Smart Exercise Equipment: How Android Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolution

Wearing Fitbit is like being hooked up to a heart monitor, a pedometer, and a respiratory machine at the same time, and without any needles or nurses. A simple accessory worn on your wrist like a watch, Fitbit will get you going and track every movement. Using Bluetooth, Fitbit products sync harmoniously to your Android devices and deliver daily fitness analytics to your personal dashboard. Fitbit can also track how long and how well you sleep, how many times you wake up, and will even wake you up in the morning with a vibrating alarm. With the ability to optimize your dashboard with other fitness applications, like Map My Fitness and Endomondo, Fitbit is an affordable way to formally track your fitness.

Although a display screen on a piece of exercise equipment is not breaking news, connecting your workout schedule, goals, and results to your Android device is! Keep all of your workout results in a stored digital space using the LFconnect app. See your average heart rate, distance climbed, total calories, and more for every workout both indoor on a machine and outdoor. With the calendar feature, you can export your workouts to Google calendar (or Outlook) which delivers alerts when you’re behind in your routine.

TRX suspension system is a portable workout tool originating in the military. With hundreds of exercises to perform on one device, it can be tough to keep track of them all, and it’s especially difficult to track results. Of course, we wouldn’t be talking about TRX if there wasn’t an innovative solution to this problem. The TRX Force Super App combines the simple TRX suspension workout system (straps and handles) with Android OS providing countdown timers, workout selection, fitness tests, and measurable results. Even though the results are not fed automatically from the straps to your Android device, the data is stored and, hopefully, shows your great progress.

In what can only be seen as a race to the wrist, Bodytronics’ Polar Loop competes in the same space as Fitbit: wearable activity monitors. Some differentiating factors between the Polar Loop and Fitbit would be a more robust heart rate monitor and an energy monitor which points out if the training is more fitness-based or fat-burning based. Much of the data delivered to the device itself is the same.

Cost: $100.

Hope youre motivated to make your next electronic purchase one that gets you moving. Have a healthy new year!