Moti­vated by a new Fit­Bit One activ­ity tracker, I ended my work­day yes­ter­day with a lovely walk around Mer­cer Island. It was a great time to be out walk­ing: ideal tem­per­a­ture (<70°), golden late after­noon sun­shine, bloom­ing roses and aro­matic laven­der every­where. My typ­i­cal day fea­tures a yoga prac­tice — beau­ti­ful in its own way, but lack­ing the out­door sen­sory delights of warm sun­shine and flow­ers bloom­ing.

A Likeable First-Gen Device

There’s a lot to like about the Fit­Bit One — that is, if your daily activ­i­ties are the kinds of things it was designed to track. It’s great for active peo­ple who walk, hike, jog, climb stairs, etc.

I like the imme­di­ate feed­back on the dis­play — you don’t have to log in to a web­site just to see daily stats. The recharge­able bat­tery lasts for sev­eral days.

It syncs wire­lessly via a USB don­gle attached to your com­puter, or via Blue­tooth to iPhones, iPads, Android devices and so on. After sync­ing your tracker, you can go online to view fit­ness sta­tis­tics dis­played on your per­sonal dash­board.

Here are some of my stats from yes­ter­day’s walk. Nice, but not what you’d see from a seri­ous ath­lete. Not too bad for some­one with a deskbound job and long work­days…

Mer­cer Island fea­tures lake views, walk­ing trails with stair­cases and lots of hills, so I earned a badge due to my hill climbs. The walk itself was less than 4 miles, so no badge… The peo­ple behind Fit­Bit sent an “attaboy” email this morn­ing, to encour­age me to be more active.

Not Designed for Yoga Practitioners

For peo­ple like me, whose well­be­ing or fit­ness régime cen­ters on a daily yoga prac­tice, the Fit­Bit One is far from ideal.

When wear­ing yoga tops and tights, there’s no safe place for a fit­ness tracker. A well-rounded yoga prac­tice is likely to involve bal­anc­ing on most of the places where you might think to attach your tracker. It would­n’t be smart to risk weight-bear­ing activ­i­ties on a pocket con­tain­ing a $99 device.

Wear­ing a tracker around your neck looks dorky. Plus, the tracker would be dis­tract­ing if it flopped against your face or neck when you’re inverted. Hide it in your shelf bra? High risk that it would fall out dur­ing down­ward fac­ing dog, head­stand or shoul­der stand…

Wear it in the wide wrist­band? Dorky. Maybe if you’re one of those guys who warms up (shows off?) with a bunch of Marine push-ups before yoga class, wear­ing the tracker on a wrist­band would be a plus. But for women decked out in Lul­ule­mon, there’s no good place to attach a fit­ness tracker.

The other day I enjoyed a 90-minute yoga class in a heated stu­dio — a very vig­or­ous prac­tice — 2 pounds lost in 90 min­utes. I chose not to wear the tracker to that class, so there was no record of my activ­ity. There­fore my Fit­Bit One logged that day as largely inac­tive… Not true, but there is no way for Fit­Bit’s dash­board to dis­play yoga prac­tice activ­i­ties.

I plan to exper­i­ment with my tracker dur­ing some home yoga prac­tices, to see if I can stand it when doing yoga. Maybe I can over­come the dork fac­tor…

There are other capa­bil­i­ties (such as track­ing sleep pat­terns or the silent alarm) that I haven’t tried.

For now, my assess­ment is that the Fit­Bit One is good at what it does, but not so good for track­ing what I do… Despite those lim­i­ta­tions wear­ing it is sur­pris­ingly addic­tive…

Update:
For amuse­ment I some­times put the Fit­Bit in the wrist­band holder and wear it while prac­tic­ing yoga at home. Despite a vig­or­ous one-hour flow prac­tice, it will mea­sure just a few steps — noth­ing that’s close to rep­re­sent­ing the energy expended dur­ing that yoga prac­tice. My con­clu­sion: next-gen track­ers may have more sophis­ti­cated motion sen­sors that work bet­ter for yoga, but the cur­rent options are lim­ited.