Now that there are more Android Wear devices heading to the market, with the Moto 360 now available if you can get your hands on, more of them are coming with fitness-focused features. ASUS’ ZenWatch is geared up to tell you whether or not you’re stressed and the Sony SmartWatch 3 was pretty much designed as a sporty device with all that silicon. But what about the watch you have now? Be it G Watch, Gear Live or a shiny new Moto 360, can these devices help you either keep fit or get fit?
The short answer is yes and the long answer revolves around you having to put in a lot of the work yourself. These devices aren’t fitness trackers, but they can be excellent guides no matter your fitness level. Out of the box, your Android Wear watch will track your steps as part of Google Fit, and while my G Watch really isn’t that accurate or consistent, at least compared to my Sony Smartband, so your mileage will vary here but it’s a nice start. Now, if you’re starting to run – or in my case walk to build up core fitness – then Runtastic is an excellent option. It works with your watch as another card in your stack, and you can start, pause or stop activities from your wrist. Runtastic might seem like something for keen runners and such, but I’ve been using it to track my walks and it’s really quite motivating. I can see that I’m already traveling the same distance in around 5 minutes less and you can even share this data with your family and friends, too.
On to more exercise-based stuff, and there’s recently been a new app to hit Android Wear in the form of VimoFit, which claims to be a personal trainer on your wrist. Again, this app is just a guide to your exercises, but VimoFit can be a really helpful way of timing your exercises. The concept isn’t quite there yet, but there’s a variety of exercises that VimoFit can guide you through and it’s geared up to use your watch’s motion sensors to measure your reps, but again how accurate this is will depend on the person and which watch you have. All-in-all though, there are 130 different exercises that VimoFit can guide you through on your watch and it could be just the thing you were looking for.
As with a lot of these apps, you need to put the work in yourself and while these two options aren’t even that great, they’re good guides and can be a nice help. Hopefully, we’ll see a lot more from Google Fit later this year and Android Wear will get even smarter, allowing your watch to be much more than just notifications on your wrist.
