fitness Apple's GymKit is coming to a treadmill near you

[captain_to_fire]

Source: CNET and Tech Crunch

 

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Apple just made connecting to treadmills and ellipticals as easy as tapping your Apple Watch on a piece of gym equipment. GymKit, a feature built into WatchOS 4.1, enables seamless tap-to-connect tech. It's like CarPlay, but for fitness machines. Apple announced GymKit as a feature for Apple Watch back in June at its WWDC keynote, promising it would arrive this year. It's just now becoming available.

 

GymKit works with a simple tap-to-pair process: Tapping a ready piece of equipment starts the process, and the Apple Watch brings up a confirmation screen. With treadmills, it asks if you want to record a walk or a run. From there, everything on the Apple Watch and the fitness machine's readout are synced: heart rate, pace, active and total calorie estimates, and machine-specific data such as elevation and flights of stairs climbed. Connecting your watch also means the machine shows calorie estimates calculated from your own height and weight data on Apple Health, without adding any extra setup steps on the machine. Heart-rate data comes from the Apple Watch itself, or from any connected heart-rate device that's also paired to your Apple Watch, such as a chest strap. Workouts can be paused on the connected machine, and your watch autopauses, too.

But how will it work will resistance training? As someone who does both cardio and resistance, will GymKit be implemented as well to resistance training equipment like a tricep pulldown?

 

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The feature has already launched in five gyms in Australia and a couple in the U.K. It launches here in the U.S. this week, at the Life Time athletic club in Manhattan, with more spots like Equinox getting their hands on GymKit-enabled equipment in the near future. It’s a bit of a slow roll out, given the relative expense of replacing gym equipment, but it should speed up fairly quickly, as a number of equipment makers have signed on to Apple’s platform.

The company says it’s got about 80 percent of the gym fitness markets hare covered, starting with Italian manufacturer TechnoGym, which is going to start adding the functionality to every treadmill it makes from here on out. Other pieces of equipment will follow, including step machines and stationary bikes. Apple’s also exploring partnerships with manufacturers of home equipment.

As of now, I'm not particularly sold just yet by smartwatches and fitness trackers because the way they calculate calories burned is not personalized. I'd rather see the likes of Apple or even Garmin implement a portable bioelectrical impedance to measure body fat percentage since doing it with BMI is inaccurate. It's nice that the Apple Watch will be paired with the treadmill with NFC+Bluetooth but is this going to be an exclusive thing for the Apple Watch? What about Android Wear or better yet, dedicated fitness trackers like the Fitbit Ionic? My problem with fitness trackers is that they don't measure resistance training well. They are good for cardio like hiking, running, walking and swimming but doing a bench press, deadlift or just simple bicep curls? No. 

 

Unfortunately, there is no way to scale down lab equipment that actually measures the amount of Carbon Dioxide exhaled and the Oxygen inhaled which is the best way to measure calories burned which is basically stoichiometry and limiting/excess reactants. The human body takes in carbohydrates (sometimes proteins during starvation) and cells in the body require oxygen to burn them. 

 

[Guest]

Can I just say that that treadmill urks me as the type to be running a modified Android skin? Seems neat but I'm curious how much smartwatch users use them for health reasons? (I'm genuinely curious as I have no clue and I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything)

[captain_to_fire]

Just now, tjcater said:

Can I just say that that treadmill urks me as the type to be running a modified Android skin? Seems neat but I'm curious how much smartwatch users use them for health reasons? (I'm genuinely curious as I have no clue and I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything)

It does look like an Android skin. 

 

I use MyFitness Pal app a lot to track down my food intake (especially carbohydrates) as I was diagnosed to be pre-diabetic months ago and now lost 15 lbs but calorie tracking with a smartwatch? I'm not actually sold. I'd rather do a routing with a given number of sets and reps per duration and that's how I know I am burning calories. Also, fitness trackers are mostly for cardio which is good in burning calories while exercising but they don't measure resistance training that well which is also important as it let's the body burn more calories while resting.

[Matu20]

I wonder how many people actually trust their watches to accurately measure burned calories.

[Nicnac]

At best this can be helpful for motivational purposes.

[mynameisjuan]

2 hours ago, Matu20 said:

I wonder how many people actually trust their watches to accurately measure burned calories.

They should not be trusted at all. The problem with calories and weightloss is they are not reliable enough. Also 30-40mins of running vs 10 mins of interval training are about the same when it comes to fat loss yet the amount of calories burned from your watch would be much much different. Thats just one of many cases. 

[ScratchCat]

New Treadmill 6000: Now can be hacked remotely to make your experience even more diverse!

Only $1999

 

 

[Blake]

14 hours ago, hey_yo_ said:

I'd rather do a routing with a given number of sets and reps per duration and that's how I know I am burning calories. Also, fitness trackers are mostly for cardio which is good in burning calories while exercising but they don't measure resistance training that well which is also important as it let's the body burn more calories while resting.

While I agree, if it can automatically enter the reps + sets + exercise name into bodyspace/other good gym app, i'd be down for it. Tread mill is also good as it'll be more accurate be able to count for HIIT (i.e. when I use the tread mill i alternate 15km/h and 9km/h for 30mins, does that count as 15mins either way? or averaged to 12km/h? also if I burn 10cal/min at 9, but 16cal/min at 15, it means there isn't linear scalling etc etc, just get the watch/treadmill to do the calc for me).

[Guest]

It is hard to measure calorific effect of resistance training so I wouldn't be suprised if it is omitted. There are a lot more variables at work than cardio. That is also why MyFitnessPal does not track it without manual tracking.

[Drak3]

Yet another thing that will only see use January 1st.