8 New Ways Technology Is Making Your Workout Better
Physiclo
The idea of functional fitness clothing-maker Physiclo is to make your workout harder but shorter, all via what you wear. Shorts ($95), capris ($110), and leggings ($125) all look like your typical workout clothes, but they come with built-in resistant bands, making them feel tight on your skin. Every step is harder, and that’s the idea. The founders of Physiclo — which was fully funded on Indiegogo within 24 hours— claim their lower-body workout gear targets muscle groups more efficiently, producing a 23 percent jump in so-called “muscle activation” and a 14 percent increase in heart rate and calorie burning. In other words, it turns a 60-minute workout into a 45-minute one.
MYZONE Sports Bra
Speaking of smart clothing, the MYZONE Sports Bra debuted at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. The bra basically accomplishes many of the same features as a lower-end smartwatch: It claims to track a woman’s heart rate with 99.4 percent EKG accuracy, pairs with a mobile app, rewards you for your workouts, and recognizes your physical activities while storing 16 hours of internal data. Oh, and it can be thrown in with the rest of the laundry. The same can be said of MYZONE’s MZ-3 Physical Activity belt ($149), a nice alternative for workout fiends of both sexes and accomplishes the same major features. Now available, the Low Support Sports Bra ($69.99) is sold separately from the module itself.
LumiWave
High-tech solutions extend beyond your workout to your inevitable post-workout aches and pains. The LumiWave, which started fulfilling orders on Jan. 15, is a near infrared (NIR) wearable device that uses photo-biostimulation to gently warm (or cool) inflamed muscles, joints, and deep tissue areas of the body. (NIR light waves are emitted through specially engineered Light Emitting Diodes, or LEDs.) The product’s parent company, BioCare Systems, Inc., believes that its 200-to-400-LED devices, which range in price from $299 to $449, are a healthier, more sustainable solution for those us who have long relied on oral medication like ibuprofen or cortisone shots. Jon Weston, the company’s CEO, tells Yahoo Health that LumiWave has so far received more positive feedback from people using it on “fresh” injuries. “Sometimes, users with chronic pain won’t notice results right away,” he says. “This is because healing tissue with long-term damage sometimes takes long-term healing. LumiWave is not a quick fix for everyone.” To make it even more portable, a battery-powered version is in the design phase for a future release.
Cold Shoulder Vest
Cold Shoulder LLC, a beneficiary of multi-time funding via Kickstarter, is back with an iterated vest ($149.95-$199.95). Its first, which didn’t have a cooling gel that is featured in the second, allowed users to burn 500 calories a day when worn twice; you can wear it however long you want, even if it’s just for an hour before bedtime. It’s essentially turning the thermostat in your living room down to 65 degrees Fahrenheit — but only for your core. (Though, you can’t “spot reduce” fat, so the product could be trimming fat from other parts of your body even though you’re wearing it around your torso.) It’s designed to be used when you’re not in the mood to work out, allowing you to burn calories while you watch TV, for example. “I conceived The Cold Shoulder as a way for people to burn calories while sedentary,” co-founder Wayne B. Hayes, PhD, a NASA scientist with an interest in thermogenesis, tells Yahoo Health. “We’ve sold over 3,000 vests so far, and feedback is almost universally positive.” The vest itself is one-size-fits-all, but if it works for you, you should notice it getting bigger.
Fitbit Blaze
Another highlight from the Consumer Electronics Show, the Fitbit Blaze smartwatch ($199.95) won’t find your wrist until March 2016. So is the wait worth it? Beyond the smartwatch basics — calls, texts and alerts — the company is pushing its FitStar? on-screen workouts as well as heart-rate tracking and exercise recognition to reward you for your hard work in or out of the gym. The company undoubtedly hopes the former feature is critiqued less than it was for its Charge HR and Surge wristbands.
Technogym’s Running Music
As any runner knows, crafting a good playlist is crucial to keeping up speed, momentum, and motivation. Here comes a treadmill that does it for you. At the beginning of the year at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Technogym previewed a treadmill that detects the runner’s rhythm and plays songs — really, a soundtrack — accordingly. Called Running Music, which is a part of the company’s cloud-based digital platform, it pulls from the user’s personal inventory of songs and then automatically selects and streams the most suitable music according to the number of steps taken per minute. The company’s platform is open, and therefore integrates the likes of FitBit, RunKeeper, Strava, and other running or exercise-based applications. If you don’t end up getting your own Running Music-ready treadmill, there’s a good chance it’ll be coming to a gym near you: Technogym can currently be found in 65,000-plus wellness centers in the world. The wait begins now, as Running Music remains in preview mode.
Kuai’s Headset
We all respond to coaching in different ways, and only some of us like to have our coach in our ear at all times. For this group of athletes and weekend exercisers, take stock of Kuai’s wearable coach ($149). Available this spring, the completely waterproof headset — calling all swimmers and snowboarders! — performs the same biometric measurements as other techy health tools. It’s the voice coaching and training plans, using customized alerts and available downloads, that set the product apart. And, OK, multi-taskers, it also makes and takes phone calls.
UnderArmour’s HealthBox
If you’re looking for the high-tech workout aid to end all high-tech workout aids, consider the UA HealthBox ($400), which is as simple yet high-tech as it sounds: a literal box containing four cool tools for your workout and daily life. UA Record, a mobile app that is perhaps the most impressive component of the quartet, literally surveys its users, “How do you feel?” and provides a 1-to-10 scale to answer. It forces the user to forget the data of their day for a minute and just focus on his or her body. (If that’s not the start of a holistic approach, we wouldn’t know it unless it hit us in the head with barbell-like force.)
UA Record (and the other three components) obviously also dig into actual data, studying your personal stats for sleep, fitness, activity, and nutrition. The goal is to give the tech-savvy athlete a complete look at his or her overall health. Toward that end, consider the box’s other three components: The UA Band ($180) that tracks your sleep and fitness straight from your wrist works in conjunction with the UA Heart Rate chest strap, which has a battery life of 365 hours, to get the most accurate possible readings. The fourth and final component of the box is the UA Scale, which would immediately become the smartest piece of technology in your bathroom, and will even estimate your percentage of fat. You just have step aboard.
When it comes to your workout, technology isn’t always supposed to make things easier. Sometimes harder and faster is better. And of course, smarter.
Thanks, in part, to last month’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (and the everyday ingenuity of inventors and startups in the health-plus-tech space), here are eight new ways that change your workout for the better — they make it smarter.
Read This Next: 6 Next-Level Health and Fitness Innovations to Try Today
Let’s keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Health on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Solve the daily Crossword
