I love a good gadget and when its fitness related, I love it even more. I’ve had my eye on the Fitbit Charge HR for some time and then when a friend of mine got hers and I saw it in action, I knew I needed to get one. So, I got my hands on the black Fitbit Charge HR.
First of all, a bit about watch. The Fitbit Charge HR is available from their website for £119.99 and comes with a USB charging cable, which is specifically designed just to charge the watch (so make sure you don’t lose it). I personally think it’s quite reasonably priced compared to other fitness watches. The Fitbit Charge HR doesn’t actually have GPS built-in so is not ideal if you are planning on running as it wouldn’t be very accurate. It’s designed to keep track of how active you are. It is available in 5 different colours; black, plum, blue, tangerine, teal and pink and is unisex. The watch only has one button so it’s not overly complicated. Pressing this button you can scroll through the stats/info; time, number of steps, heart rate, distance, calories burnt, flights of stairs climbed. If you don’t like the idea of pressing the button to scroll through the data, you can change the settings and set it up so you can tap the screen to go through the stats, as the screen is touch screen. One of my fav things about the watch is it continuously monitors your heart rate from your wrist so there is no need for a heart rate strap around your chest. I’ve actually got a Garmin with a chest strap and it can get quite uncomfortable to wear at times, particularly if you’re working out in the gym. If you thought that was it, you’re wrong. It has a built-in alarm, so you can set the watch to wake you up with a silent vibrating alarm, which was quite scary for the first week and it’s not something I’ve ever experienced. If you have it connected to your phone via bluetooth it notifies you when your phone is ringing or you get a text. Finally it can monitor your sleep so you can see whether you were restless, awake or fast asleep. Basically, its more than just a pedometer!
So, I’ve had my Fitbit for over 6 months and I love it. The watch is super simple to get set up and is easily synced and setup via the free Fitbit app that you can download onto your tablet, laptop/pc or smart phone. Even if you’re not that clued with technology, you won’t have too much difficulty getting it up and running. Its super light weight and comfortable to wear throughout all daily activities and doesn’t even bother me wearing it whilst sleeping. The battery life is pretty good and once fully charged it lasts about 3-4 days. I tend to keep the charging wire in my handbag and then if I can see its running low whilst I’m sat at my desk at work for example, I can plug it into the computer and give it a boost.
I feel the watch has really motivated me to get more active. I tend to get bored with things pretty quickly and wasn’t sure how long I’d be excited about the watch and how long I’d wear it for. Well its been over 6 months and I’m still loving it. Before having the Fitbit I would never have looked into how many steps I had done in a day. I generally thought I was fairly active and walked around a lot at work. Since having the Fitbit I now know I’m not as active as I thought! When I set my daily challenge to 10,000 a steps a day I thought that would be easy and I’d be hitting that everyday…I was WRONG. I actually needed to go out my way and walk extra almost everyday just to hit my goal. On a daily basis I tend to check my Fitbit every couple of hours just to see if I am on track to reaching my daily goal. If I can see that I haven’t walked much, I’ll make extra effort to go answer the door and walk to the toilet that’s furthest away.
Just a little bit of advice for when you are wearing the watch, you don’t need to have it super tight for it to be able to detect your heart beat. I noticed I had it on a little bit too tight and that was causing an irritation on my skin beneath the strap. After loosening the strap by one notch the irritation began to go. My skin is super sensitive so I’m not surprised at this at all.
Now onto the Fitbit app. It can be downloaded onto a tablet, smart phone, laptop/PC and the Fitbit can be synced to the device at anytime of the day so you can see the data from your watch. It’s a great way of getting an overview of all your data and comparing the data across each week or month. I like how easy it is to use and view the data, its laid out in a very simple format so everything is easy to find. I took the watch with me on a recent 5 week trip around Asia. I wasn’t working out while I was there so I wanted to make sure I was getting enough steps in a day to keep my fitness up. There were no worries there, even without trying I was going well over my standard daily challenge. Here’s the screen shot of the day I climbed up the Yellow Mountain in Huanghshan, China. I hit 10,000 steps before I even got to the mountain and at the end of my day hit a crazy 30,670.
Via the app you can add your friends and family who also own a Fitbit and see their weekly steps, cheer them on and set each other challenges. If you don’t know which of friends have got a Fitbit you can add them via Facebook or contacts making it really easy to get your Fitbit family together. On the app there is a challenges section which I love. It’s a great away to introduce a little bit of friendly competition which encourages you all to do more steps. I have a real competitive side to me, so this works really well for me. I often take part in the daily 10,000 a day challenge. I would like to see more of a variety of challenges and maybe a way of users designing their own challenges.
You may have noticed that I have pictures of a black and teal watch. The reason for this is after a few months of having my watch it did start to play up. The time would randomly change throughout the day. Mid-day it would say I’d walked say 2000 steps and later on in the day it would go back to zero. I contacted Fitbit and they were really helpful and helped deal with the issue and troubleshoot the problem. Sadly resetting the watch didn’t help and the problem was still there. Fitbit then kindly sent me out a brand new replacement watch and this time I went for the teal as it was fairly new colour and I thought I’d go with something a little bit more vibrant.
One part of the Fitbit that I haven’t had chance to look into as much as I would like to is the sleep monitoring data. I am hoping to use the information collated to see if I can make changes to my sleep pattern and improve my sleep.
Overall I am super happy with my Fitbit and the service Fitbit provided. Fingers crossed my new watch is working perfectly and I’ve had no problems. If you want to get more active and struggle to get the motivation to get up and workout, i would suggest putting the Fitbit Charge HR on your wish list for your next birthday or Christmas present. Once you start getting more active and hitting your daily step goal, you start to see results you will automatically be driven to get more active. If you want more information about Fitbit products click here and it will take you to their website.
