As athletes, we make use of different gadgets and devices for things like tracking our activities, heart rate, sleep, recovery, and more. These devices enable us to optimize our performance by being cautious and critical as regards our approach to our workouts. One of the most useful tools that all athletes must have is a reliable and feature-rich smartwatch. Smartwatches, especially those that are geared toward health and fitness, allow athletes to plan their activities effectively. A well-known brand when it comes to health and fitness smartwatches is FitBit. Since Black Friday is fast approaching, take this opportunity to grab your very own FitBit smartwatch through Fitbit Black Friday deals. In this article, we are going to talk about why a Fitbit smartwatch will be a game-changer for athletes.
Heart Rate Monitoring
Heart rate monitoring is perhaps the most essential feature when it comes to all smartwatches. The ability to be able to accurately track your current heart rate is absolutely critical in all aspects of performance. This is especially true for athletes who are into high-intensity activities and workouts. These activities typically include cycling, running, and swimming. Essentially, by tracking your current heart rate, you are able to gauge if the intensity of your current workout is sustainable. For example, in a cycling scenario, a high heart rate means that you are exerting a lot of effort and strain.
As a result, you are burning more fuel, and you are causing your body to work harder. By monitoring your current heart rate, you can better decide if you are better off lowering your effort or if you can sustain the current level of effort that you are putting out. The ability to make this decision is very important, especially in a race or a performance scenario.
Monitoring Sleep and Recovery
As athletes, we all know that sleep and recovery are just as important as any other type of training. A good and sufficient recovery is key to enable our bodies to regain the energy that it has lost throughout our workouts and activities. This is often the most overlooked component of an athlete’s performance because there were no effective methods before to accurately track and monitor sleep and recovery. Here come smartwatches. By monitoring your heart rate and checking how it compares during the day, smartwatches can know if you are already in a state of sleep or rest. By monitoring this activity on a daily basis, smartwatches, along with their respective apps, can show you a report of how well or how much you have recovered.
Effectively, it provides you insight as to how you might be performing for your next activity. In other words, if the app reports that you have properly recovered, then you would expect to perform rather well. In contrast, if the app reports that you are yet to recover sufficiently, then you would expect your performance to decline.
Timing and Lapping
Another great feature of smartwatches is the ability to record your lap times. This is very crucial, especially for those sports or activities that pay particular attention to speed. For example, with the use of this feature, you can track how much time you have consumed in running a mile during a marathon. This is commonly referred to as “splits.” By knowing how much time you have consumed during your previous kilometer or previous “split,” you can better decide how to adjust your performance for the current or upcoming split. For instance, if you see that you have consumed too much time during your last split, then it might be wise to run a faster split for this lap. Again, this feature is crucial in a race environment or during training where you are seeking incremental performance improvements.