Man & Tech v Tarmac: Sub-3-hour marathon challenge

Fitness Tech Tested: Living with the Jawbone UP

I’ve had the Jawbone UP second generation wristband for about three weeks now and it’s starting to provide me with daily tips. Some of these are nicely tailored to you, based on your activity. Others are more generic like this one. It’s a nice touch.

Is it enough though? I’m still not entriely convinced of why someone would want to own one. I’m still crafting my full review for T3.com but there’s something about these steps and movement trackers I can’t quite get to grips with.

If you’re somone who never moves - a sofa dweller - then a product like the Jawbone UP or the Nike Fuelband might be a great motivator to start being more active. A fitness gadget that’s good at taking people with a very low fitness baseline and making them more aware of what they’re (not) doing.

But in my opinion if you’re already doing any kind of serious exercise then the Jawbone feels a bit redundant. The tracking isn’t detailed enough to cope with anything beyond steps and while it might make you take the stairs once in a while or walk to the next bus stop, if I’m already adding value to my fitness and health via my chosen sport or exercise then it’s hard to see how it can significantly improve my lifestyle.

Within any given working day there are only so many opportunities for most people to move around. If you’re in an hour-long meeting you can’t get up and wander around no matter how many times the writsband vibrates to remind you you’ve been on my backside for thirty minutes.

The Jawbone guys will openly tell you that this isn’t a product aimed at sports people and specific sport tracking. It’s a general wellbeing aid and I think it happens to be good at that.

I’m just not sure it does enough to satisfy people who are already on the road to fitness.

Fitness Tech Tested: Living with the Withings Smart Body Analyser

Day three of using the Withings Smart Body Analyser and I’m struggling with it a bit. I want to love it but I’m finding it comes with some niggles.

One of the major problems is the accuracy of the information which is pretty vital when you’re talking about a set of scales. Look at the image above for instance. It’s surely not possible to gain six pounds in 33 minutes. But that’s what it’s registered this morning.

I’m also finding the Android app a little clunky. It crashes, for me at least, fairly regularly and it seems to take a long time to update once you’re off the scales.

Every time you open the app it stops on sort of interstitial homescreen and I tend to find myself waiting for that to close so I can get to the app. After a minute or so you realise you have to tap it to move to the dashboard screen.

Once you’re inside the app, the dashboard screen is fairly well laid out and nicely designed. But when you tap on a specific metric, let’s say weight, to see the pattern over a period of time, the graphs are fairly hard to read.

The information is very small and it struggles to represent data if you’ve taken more than one set of measurements per day.

It’s still early days though and I’m wondering if some of these glitches will iron themselves out as I get used to using it.

One very clever thing that the Withings people have done is to make it work alongside your other fitness apps and tools. So I can connect my Endomondo account and have my weight mesasurements fired straight into that profile which then gives me more accurate calorie burn rates each time I use the app.

It also works with RunKeeper, BodyMedia Fit, FitBit and MyFitnessPal. Sadly not the Jawbone UP that I’m also testing, otherwise I’d be able to get my sleep data into the Withings app as well.

Fitness Tech Test: Endomondo Premium Subscription

I just unlocked the premium features to Endomondo’s online tools. You get workout comparison, personal best history, heart rate training zones and more detailed training analysis which adds a decent amount of depth to the overall experience.

You also get Peer Benchmarking so you can compare yourself to the rest of the Endomondo universe. You can filter distance, age, sex and geography to see how you stack up.

There’s a nice visual representation of how far up the tree you are which also shows where your Endomondo friends are in comparison. It’s a nice touch.

It’ll also tell you in words. So apparently I’m in the top 10 per cent when it comes to my personal best 5km time and I’m 2 minutes off being in the top 5 per cent. Handily it then tells me what my mile pace needs to be to make that leap.

It’s heaven for statto’s.

Starting running: Get more running tips and training adivce

Altitude training… in a running shoe shop

When the clever guys at Sweatshop decided to open a flagship store in the City of London they didn’t mess around.

In addtion to three floors focussed on specialist running clothes, shoes and equipment, they installed a high altitude training chamber on the top floor.

The large space looks amazing and is used to provide spinning and treadmill classes at simulated high altitude. 

They’ve agreed to give me a tour of the tech and let me have a session in the chamber to see what it’s like.

Could be a big help for my preparation for the Marathon du Mont Blanc.

Can’t wait to get in and have a run in a couple of weeks.

Would sir like some tech with that high-waisted blue outfit?

This is exactly how I run. A man can never have too many tracking devices right?*

When this was shot for T3 magazine, I was actually on a little turntable - the ones you ice cakes on - and told not to move while someone had to spin the cake icer through 360 degrees about two degrees at a time.

Before the first shot I was told I’d either need to breath out before each click or breath in. This is where I made my mistake. I breathed in creating that little paunch. This was a schoolboy error. Beckham would never have made this mistake in those Y-front ads he did.

Add to that the fact I’m tucked in like Simon Cowell and the look is complete.

* Imagine if that were true. How long would it take me to cross the start line in races. Beep, beep, beep. Not done yet. Beep, beep. Still not done. Beep. Beep.

Fitness Tech Tested: Jawbone UP 2013

I’ve been living with the second generation Jawbone UP for a little over a week now and I’ve been busy testing the food diary element.
Within the app you have the option of recording your daily intake. I can already hear a million Fitblrs screaming ‘not the dreaded calorie counting’.

In part it is about clocking how many calories you’re consuming but there’s also a handy breakdown of other key nutrtional values which is really nice to see. You can monitor where your calories are coming from with stats on fibre, unsaturated fat, sugar, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium and carbs.

The meal summary screen also comes with useful percentages that show how your intake compares to recommended daily allowances, based on USDA guidelines.

Logging Your Food Intake
There are a number of ways to log your food. First up you can choose from a pre-loaded list of common food items from within the UP food gallery. Slightly annoyingly, once you’ve selected a food type, let’s say an apple, you’ll then need to match it to a food in the UP’s database.

So you start by selecting Fruits, then Apple and then you need to search and select which variety. In addition you’ll also need to input the size or whether you’ve eaten the whole thing or a slice. The whole process is fairly cumbersome and time consuming. Not to mention a little bit hit and miss. What’s a medium apple?

The good news though is that there are a wide variety of branded items in the database. It’s easy to log things like a Starbucks’ latte or a Danone yoghurt. The bad news is that recording packaged food is far easier than homemade meals. As any Fitblr will tell you, the more pacakged food you’re eating, the less healthy your diet is likelty to be.

Another method you can use is the barcode scanner. In theory this is a great addition to the app that should make food monitoring simpler - and when it works it does. The problem is that it doesn’t always work and once again it’s far better at spotting a can of coke than a handful of walnuts.

Take my breakfast this morning as an example. I had Quaker Oat So Simple porridge with a tablespoon of Manuka honey and a handful of sultanas.

The scanner logged the Manuka honey and the serving size as a tablespoon. Amazingly there was only 2 calories variation in what the label said versus the app’s own data. However, when I tried the porridge - which is a very popular brand - it registered it as someting I can only guess as being Greek. The sultanas were even worse. The UP scanner decided my juicy dried fruits were in fact tomato and porcini mushroom soup. That’s a 33 per cent hit rate which isn’t great.

I intend to keep testing this to see how it fares with a hundred common food stuffs and I’ll drop that into my full review but for now it’s far happier with Special K than it is with healthier options.

You can also take and store pictures of meals you’ve eaten and items you log are also stored in your own library as you go which does make it easier to record things you eat regularly.

In defence of the UP app, if you’re willing to invest time in building accurate meal data, logging food will become increasingly speedy and accurate as your library builds. The question is whether you’ll have the inclination to spend hours setting up your library. I believe most people won’t.

Also the minute you deviate from your normal meals, the accuracy has the potential to drop. Once it ceases to be accurate it becomes meanlingless.

The Jawbone UP is not alone in suffering from this problem. I’ve not encountered a food diary tool that actually makes this easy. It’s one of those things that technology may never be able to solve. In fairness to the UP app, it does have a pretty good stab at it.

The New Jawbone UP: Two days on the wrist, first impressions

After a weekend of wearing the new Jawbone UP activity tracking wristband,  I thought I’d share some of my early thoughts.

This is by no means a full review, that’ll come after I’ve been living with it for longer but I thought I’d put my first impressions out there.

Let’s start with the positives. It was easy to set up. All you need is a smartphone (with web connection to download the app), the wristband and some little grey cells. A handfulshould suffice. The instructions are straight forward and it took about 15 minutes tops.

Second, it’s comfortable. I’m not sure it’s as comfy as the Nike+ Fuelband but you can quite easily forget you’re wearing it. That’s pretty important.

At night that changes a little. While one of the big sells of the Jawbone UP over the Fuelband its ability to monitor your sleep, this comes at the price of feeling a little bit like you’re getting into bed with your socks on. And trust me it’s not something you’ll want to be scratching up and down your partners soft bits during any kind of intimate encounters. Unless they’re a fan of rubber on skin of course.

If you can get over that feeling then the sleep info you get is actually geniuinely interesting. From just two nights I can see I’ve had wildly different sleep patterns. One with long periods of deep sleep, one with lots of fluctuating light sleep. Why this is the case will need more personal interpretation based on what I did both days before but seeing it is an eye opener.

One big concern I have is that the acitvity tracking is based almost entirely on the notion of steps. You can input bouts of exercise manually but the measurements are a bit rudimentary (you tell the app whether your workout was easy - but busting). Seems a lot less accurate than I’d personally like.

I’m also worried that there are occasions when you’ll need to take it off. Like before going swimming and spending time in and around a spa. (That’s what I’ve been doing this weekend.)

So when you’re involved in actiivty that does still involve walking around, you’ve can’t track because the devices is only water resistant and not water proof.

Having said that, the same is true of the main rivals.

On the whole, so far I’ve found it easy to use and there is detail coming out of the app that I believe will prove motivational and insightful over time but whether it’s the full accurate tracking device for the more serious fitness types remains to be seen.

Watch this space…