You want to lose weight. You track your daily steps and calorie intake. You weigh yourself daily, but weight is just a number. Do you really know how your body progresses each day?
You are a fitness enthusiast. You aim to increase your muscle and reduce body fat. You want to know what happens to your body when you do a certain workout regime or diet.
Whether you fit into any of the above, or you have other fitness goals you want to achieve, TomTom Touch might have the solutions you need. TomTom Touch tracks not just steps, it also tracks what you’re made of: your body composition.
Now, you can measure your body composition anytime you want, without the need of a bulky smart scale. Read on to find out how TomTom Touch can help you achieve your goals.
TomTom Touch Features
The name says it all. TomTom Touch features a touchscreen with OLED display which delivers bright, self-illuminating display of letters without backlight and uses less electrical power than LCD screens. You just need a light tap on the metal button to wake up the display.
The home display shows the current time with a little footstep icon at the top, acting as an indication of your progress towards your daily steps goal. Swipe the screen down, and you can find information on your steps count, calories burned, distance travelled, active time, and sleep amount. Swipe up from the home display, and you’ll be able to access sports mode, body composition analysis, and current heart rate reading.
TomTom Touch is equipped with 24/7 activity tracking, so you can view a detailed graph of your all-day heart rate, steps, calories burned, distance, active time and sleep information through both MySports mobile app and MySports website. Syncing the device to MySports app can be done wirelessly via Bluetooth, without the need for cable.
In sports mode, TomTom Touch goes the extra distance to analyse your heart rate and tell you in which zone your heart rate belongs when you do exercises such as running, cycling, treadmill or gym. You also have the option to share the summary of your exercises in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others.
If you are fashion conscious and would love to have your TomTom Touch matched with your outfits, opt for customisable straps and choose from 4 colours: black, azure blue, coral red and indigo purple. Don’t worry about the accidental splash of water, because the device is water resistant, but it’s not suitable for swimming, though.
TomTom Touch alerts you with a brief vibration when your phone receives a phone call or text message, provided it is synced with MySports mobile app.
Body Composition Analysis
This is probably the best feature of TomTom Touch which can be hardly found in other fitness tracker devices. This little fitness tracker that weighs only 10 grams has the technology to estimate your body composition in just 10 seconds.
You might wonder, why a fitness tracker bothers to include body composition as one of its features. VP of TomTom Asia Pacific, Chris Kearney, explained that body composition is a great way to measure your fitness, while weight is just a number and doesn’t tell the whole story. Two people with the same weight might not have the same level of muscle and fat.
Similarly, someone with an overweight BMI could actually be a physically active and muscular person, while another person with same overweight BMI might have higher fat levels and less muscle than the former. By giving users the clarity of their actual body compositions, TomTom aims to motivate users to improve their fitness.
Body composition technology employs Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA) method by sending small harmless electrical current through the body and measuring how much resistance the current meets along the way.
The procedure is quite simple. Wear the band on one hand, choose body composition feature, use the index finger of the other hand to tap and hold on the metal button for 5-10 seconds. When a tick is displayed, the reading is done. Lastly, sync the device to MySports app to obtain the reading.
Do this every morning after going to the toilet and before showering or eating. After a while, you’ll be more conscious of your body and you’ll start to make adjustments to your exercise routine and food choices.
Runner’s boon
- The innovative feature of body composition provides a convenient way to estimate body fat and muscle level, and serves as an overview to a person’s fitness level.
- The built-in heart rate monitor tracks and displays heart rate in sports mode, enabling users to control the intensity of their training. When not in sports mode, it tracks resting heart rate.
- MySports mobile app and website provides useful detailed graphs of activity tracking. This information is especially useful for users to know what happens to their bodies over the time.
- Goal setting allows users to set specific goals, such as steps count, weight, body fat level, muscle level, number of exercises over a period of time.
Runner’s bane
- Body composition readings must be viewed in apps, not instantly on the device.
- TomTom Touch doesn’t have GPS, so it’s not able to accurately measure distance through satellite, instead, it estimates the distance based on steps count. Therefore, do not expect to get exact running distance and speed information.
- The app has plenty of room for improvement. The speed could be faster, and the navigation could be more intuitive and user-friendly. It took me some time to figure out where to get the heart rate and sleep graph.
- Social media sharing could be fine-tuned further. As of now, the output format for sharing through MySports mobile app differs from sharing via MySports website.
Conclusion
Knowledge of how your body is doing over the time is essential to help you make conscious changes in your daily life to move towards your fitness goals. With TomTom Touch’s goal setting, body composition, activity tracking and body tracking graphs, you can monitor the data over the time and understand which workout or diet works best for you in the long term.
The TomTom Touch Fitness Tracker is now available from selected retailers at S$239.
If you are still not convinced yet of how capable TomTom Touch is in helping you to be in better shape, consider this. I lost 0.5% body fat after using TomTom Touch for a week.
