After a couple of months of largely rainy weather, local beaches busy with tourists (good for those local businesses reliant on tourism, but the Covid-19 pandemic has brought a new wariness of strangers), my dance mojo still absent and all attempts to get the garden under control and more productive having been thwarted by the excessive numbers of slugs and snails (and rain), by mid-August I had to admit to myself that I was in something of a slough of despond and apathy.
I noticed some stasis dermatitis on my lower shins, a sign that the circulation in my legs could be better. Realising I needed to take action, I wanted something which would buzz me to move every so often, without having to set alarms, as I can get hyperfocused and end up sitting at my computer for hours. I finally cracked and got myself a fitness tracker watch.
Not that I am very interested in step counting. The suggested 10000 steps a day is supposed to be roughly equivalent to five miles. However, I can no longer comfortably walk a mile, so I would have to scale back considerably when setting myself a motivational target number of steps.
In the end, I chose a Fitbit Inspire HR, on offer because an upgraded version was about to go on sale. I didn't need anything very flashy, not being into sports and gym. The HR is the ability to measure heart rate, so I could look at cardio and sleep, and it would give me a little buzz at ten to the hour during the day to prompt me to complete at least 250 steps.
I settled on a target of 3000 steps a day initially, and found that my baseline was around 2000, 2500 on a good day. Gradually I found the number I did creeping up, but my 'crash' days, when my knees really hurt, and I feel tired and generally achy and low on energy, are obvious; I struggle to make 1000 steps on those days.
I saw a few complaints in reviews that there weren't enough instructions on how to use it, and that it was difficult to navigate, not intuitive. I found it easy to set up, and with a certain amount of 'poke it and see what it does', I found my way around quite enough to be going on with. I didn't feel the need to know everything about how it worked, because I was happy not using all the functionality (it can also allow you to record food and water intake, give message notifications and probably more besides, but if it's not going to make tea and cook a meal for me, I don't really care).
I found that if I walk slowly and smoothly with no arm-swinging, the tracker has a problem realising I'm walking and doesn't record steps. The upside of that is that if I do some seated exercise with arm swinging as I step, it still records them as steps. Not that it recognises the steps as part of 'seated exercise'; it's very walk/run/cycle/swim/aerobics focused. I did some dance on the beach when lockdown lifted a bit, and it finally concluded I was swimming. Obviously dance isn't 'sporty' enough.
The sleep function is a bit flaky, sometimes giving a nice graph of light, deep and REM sleep and wakefulness (although you get an error message informing you that the database didn't allow that sleep to be logged. Er, what?), other times just giving some basic measurements. I read from the help/forum that a lot of people have found this, and no one has found a way to resolve it. Fitbit's answer was to subscribe to the app and/or buy the latest watch, which is no help at all. I notice it is sensitive to 'wakefulness', as brief stretching a knee to relieve pain or sleepily stroking a cat means I am awake, however briefly. It usually recognises when I fall asleep again after I get up in the night for a quick trip to the bathroom, but sometimes, it doesn't. I start the 'sleep now' when I decide to turn off the light and sleep, but it sometimes doesn't record my sleep from that time. To get sleep details, it needs to be longer than three hours (I think it's three). I was watching a thriller on TV, very absorbed, and found that the watch had recorded me as being asleep. Despite the excitement, my heart rate didn't increase. She's not moving, must be asleep? I haven't seen a murder/crime programme yet where Forensics download the fitness tracker data to narrow time of death, but it surely can't be long now.
Recording active minutes is another issue. If you aren't doing anything it can automatically recognise as exercise, it relies on heart rate being up in the cardio zone consistently for ten minutes. I quickly found I could work in the garden until I felt wobbly and light-headed from the effort, but it wasn't recognised as exercise or active minutes, and if I was working in one place, taking occasional rather than continuous steps, not recording steps either. FYI Fitbit, pickaxing bramble and sedge roots really is effort. Maybe I should experiment with recording it as aerobics or something.
it's been three months since I started wearing it. I still cannot conceive of managing 5000, let alone 10000 steps a day and I've found it easy to be so focused on what I'm doing that the hourly 'shift yer bum' buzz goes unnoticed too. It will be interesting to see if continued use changes anything.
