Fitness bands are a convenient and catchy idea: wearing a simple band to track your fitness stats as you go about your day. But do the people who are paid to motivate clients to reach fitness goals approve of the gadgets? If you ask around in Atlanta, the response from personal trainers is, "Sure!"
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Two area trainers weighed in on fit bands, including brand recommendations and cautions on expecting too much.
"I think they are a great tool to increase self-awareness and motivation," said Jenny Askew, owner of Balance Fitness and Nutrition and an American College of Sports Medicine credentialed health and fitness specialist.
"Fit bands are good for beginners because they hold you accountable to your daily activity level," she said.
Elmore McConnell, a personal trainer and business owner at We Train Atlanta, encourages clients to use fit bands, but only the types that will motivate them.
"The biggest thing with a fit band is finding one that you will respond to," said McConnell, who earned a Bachelor of Science degree in exercise science at Mississippi State University. "Some are more about numbers, with details about the calories you burned and your heart rate, like Garmin and Polar," he said.
Others, like FitBit, track your activity levels and chart your results in a way that makes it easy to compare.
"Some people are very motivated to see that last week on Monday they walked 2,000 steps and this week on Monday they got to 3,000, and that would be a good option for them," he said.
However, a fit band can become a demotivator, particularly if you expect the same type of huge day-over-day improvements when you first start wearing the fit band, McConnell said. "And some clients will get OCD about certain types of goals, and get discouraged if they don't, say, burn a target number of calories," he said. "You need to look for the positives in the negatives and remember no matter what, all that activity adds up."
