I recently overheard a little girl tell her friend that she was having ice-cream for dessert – but only if she met her daily steps goal on her Fitbit.
I’d estimate this girl is six years old, seven at the most. That’s right: we’re now using fitness goals to track kids’ activity levels — and then rewarding them with food if they reach them.
Activity trackers take the fun out of exercise and teach children that they literally have to earn their food step by step.
This example is extreme but things are only likely to worsen with activity tracker companies working hard to crack the kiddy market this Christmas.
You’ve probably never heard of Suunto unless you’re a die-hard fitness watch enthusiast, but the company’s latest wrist-worn gadget might have a larger audience than before. It seems to be the first smartwatch the company’s offered, its first Wear OS watch, and a watch that attempts to make Google’s smartwatch operating system more outdoorsy than ever before.
It’s called the Suunto 7, and it sounds like it’s a multisport watch that could theoretically be the best of both worlds, with the GPS tracking, offline outdoor maps, heart rate sensors, an altimeter, sleep tracker, and (70-plus) exercise modes you’d expect from a Garmin-style fitness watch. There are also the standard benefits of Google’s Wear OS like summoning Google Assistant, turn-by-turn Google Maps directions, Google Fit, Google’s catalog of apps and watchfaces, and being able to tap to pay with Google Pay on your wrist.
… “We very much stick with the basics,” [Jan Fredeno] said. “We look at pulse, running speed and the wattage values on the bike. All of the other values are fine, but not terribly important. We work on the basis of this data, which allows us to assess things quite well.”
The “we” refers to Frodeno and his coach, Dan Lorang. He also trains women’s Ironman world champion Anne Haug and professional cyclist Emmanuel Buchmann, and is regarded as one of Germany’s top endurance sports coaches.
“Without wearables, my job, the way I do it, wouldn’t be possible at all,” Lorang said, before explaining that because he sees Frodeno only a few days a year, he provides most of his coaching support based on the data provided by the smart technology the triathlete wears.
2019 was the year wireless earbuds went mainstream. The category has been around much longer, of course, and Apple really broke the whole thing open a full three years ago with the release of the first AirPods, but sales exploded in 2019. The category experienced a 183% YOY increase in shipments last quarter, according to a new study.
The space continues to be driven by Apple, which currently controls 43% of the market (a number that will likely increase with the arrival of the AirPod Pros), but its near future seems destined to be defined by a race to the bottom. With Apple, Samsung, Sony and Google battling it out for the high end of the market, other players are determined to undercut the competition on price.
At $30, JLab’s Go Air True Wireless Earbuds (the first and last time I’m going to type that full name) are positioned right around Xiaomi’s category-defining AirDots.
This year the Strava community stepped up their game all over the world. We climbed to the top of Mount Everest and the top of World Championship podiums (six of them in Yorkshire alone). We broke world records in the marathon and the mile (when run with a dog). We logged over 7 billion miles and we did more of them together than ever before (especially if you were in Brazil). This is the best (and the rest) of the Strava community in 2019.
Bloomberg Markets, Gearoid Reidy and Shoko Oda from
Nike Inc.’s Vaporfly Next% sneakers have been called “groundbreaking” and described as a “supershoe.” For Japanese shoemakers Asics Corp. and Mizuno Corp. they are something else: trouble.
Shares in the shoemakers slid in Tokyo Monday after Nike’s sneakers played a starring role in one of Japan’s most-watched road races, the Hakone Ekiden.
Reebok’s PureMove Bra features proprietary Motion Sense Technology fabric able to respond to movement where and when wearers need it, thanks to UD’s shear thickening fluid (STF).
Heard of the Wim Hof Method but don’t know what it is? John Wood explains how this breathing method can help with the cold and stress of open-water swimming
… Don’t even lace up your shoes before clearly defining why you’re heading out the door. Are you totally burned out on your current sport and looking for a new way to get in some movement? Is there a race down the road that you would like to get fit for? A “why” will come in handy and keep you motivated and accountable when you’d rather drink coffee or stay in bed an extra hour on Saturday morning instead of going for your run. A great way to keep it in the front of your mind is to write it down and stick it to your fridge as a reminder.
… According to a story in the Norwegian paper Aftenposten, safety advocates are directly attributing the virtual elimination of roadway deaths to recent initiatives which have allowed fewer cars into the city’s center.
Over the last five years, the city has taken dramatic steps to reduce vehicular traffic in its downtown, including replacing nearly all on-street parking with bike lanes and sidewalks. Major streets have been closed to cars, and congestion pricing raised the fee to drive into the city center, with the goal of making most of downtown car-free by 2019.
December means one thing in the world of content creation – end of year lists. Whether it’s Spotify Wrapped or our own Pinkbike Awards there’s plenty to be learned by looking back over a full year. Strava are the latest to release their end of year stats in their Year in Review, a slideshow of data that shows the trends in their users’ activities over the past 12 months.
Unfortunately, the data is split into cycling or running, meaning we don’t have any separate mountain bike data, however, there’s still plenty of interesting info to take away from this release. Here are five key stats.
1. Canyon and Orbea can Claim the Most Desirable Mountain Bikes… or Can They?
“In North America, the term ‘weekly mileage’ is like the holy grail of distance running performance,” says Dr. Max Paquette. Max is an Associate Professor of Biomechanics in the Human Performance Center at the University of Memphis and is interested in quantifying training load in runners. “Everybody gauges performance, or how well an athlete is training based on how many miles they run per week. For some reason, there seems to be a mythical goal of 100 miles per week. Some coaches even believe that there are necessary mileage thresholds to achieve certain performances. ‘Mileage” is engrained in the running culture.”
Max and one of his Masters students, Megan Ryan, who is a competitive runner and was a member of the University of Memphis cross-country and track teams, have started to question whether there are key aspects of training that mileage alone is not telling the coaches and athletes. Training load monitoring using minutes instead of mileage has become increasingly popular. This is particularly prevalent in high schools where there are large numbers of athletes in training groups. “The human body does not come with an odometer or speedometer. It has no idea how far or how fast we run. It simply knows the extent to which its physiology is changed over the course of a run, which includes a time component.”
This year, I was on the judging panel for the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Decade.
Much like Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” competition, the international statistic is meant to capture the zeitgeist of this decade. The judging panel accepted nominations from the statistical community and the public at large for a statistic that shines a light on the decade’s most pressing issues.
On December 23, we announced the winner: the 8.4 million soccer fields of land deforested in the Amazon over the past decade. That’s 24,000 square miles, or about 10.3 million American football fields.
The U.S. Forest Service has awarded a team of scientists, including Saving Nature’s Dr. Clinton Jenkins, with their 2019 Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Research. The award recognizes their innovative spatial assessment of conservation values that provides guidance on conservation strategies for the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS). In this pair of award-winning papers, the authors consider how to set conservation priorities and management strategies to build resilience and protect biodiversity in an era of climate change.
The team, led by Travis Belote of the Wilderness Society, investigated how to best maintain biodiversity and ecological processes in the face of habitat fragmentation and climate change, while considering what a resilient system of protected areas in the United States would look like.
A family of four who spends two or more days hiking in portions of Bears Ears National Monument will be required to pay $40 in fees starting Jan. 1. That’s when a new fee structure imposed by the Bureau of Land Management takes effect, doubling most fees for overnight and day hiking on Cedar Mesa.
The changes also expand the fee area to include Butler Wash and Comb Ridge in the Shash Jáa unit of Bears Ears near Bluff that currently offers free dispersed camping and hiking.
… Smartly timed use of electricity can play an important role in stabilizing a grid reliant on renewable energy, but a robust investment in energy storage will also be essential. Solar power today accounts for a modest 2.3% of U.S. electricity; wind provides about 6.5%. Making the leap from these modest numbers to a mid-21st century America powered primarily by renewable electricity will require development of safe and affordable ways to store vast amounts of power.