Transform Your iPhone into a Personal Trainer and Weight Loss Coach
- Analyze Your Life Patterns Using Jawbone's Up Band
- Let Your iPhone Communicate with Your Sneakers to Help You Stay Fit
- Monitor Your Heart Rate During Workouts
- Apps to Help Improve Your Fitness and Eating Habits
- Other Accessories Useful for FitnessMinded iPhone Users
Whether you enjoy working out at a gym, exercising at home, or taking advantage of the great outdoors to engage in physical activity, with the help of some third-party apps and accessories, your Apple iPhone can be used as a personal trainer or weight loss coach.
Analyze Your Life Patterns Using Jawbone's Up Band
One of the more unique fitness-related accessory and app combinations available for the iPhone is the Up Band ($99.99). It comes from Jawbone (http://www.jawbone.com), a company that offers several high-end Bluetooth wireless headsets, as well as a powerful, battery-powered speaker that works with the iPhone or iPad.
Worn around your wrist like a bracelet, the Up Band is designed to help you eat healthier, sleep better, and exercise more efficiently by monitoring your daily activities and then allowing you to analyze them.
After setting up the Up Band by connecting it to the iPhone via the headphone jack, the accompanying app will request basic information about you, including your gender, age, height, and weight. Then the app will help you set realistic goals in terms of how many steps per day you walk, how many hours of sleep you get per night, and how many nutritious meals you eat each day.
As you wear the Up Band throughout the day and night, it will keep track of your steps and the distance you walk (run or jog) throughout the day. It can also keep track of the calories you burn, as well as the pace and intensity of your workouts.
When you're asleep, the Up Band can track the quality of your sleep, and help you analyze your overall sleep quality. To ensure you partake in activities throughout the day, especially if you find yourself sitting idle at your desk for hours at a time, the Up Band can easily be programmed to vibrate slightly whenever it determines you've remained inactive for a predetermined period of time during the day.
At any time, you can connect the Up Band to the iPhone to sync data, and then analyze your activity, workout, and sleep patterns in a way that helps you better understand how you can improve your overall health and fitness.
In order to get the most out of this Up Band accessory-and-app combo, you'll need to get into the habit of wearing the Up Band bracelet regularly, keeping it charged and synced with your iPhone, and then utilizing the data it provides to make more intelligent life choices.
To view instructional and informative videos about how the Up Band is used, visit http://jawbone.com/support/up.