Commentary: We’re buying more fitness trackers but exercising less

In addition, fewer adults and youngsters are strolling or bicycling to high school or work than 25 years in the past. For occasion, within the late Sixties, most US youngsters ages 5 to 14 rode a bicycle or walked to high school. Since then, this “lively transportation” has largely been changed by car journeys. Rates of journey by college bus or public transportation have seen little change.

FITNESS TRACKERS ARE STILL USEFUL

So if ranges of bodily exercise have dropped on the identical time that the recognition of health monitoring has grown, what makes these devices helpful?

Fitness trackers will help to extend folks’s consciousness of their every day bodily exercise. However, these gadgets are solely a part of the answer to addressing the issue of sedentary life. They are facilitators, quite than drivers, of behaviour change.

When an individual’s bodily exercise goes down, it opens the door to total diminished health ranges and different well being issues resembling weight problems or diabetes. On the opposite hand, bodily exercise has a dramatic constructive impression on well being and well-being. 

The first step to growing lively motion is to measure it, which these gadgets can do. But efficiently growing one’s total bodily exercise requires a number of extra elements resembling goal-setting, self-monitoring, constructive suggestions and social help.

Scott A Conger is an Associate Professor of Exercise Physiology at Boise State University, David Bassett is a Professor and the Department Head of Kinesiology, Recreation and Sport Studies on the University of Tennessee, and Lindsay Toth is an Assistant Professor of Kinesiology on the University of North Florida. This commentary first appeared in The Conversation.