MNew technologies take your fitness to the next level—by making the most of your downtime
Any athlete knows good recovery is just as important as hard training. But how are we really supposed to quantify rest? That’s the question being answered by a new batch of tools designed to help you measure and analyze the easy part of your training. One is Restwise.com, a new Web site and coaching tool that crunches 12 metrics—things like resting heart rate, oxygen saturation, sleep, hydration, and muscle soreness—then sends you a recovery score, telling you how hard your body is ready to push itself again. “Everyone is looking for the next way to gain a performance edge, and quantifying fatigue is the answer,” says Restwise co-founder Matthew Weatherley-White. There’s also Suunto’s new M5 heart-rate monitor, which gauges your workout intensity against your fitness level and tells you how many hours to wait before working out again ($209; suunto.com), and Fitbit, a $99 monitor you wear on your wrist to track the quantity and quality of your sleep. “It’s taken me years to figure this out,” says three-time 24-hour solo-mountain-biking world champ and Restwise client Rebecca Rusch. “You can train like a world champion, but if you don’t recover like one, you’re not squeezing 100 percent of the benefit out of your workouts.”
—DOUG SCHNITZSPAHN
(This article is from Outside Magazine..... The sleeping puppy photo is from Google.)
I've been really interested in getting the Fitbit.... It's been on back order for ever!!!! Even though I no longer work ungodly hours, I still toss and turn, waking every hour or so. It would be nice to see just how much sleep I get.
How much sleep do you get? Is it restful?
Gotta rest.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
2 comments:
I get about 7 hours a night during the week and I usually sleep really well. Every once in a while I'll go through a period of a week where I have a hard time but it only happens a couple of times a year.
I'm jealous! :-)
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