Garmin VivofitFinally, a Fitness Tracker That Actually Gets You Off Your Butt

Garmin Vivofit Finally, a Fitness Tracker That Actually Gets You Off Your butt

You come to dread the blinking red bar on the Vivofit display. But that’s precisely the point. It’s there to highlight your inactivity — specifically, when you’ve been immobile for an hour. But as exasperating as this bar of shame can be, heeding its gentle prodding does have a measurable effect. Using the Vivofit, I got up from my chair more, took more walks, and, in general, felt better.

Getting you up off your tush and moving is, of course, the goal behind most wrist-worn step trackers. But the Vivofit’s implementation is especially effective. When you’ve been sitting for long periods, the red bar appears. Shorter bars pop up next to it for each additional 15 minutes you’ve been stationary. The device doesn’t vibrate, or beep, or otherwise interrupt your workflow. But should you glance down at your wrist, it’s an instant reminder to get up and save yourself from the inevitable death our desk jobs are delivering us.

On its slightly curved LCD display, the Vivofit can show you how far you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve burned, the time, date, your heart rate, your steps, and the steps remaining towards your daily goal. The latter is another thing that sets Garmin’s fitness tracker apart: After starting with a default number of “goal” steps for the day — mine was 7,500 — the Vivofit starts to learn how often you walk around each day. It adjusts your goal accordingly, pushing you to be more active, but not unreasonably so. For example, after getting within 100 steps of my goal by the end of the work day, I was surprised to look down at the end of my daily commute to see that the number of required steps had been upped. I still exceeded that, and the next day, my goal steps were upped some more. The fitness tracker isn’t a pitiless whip cracker though. If you have a few slower days, the step goal drops back down.