Best Weight Lifting Tracker Wearable for Gym
When it comes to fitness trackers, they are not all created equal. You can take a high-end fitness tracker that logs many metrics like calories, running cadence, distance, elevation and so many other details only to tell you that you have burnt about 50 calories after you just bench pressed 200 lbs.
The fact of the matter is that you need a very weight lifting specific fitness tracker if you want to properly track your gym workouts, where you invest invaluable time and effort.
In this post, we will specifically focus on the best weight lifting tracker wearable or gym gadgets that your money can buy. But first, it will help for you to know what exactly these specialized weight lifting tracker gadgets can do for you at the gym.
What can a weight lifting tracker track for you?
A tracker specifically meant for weight lifting will track the following metrics, in real time.
Reps
As a bodybuilder, you know how important keeping track of your reps and sets are. Whether you are cutting or bulking, the number of reps you do and the weights you used will largely determine how quickly and how qualitatively you will achieve your results.
Without a personal trainer, it can sometimes get a little confusing to keep track of your reps, especially when you are really pushing it in terms of weight. This is where the fitness tracker will help you out, giving you a rep count on a large display that is just a glance away, or with audio prompts. Besides allowing you to track your reps, it gives you the motivation to push out those extra reps that play a critical part in helping you add just that little bit more muscle mass that is so precious to you.
Calorie counting
Ordinary calorie trackers do a horrible job of tracking your calorie burn when you are tirelessly lifting weights at the gym. A weight lifting tracker on the other hand will use the type of exercise you are doing and your heart rate to give you a very weight lifting specific calorie burn that is as close a figure as you will get anywhere.
Weight Lifting Circuit Schedule
A weight lifting watch does a fantastic job of helping you stay on track with your schedule. When you are tired after a few exercises, you can so easily skip out a few workouts before calling it a day. With the weight lifting tracker staying on schedule and always telling you there’s more to your workout, you are motivated to completely finish your day’s workout. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a fitness tracker track all your exercises, to finally tell you that you are done with all your exercises, without skipping any reps or sets or exercises.
Apps that work with the weight lifting fitness trackers also allow you to plan your workout very well, well in advance, before you even come to the gym.
Heart rate and recovery time tracking
As you may already know, recovery times are very important if you want to give your muscles just that enough time to recover for the next set. Since weight lifting exercises almost always involve upping the weights used after each set, recovery time is very important.
The best fitness tracker for weight lifting will use your movement along with information about the type of exercise, reps and sets and also your heart rate to then calculate ideal recovery times that will allow you to nail your next workout, without fatigue.
Now that you know what to expect from a fitness tracker, let’s look at the best weight lifting tracker gadgets out in the market today.
GymWatch
The GymWatch is a premium weight lifting tracker that retails for just less than $150. Don’t let that price point scare you though. There’s a ton of technology built into this nifty little device. The company ideally recommends that you use two GymWatch gadgets in tandem, during your workouts.
The product boasts of German engineering. It had a very successful Indiegogo crowd funding campaign in 2014 and the entire company was bootstrapped from the crowdfunding campaign, which was pretty impressive. This is another tracker that includes a gyroscope and not just accelerometers for sensors.
When you use two GymWatch gadgets, you can use one for your upper body and one for your lower body. This advanced combination will not just track your lower body and upper body workouts without you having to remove and attach the GymWatch to your lower or upper part of the body, but actually use the combination tracking to even tell you if you are doing your exercises right. For example, most people get the squat wrong, with their knees coming out in front of their toes when they go down on the squat. With two GymWatch gadgets, the app will tell you that you are doing the squat wrong, giving you initiative to fix form on this very basic but super important exercise.
Some of the other metrics that are tracked by the GymWatch are range of motion, the speed at which you exercise and also a very important metric called TuT or time under tension.
One drawback with this tracker is that you will have to move the tracker around for accurate tracking. For example, for the bench press exercise, you will need to put the strap on your bicep. When you do bicep curls, you need to put the tracker on your forearm and not your bicep.
Another drawback is that it doesn’t do a great job of tracking CrossFit exercises like the simple box jump.
Some users might also not like the fact that they have to enter the weight for each exercise they perform. But, this is a flaw that all muscle building fitness trackers have as none of them can predict or estimate the amount of weight you are trying to push or pull in your workouts.
There’s also a Voice assistant that will guide you through your schedule, giving you encouragement to pull through your reps and sets. You have the option to turn it off though. The voice assistant won’t always understand what you are doing. For example, if you are aiming for a high number of quick reps to tone up a muscle group, the voice assistant might tell you that you are going too fast and that you need to load up on the weights and slow down your reps, to increase time under tension. But then, if you are toning up, you don’t really care about time under tension.
Despites a few drawbacks, it has to be said that the GymWatch is definitely the most accurate bodybuilding tracker out there. No other device is able to automatically detect the type of exercise like the GymWatch does.
Atlas Wearables Wristband 2
At just over $30, this Atlas wearable is a hot favorite with body builders. First, it is incredibly priced. For that price, you get a wrist based heart rate sensor that continuously tracks your heart rate.
The Atlas wristband also uses adaptive motion tracking that allows it to very accurately track what type of exercise you are doing, and also how many reps you are doing of them.
It has a 3 ATM water resistance meaning that it can be used in a pool with up to 30 meters depth. What’s nice about the Atlas wristband is that it allows you to track CrossFit, HIIT and other activities like running and swimming as well.
So, if body building or gym workouts isn’t the only way for you to stay fit, you will love the all-round capabilities of the Atlas Wearables wristband.
What’s also nice about the Wristband 2 is that it is constantly learning. As more and more people use the Atlas Wristband for their gym and other workouts, the data is continuously used to improve tracking efficiency. In fact, you will often receive alerts to update your Wristband 2 and we highly recommend that you do it as doing so will mean that your tracker can identify more and more exercises, with ease.
The real joy in using this weight lifting tracker is when you install the Atlas app. With the Atlas app, you can plan workouts to achieve very specific goals. For example, if you want to tone up, there are workouts that you can plan for those. The same goes for bulking up, slimming down or even for building endurance.
These suggested workouts are also constantly tweaked and every time you use your Atlas app, you will notice new suggested workouts that will help you achieve your goals. This will allow you to switch it up when you hit the gym next time, constantly confusing your muscles and resulting in better and better workouts, with great results efficiency.
The Atlas Wristband 2 uses 360° mapping, where inertial sensors map your motion in 3D, thereby enabling a very accurate tracking of your exercises.
The Skulpt Scanner
The Skulpt Scanner is technically not a bodybuilding fitness tracker in the sense that it doesn’t track your actual exercises. But, it is still one of the best tracker for weight lifting because it monitors the quality of your muscle.
As a body builder, you know that muscle quality is what you ultimately strive for and this device allows you to track whether your efforts are helping you achieve that muscle quality.
Besides measuring muscle quality, it can also measure your body fat percentage, another very important metric for you to track when you are body building.
It is the World’s only tracker that can measure muscle quality on various metrics like muscle imbalances and asymmetries. Based on your unique physiology or muscle and fat composition, the app will give you both workout and nutrition plans to strive for a better body. It is a hand held scanner that connects wirelessly to your phone or tablet, via Bluetooth. The hand held scanner uses a total of 12 sensors that pass a minute amount of current through your muscles, to then study the feedback and then compute muscle quality. Please note that the Skulpt scanner does not have a display. You will need to pair it with a phone to view all the data it collects. The app’s UI is however phenomenal and the device not having a screen just means that it will last longer in terms of battery life.
If you are a sportsman or are suffering from injuries related to muscle imbalances, the Skulpt sensor will first help you identify the problem, so you can actually do something about it then.
The Beast Sensor
The Beast Sensor is a simple looking wrist band like sensor that, like the GymWatch, does a phenomenal job of quickly identifying the type of weight workout you are using. Once you begin your exercise, it keeps tracks of sets, reps, load and velocity.
All data is continuously tracked into the app, allowing you to review performance on a daily basis or on a comparative basis.
For each rep you push out, the Beast sensor measure the power in watts that you are producing from your efforts. It also analyzes the speed in meters per second. If you get down to the detailed screens to view your metrics, you will also be able to see strength, explosiveness, volume, average power, reps, density, energy burn, set by set progress, tonnage and weekly progress.
If you really want to get all the tracking data you can, you can get the trainer package that costs $100 more. With the trainer package, you will get the advanced ability to see movement analytics and also view the progress of many of your trainees through your Beast app. You will also have the option to download all your trainee data into an Excel file, for sorting or for further analysis.
There are three training goals with which you can make the Beast sensor work for you. Choose from between Hypertrophy, Power or Max Strength to train accordingly, with assisted guides.
The Push Band
The Push Band is a very interesting weight lifting tracker in the sense that it includes a gyroscope in addition to the accelerometer that is featured on most fitness trackers. The Push band is very pricey at just under $300, but it provides tracking metrics that other weight lifting watch or band models cannot provide.
With the Push band, you are instantly able to tell if you are reaching a level of fatigue or if you are ready for your next exercise. The data that is tracked is also used to compute your ideal training loads for your next gym workout session.
The Push Band is designed to track over 250 popular gym or weight based exercises.
Athos
The Athos is the best weight lifting tracker wearable for gym if you are specifically looking for a wearable that will help you recover from a serious injury. It is generally used by semi-professional or professional ball players who need critical data to decide whether or not they have recovered enough to return to professional sports or to a high level of training.
Please note that the Athos isn’t a weight lifting watch. It is instead a core or a shirt or track bottom that includes sensors that analyze all your muscle movements, to then report that data back to your app. The Athos is definitely a very expensive product, with the full body men’s kit comprising of the compression shirt and compression shorts costing in excess of $500.
