5 smart best fitness gifts for anyone who loves working out
With Black Friday a week away, it's an opportune time to start shopping for holiday gifts this season. Here are five smart home gym essentials available right now.
You don't have to spend hundreds of dollars on smart fitness devices this gift-giving season. Fitbit created an affordable Bluetooth-enabled scale for less than $50 and it tracks your weight, BMI, lean mass and body fat percentage. Fitbit owners can sync their trackers and smartwatches with the Aria Air Scale, which is compatible with the Fitbit app, and it will automatically recognize your weights of multiple people (while only sharing your stats on your private Fitbit account). I've owned the Aria scale for two years and find it very accurate. And it’s not just for me (or you). Whenever I weighed my checked suitcases back when flying was normal, it always matched the airline's baggage scale.
Shopping reader-favorite brand Echelon created the Stride, a treadmill that earned praise from Anthony Crouchelli, master and founding trainer at Grit Bxng, and subsequently earned the top spot on our list of the best treadmills. The "extremely light" Bluetooth-capable machine pairs with your smartphone or tablet so you can access "awesome" fitness classes Echelon created exclusively for the Stride and the "world-class" Echelon community. Your Stride comes with an 18.5-inch-wide monitor that displays vitals such as speed, time spent working out, incline level, among others stats. Place your palms on the heart rate monitor on the handles to see your pulse rate pop up on the monitor. "Echelon offers an extended outreach and connection from their instructors to members daily," he said. An Echelon United subscription is $40 per month or $400 per year. And if your giftee lives in a small space, rest easy: With a push of a button, the treadmill automatically folds up to a depth of only 10 inches and wheels away for easy storage when not in use.
Encourage your loved one to get fit indoors by treating them to the recently-released Oculus Quest 2, a wire-free virtual reality (VR) headset. The highly-rated Quest 2 boasts built-in speakers, 64 GB of storage and you can cast directly on the Oculus mobile app or a compatible TV screen. The VR headset, which comes with two touch controllers and other accouterments, has a 4.6-star average rating from more than 3,500 Amazon reviews. The lightweight Quest 2 gets you access to the Oculus App Store filled with a plethora of free and premium content, including Supernatural, an immersive subscription fitness app. For $19 per month, you can workout indoors while taking in the virtual scenery of exotic locales such as Machu Picchu, Peru and Blue Lagoon, Iceland, all from the comfort (and safety) of your home. Supernatural comes with a library of workouts broken down by intensity — low, medium and high — along with stretching and meditation classes with varied playlists, like Sweat Symphony and Meditation Basics, so you don't get bored.
According to Karena Wu, PT a physical therapist and owner of ActiveCare Physical Therapy, a foam roller is a great way to self-massage your body's soft tissues. "Massage is an 'irritant' to the soft tissues that brings blood flow, which then helps with fluid movement and promotes healing because blood carries nutrients and oxygen. So, getting this type of compressive massage therapy helps break up tightness or 'knots' in the tissues," she previously told our friends at NBC BETTER. Theragun, a popular brand in the massage gun space, made a smart foam roller with five vibration intensities so that you can customize your at-home recovery routine with ease. Wave boasts a three-hour battery life and is Bluetooth-compatible, allowing it to pair with the Therabody app, which has a collection of guided foam roller routines for different parts of your body and others tailored to your fitness goals. It's also made from high-density foam to help prevent excess noise and has grooves throughout for smoother traction as you roll the 12-inch Theragun Wave down your back or legs.
Catch up on Select's in-depth coverage of personal finance, tech and tools, wellness and more, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date.
