chavez, a master trainer at CorePower Yoga, is also a Whoop fan, and like Chatterjee, he appreciates the focus on overall health and behavior. “I’ve even begun to notice trends in the metrics based on how hydrated I am or how a glass (or two) of wine will affect my sleep and overall recovery the next day,” he says. Andrea Fornarola, founder of the barre and dance-fusion studio Elements Fitness, calls the Whoop her “newest obsession,” and Nathan Forster, CEO and founder of the on-demand workout platform NEOU, says it’s his tracker of choice. Swerve instructor-operations director Jenna Arndt and SoulCycle master instructor Maddy Ciccone mention Whoop’s “strain coach,” which, as Arndt explains, guides you “how hard to push based on your recovery level.” And the strap doesn’t come with GPS, so you can’t track distance on a run by wearing the strap alone. You can, however, use the Whoop app on your phone during a distance activity and use GPS tracking for your workout that way.
Fitness
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Fitness
Skip the 10,000 Steps: The One Exercise That Matches a Full Day of Walking, according to a Fitness Coach
On Instagram, Zarina Manaenkova advised taking short intervals of squats could deliver the same impact as a full day of walking. “Ten squats instead of 10 thousand steps,” Zarina’s post read, referencing a study that equated ten squats every 45 minutes with 10,000 steps. Manaenkova explained the science behind her claim, stating, “When your muscles actively contract, they produce very important compounds that influence your brain, metabolism, and even your fat-burning processes. Meanwhile, a simple walk does not have this effect. So, if you want to stay young, squat.”
Fitness
A deload week over Christmas will help you hit your goals, experts say – here’s how
Has the idea of taking a break from your fitness routine this Christmas left you with more fear than cheer? Good news. Rest days are a legitimate cornerstone of muscle recovery – a hard-earned chance to kick back and allow the past week’s gains to catch up with you, and never has there been more reason to do so than now, when Christmas is here, and, TBH, we deserve a bloomin’ break.
Besides letting up on any mental stress you may have amassed over the year, extended breaks from training help keep you motivated and, plot twist, there are also physical benefits that come from switching the squat rack for the sofa. They trigger powerful physical and biochemical changes that help increase your muscle mass over time.
Your body needs regular breaks to adapt to sustained training. It’s not the work itself that brings your goals into fruition – like enhanced muscle mass and a deadlift PB – but the time you spend recovering. The training is just the stimulus; during rest periods you experience a cascade of biochemical, neural and hormonal changes that cement those changes in your body as it’s the time for your muscles to repair and grow back stronger.
If you don’t regularly take time to recharge and regenerate, you simply won’t cash in on the results you’ve already paid for. Play the hero long enough and you could even suffer overtraining syndrome (OTS), the result of excessive muscular, skeletal and joint trauma.
This could cause a rise in circulating monocytes – a type of white blood cell linked to immune function – which leads to:
- Low energy;
- Reduced protein synthesis;
- Poor sleep;
- Reduced performance;
- A drop in hormone production
Pretty much everything you need to ensure muscle growth and energy production get shut down.
You keep training because you want to achieve your goals. But by overtraining you force your body into survival and protection mode instead. To some, a week away from the gym might seem counterintuitive. Two weeks might seem like heresy. However, in reality, it could be your key to success. When you take a week or two off from the gym every 12 weeks or so, your muscles, tendons and ligaments repair themselves, and the glycogen energy stores in your muscles and liver are replenished.
Best of all, you won’t lose any of your hard-won gains: studies show it takes four to six weeks of pure inactivity – we’re talking proper bed/boxset rest here – to see severe catabolic breakdown. After one or two weeks off, you won’t suffer a significant drop in strength, power, body mass or size – or witness a noticeable gain in body fat.
And it takes even longer to see any decline in aerobic capacity, stamina or VO2 max (the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise, according to BUPA). A week without loud, crowded gyms and rushing to get to spin class will also do wonders for your mental freshness.
You’ll feel sharper, your enthusiasm to return to your workouts come January will surge, and you will have neutralised all the tiredness and irritability associated with overdoing it. So cut yourself some slack and plan in a week of (COVID-friendly) festive fun. Truth be told, you’ll do a lot worse by overtraining than you ever could by taking time off.
Expert source: Ian Aylward, lead strength and conditioning coach at Perform St George’s Park
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As Women’s Health UK’s fitness director and a qualified Pilates and yoga instructor, Bridie Wilkins has been passionately reporting on exercise, health and nutrition since the start of her decade-long career in journalism. She secured her first role at Look Magazine, where her obsession with fitness began and she launched the magazine’s health and fitness column, Look Fit, before going on to become Health and Fitness writer at HELLO!. Since, she has written for Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, The Metro, Runner’s World and Red.Now, she oversees all fitness content across womenshealthmag.com.uk and the print magazine, spearheading leading cross-platform franchises, such as ‘Fit At Any Age’, where we showcase the women proving that age is no barrier to exercise. She has also represented the brand on BBC Radio London, plus various podcasts and Substacks – all with the aim to encourage more women to exercise and show them how.Outside of work, find her trying the latest Pilates studio, testing her VO2 max for fun (TY, Oura), or posting workouts on Instagram.
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