Activity Monitors - Useful?

ArareRed

Do any of you wear/use a good activity monitor and do you recommend them? They seem to be a little pricey. What do you think?

moxette

I have used the body bugg before and heart rate monitors. They aren't very accurate. The body bugg uses arm movement to gauge calorie burn. Meaning it thinks you would burn more calories doing Zumba than going for a run or a bike ride. Totally ruined it for me when I learned that. Plus I think when it comes to weight loss (if that is your goal), its more important to keep track of calories in than calories out.

grassette

I use a pedometer to measure my activity. You can get a good one from a sports fitness store for $20. Mine is a Sportsline, and I've been using it for the past 3 months to monitor my activity. As well as mesuring the number of steps I take during the day, it also gives me the distance (in miles or Km) and the number of calories burned. To stay healthy, you need to log in at least 10,000 steps daily. I have a sedentary lifestyle and average about 4,000 steps just walking around the house. I find it a powerful motivator to boost my activity level to make sure that I get my 10,000 steps in. I don't log all of my steps as exercise, but when I walk the dogs for 2 hours, I enter that.

Wiki as a great article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedometer

And I find that mine is accurate.

Though I am a slow walker at present, as I am recovering from a car accident, I hope to use it eventually as a fitness tool. See this link to see who to make it a real cardio tool: http://www.canada.com/Walkers+should+steps+minute/1398269/story.html