Choosing a Health and Fitness Ecosystem - Part 8 - The TomTom Ecosystem

The final ecosystem in the line-up is TomTom. Although they started off with the ability for users to easily export data to almost any service, TomTom got off to a real rocky start in regards to their app, computer software, device firmware updates and fixes and website. Fortunately, for the most part, their latest devices have been pretty solid, with the most recent line being really awesome. In addition, they have really overhauled their apps and site, making TomTom a great contender in the ecosystem arena.

Devices
One of the things that drew me to TomTom when they first entered the fitness arena was that they made a multi-sport watch that was extremely affordable. Now, they still don't offer a mode for triathlon, so I definitely don't recommend TomTom for triathletes who are competitive and/or need their metrics tracked in a steady manner for a race. That aside, when I was just getting into triathlon, it was amazing having a watch that tracked literally everything I needed for training. TomTom now has a diverse line of products, ranging from running watches, to multi-sport watches, daily fitness trackers to daily activity monitors.

Even though I already noted it, I think it's important to emphasize how affordable TomTom's product line is. They truly offer one of the easiest user interfaces on their devices, one of the best GPS I have ever used, and similar products are usually much more expensive; and by affordable I mean under $200. You might not get all of the fancy smart features of an Apple Watch or Polar M600, but you are going to get almost everything else you want and need.

Website
I was with TomTom in the beginning, and their website was very vanilla, especially compared to every other competitor's website. However, the always made sure they could send data to virtually any service out there, making TomTom's platform one of the most flexible. Today they have really beefed up their website to create a mostly one-stop-shop for your stat needs.

Main Tabs

You start off with "Latest". This will have various tiles, such as Distance, Average Resting (HR), Sleep, Goals, map and summary of latest GPS-based workout, and your latest workout. There can be multiple goals, but you can only have one cardio-specific goal, such as running, cycling or swimming. The other goals that will appear if you choose is Weight and Steps. You can then click on any of these items to see more detail. Overall, this is a wonderful and clean screen, giving most people exactly what they want and need to see.

Activities

Next you can see all of your activities that have been logged via your TomTom device. It's very similar to Strava's activities list, which makes it an easy-to-view screen with details of each activity a click away.

Planning

The Planning screen is a very neat tool. This screen allows you to take courses (Trails) people have posted via GPX format, and upload it to the My Sports site. You can then upload this course to your watch. There are also the pre-defined "Races" which you can customized and appear on your watch as well. This is really fun because it serves to track your best performance for a given Race distance. Synced races include Running, Cycling, Treadmill and Freestyle (indoor swim).


Progress

Finally the Progress screen is just a visual analytics page to let you see trends for all or specific activities, as well as specific stats for the activities. It's a wonderful and simple tool for analyzing your workouts and races.

Set a Goal

Goals are extremely simple and allow a user to quickly set a goal then go. This is very similar to FitBit and this feature is excellent! You can set an activity-specific goal, such as a specific number of running miles per week or total time cycling per week. You can also set a weight goal, as well as the standard 10k steps per day goal.

Sleep

I wanted to break this part out because I am very impressed with TomTom's sleep tracking. Of all competitors, I have found TomTom to be one of the best at accurately tracking sleep. As you can see from the picture below, it does an amazing job at identifying when you are actually sleeping or napping. It was almost 100% accurate with my times.

Apps

TomTom technically has 2 apps; TomTom MySports and TomTom Sports. Although you can still use MySports, it's technically the old application, and when you download Sports, TomTom's newest app, you can migrate your MySports data over and use Sports as your default.

The Sports app tabs mirror the website for Latest and Activities. However, instead of Progress, the app calls the tab Trends. Finally there is a Manage tab to all you full customization and account / profile management.

The Latest tab is what loads first. Like the site, it shows a clean summary that has most of the important stats you would want at-a-glance. Activities is identical to the web version, and Trends is very similar to the web version as well, so nothing new and important to note here.



Final Thoughts

Overall TomTom is probably one of my favorite companies for general activity and sports tracking. The wrist HR is very accurate, chest strap HR is right on point, and devices, sites and apps are insanely simple to use. However, TomTom is designed for people who cross train or just want daily activity tracking. Their devices don't really have any smart features and don't really give enough stats for the stat-hungry athlete. In addition, although devices like Spark 3 can track multiple sports, it does not cater to multi-sport such as triathlon. But their devices work well, sync well, and can send data to almost every major site and service out there, making TomTom compatible with virtually everything.

This concludes my Ecosystem write-up. If you have any questions or comments, let me know. Enjoy whichever ecosystem you choose, and remember, always have fun and if you need motivation, go with the ecosystem that most of your friends or motivational friends are using.

Choosing a Health and Fitness Ecosystem - Part 2 - Activity Tracker vs Fitness Device

Activity Tracker vs Fitness Device

The health and fitness tech market is growing exponentially, with everyone either wanting to get healthy or being obsessed with numbers. However, before you jump on the bandwagon, you need to know the difference between an activity tracker and a fitness device. They are starting to become one-in-the-same for the most mainstream brands, but there is a clear difference and this will hopefully help you when you are deciding what to choose.

Activity Tracker

An activity tracker does just what the name implies; it tracks your daily activeness or lack-there-of. At the most basic, an activity tracker will tell you how many steps you have taken. Most however include sleep tracking as well. Once you start going up the line, you will get automatic workout tracking, integrated or external heart rate tracking and other metrics related to your steps, such as stairs climbed and inactivity periods.

It should be noted that if you are not a huge fitness person and you just want to track the basics because you either something to keep you on point with hitting your step goals or achieving some level of activity toward health or weight goals, then an activity tracker is key. And most companies are hitting up these devices with extremely stylish designs. For example, Withings has an activity tracker watch that is really slick, the Activite Steel and Saphire. Garmin just came out with one as well, the Vivomove; and it's probably the most attractive looking activity tracker I have seen yet.

Other devices can track activity as well, like smart phones and smart watches. So, your iPhone or Android phone will probably have a step tracker app or you can get an app that can utilize your phone to track that. But Apple Watch and Gear S2 can track your workouts like mainstream fitness devices, right? Yes and no. I leave the super technical details to DC Rainmaker, but basically these devices are not the best when it comes to true fitness tracking. The have severe accuracy flaws. Now, there are some 3rd party companies that have apps to correct some of this, but overall, if you are training for races or have a huge focus on working out, then an activity tracker is going become very limiting at some point.

Fitness Device

And now the fitness device. This is a device that is purely designed for tracking detailed metrics about your workouts. This can include heart rate min, max, average, and zones, calories burned, intensity levels, elevation changes, distance, speed, instant pace, and the list goes on and on. Now, thanks to FitBit being so competitive, they forced companies like Garmin, Polar and Tom Tom to incorporate activity tracking into their newer devices. So nowadays, a fitness device usually has all of the activity tracking components in addition to everything it already has and is designed for. This basically gives you an extremely detailed and advanced device that will give you a holistic look at your day-to-day lifestyle and the impacts of your workouts, activities, sleep, and more.

In addition, thanks to Apple, many fitness devices and activity trackers alike are incorporating smart features now as well; apps, music control, message alerts from your phone, and much more.

How Do I Choose?

This is fairly simple in most cases. If you are just trying to be active or you have goals set by your work, then a standard activity tracker will meet all of your needs and then some. However, if you consistently workout by doing running, cycling, strength training, swimming, other, or a combination of them, then you will want a fitness device so you can see metrics specific to the workout you did so you can keep improving for whatever goals you have. This is not to say that a fitness device wouldn't be good for someone who is just looking for standard activity tracking, but it will definitely give you way more than you want or need...although for some of the extra smart features or style, in some cases, it might be worth it.

Summary

This was a short article, but I wanted to make sure you understood the top level difference between devices before I start going into more details on which ones to buy, how to customize your ecosystem, and more. Up next I will be discussing calories burned across activity trackers and fitness devices.

Tracking Your Life...11 "Apps" to Help You Out

I am always trying to find more efficient ways to do things; and trying to keep my life organized and on-track is always challenging, given my schedule. So, I thought I would share some awesome "apps" that allow me to track everything. I quote "apps" because almost all of them have a web-based and mobile application access, which makes life even better; because once in a while you just don't want to be on a small phone or tablet screen.

1. Evernote
• Quite simply, this is a notebook to store anything you can think of; scrap book, create To-Do Lists, projects for work or personal, etc.
• Alternative to Microsoft OneNote
• Available on virtually every platform
• You can pay extra to be able to have offline usage and some other great features
2. Mint.com
• When it comes to personal finance, Mint does everything stand-alone software does, but it's a website or mobile application instead of something you are forced to install on a computer
• Syncs with almost every financial institution for tracking loans, income, expenses, bill reminders, budget planning, and tons more
• Did I mention you pay NOTHING for it? Yep, awesome!
3. Wegmans
• Chances are you don't even know Wegmans. They are a grocery chain and their app ties seemlessly with their website.
• Grocery list building from all products available from store you set as your local store
• Tells you location in the store of the items on your list
• Can add recipes ingredients from their awesome recipe section to your shopping list
• Can view history of purchases to track spending, what you buy, or to compile new shopping lists quicker
• NOTE: If you shop at a grocery chain, see if they have an app that is similar
4. My Fitness Pal
• Whether you are trying to lose weight or just trying to stay healthy, it's important to know what you eat and recommended by most nutritionists, doctors, and specialists. MFP, as it's commonly called, can track all of that
• It has one of the largest food and drink databases I have come across, and although not all data is always 100% accurate, people can update the incorrect items with the correct information if they want
• You can also track any fitness you do
• Many external fitness sites and tools can automatically sync with MFP, allowing even easier tracking of fitness and activities
5. CardStar
• Did you forget your 10lb keychain at home with all of the different membership and store cards? Don't worry, you can use CardStar to input all of those pesky cards...ranging from an LA Fitness membership card to a GNC rewards card
• CardStar has a huge database of existing services, so usually you just find the name of the company, group, etc. and then input or scan your card
• If the rewards program isn't in CardStar's database, no worries, you can manually input it
• Also, a few updates ago they beefed up security, which is a really nice piece-of-mind
6. Waze
• No website, since this is a GPS app
• However, this is hands-down the best GPS app I have ever used; and although Google has bought Waze, Google's map app for iPhone still isn't that great
• It updates with alerts as people report them, so if Waze sees that there are a lot of slowdowns or an accident that pops up in your route, it doesn't need to wait for it to be reported to the local highway administration, it gets updated immediately by other users, then can automatically re-route you
• This really is a must-have for driving almost anywhere
• NOTE: Google's map program is still the best for walking around a city and finding things
7. Google Drive
• With some recent updates, you not only gain access to all of your Google Drive files, but you can now edit and create as well
• If you keep all of your document on Drive, then this app is a must!
• NOTE: SkyDrive people, unless you have a Windows Phone, forget the editing unless you get another app such as Office2 or CloudOn
8. OpenTable
• OpenTable is basically a restaurant finder and reservation scheduler tool
• Okay, not every place to eat will show up in here...just the ones who sign up with OpenTable
• However, it's great to find somewhere to eat when you are out, and you get rewards and can make an instant reservation...Perfect!
9. Wall Street Journal (WSJ)
• All the news
• Yes, for all of the goodies and articles, you need to pay, but comparing the quality of writing and journalism to other free news sources, you typically don't need to worry about a poorly written and/or researched article in here
• And I personally have no patience or time to weed out the junk articles...no offense to apps or services similar to Google News
10. Chrome
• Sorry Safari, Opera, and million other browser options
• I love the Chrome browser...syncing across all devices I have is awesome...not only that, but Chrome has a great feel to it
• NOTE: With iOS 7 coming out soon, I may end up changing this back to Safari, but we shall see
11. EasilyDo
• No website, but apps on iOS and Android
• If you are busy, and tend to forget things, even when you enter them in your calendar, then you NEED this app
• It basically acts as your personal assistant, and it will automatically send birthday wishes and presents to people via Facebook, or will track a shipment for an order you just, and much more
• Various functions include:
• Location-based items such as Direction to Home and Work, Local Weather and Alerts
• Facebook birthdays, RSVPs, Important Posts, Popular Posts, Daily Top Photos, Tagged Photos of you, Friends' Profile Pictures
• Email (ties into your email service) - boarding passes, hotels, restaurants, events, invitations, job changes, contact information, package tracking, bill pay reminders, receipts, expired deals cleanup, old calendar emails cleanup
• Calendar (ties into your calendar) - Next Calendar Event reminder
• Contacts (ties to your contacts) - Duplicate Contacts Cleanup
• Extras - Free App of the Week, Free iTunes Single of the Week (for iPhone)
• And they are always adding more features!!!
• NOTE: If you are a privacy nut, you don't want this app, it invades everything...HOWEVER, the privacy policy states they will not use any of the information other than for the functions of the app...this still means they can get your non-personal stuff and use it, as most apps do anyway