I bought a Fitbit Versa smartwatch and I like some aspects of it a lot. Unlike the hybrid analog/smart watches I’ve been trying recently, this one is a pure smartwatch with an LED display and no physical hands. I’m still evaluating.
I bought a Garmin Vivomove HR smartwatch to see if it would be a good replacement for my Nokia Steel HR. It’s a great hybrid smart watch design, but it’s buggy and I couldn’t get it working well enough, so I didn’t keep it.
Someone asked me on Twitter some time ago if I was familiar with the Simple and Sinister kettlebell workout. I was not. Now it’s one of my go-to workouts. It’s remarkably simple, yet extremely hard and effective.
I bought two of the more interesting-looking hybrid smart watches to compare their functionality to each other, and to the Nokia Steel HR I already own. In the end, the Skagen Jorn Connected (Amazon) is a better watch and extension of my phone, but is not enough of a health or fitness tracker to replace the Nokia Steel HR; and the Misfit Phase (Amazon) has useful functionality but a poor design and feel. Neither offers the notification features I’d find most useful.
After leaving CrossFit, I found a workout rhythm that works well for me, and gradually stocked my basement and patio with a few essentials so I can vary my workouts. Now I can do pretty much anything I used to do at a really nice CrossFit gym.1 CrossFit is great because the equipment needed is fairly minimal anyway. People often ask “where are the machines?” and the insider’s joke is “we don’t use machines, we build them.” Here’s what’s in my “garage gym.”
I’ve found a workout routine that I’ve been able to maintain despite the challenges of parenting, travel, sickness, and founding and leading a startup company. Not only do I sustain the regimen, it sustains me. This is my workout practice.
After thinking about smart watches, activity trackers, and similar devices for a while, I bought a Withings Steel HR. My goal was to find a traditional stylish-looking watch with long battery life, heart rate tracking, sleep tracking, and activity tracking. Here’s my experience thus far (updated after a year; scroll down).
TL;DR: Using the Withings Steel HR has changed the way I use my smartphone. I love how much less distracted I am. I’m pretty happy with the health tracking features, and I like the traditional watch styling and long battery life.
In my last blog post I explained how to reclaim your mornings and make them the most productive time of day. In this one I’ll explain how exercise makes my mornings better, and how I avoid feeling sluggish after overdoing it.
If you’re like a lot of knowledge workers, you might feel that you spend your time unproductively. You seem to “do stuff” all day long but then feel that you’ve done nothing but “stuff” at the end of the day.
How can you change this? I’ve found three things that work for me to not only stay focused and achieve my objectives, but also help me feel better about myself.
I’ve been a happy CrossFiter for a few years now. I met my co-founder and many friends in CrossFit Charlottesville, completely changed my level of fitness and many key indicators of health such as my hemoglobin A1C and vitamin D levels, am stronger than I’ve ever been, feel great, and now my wife does CrossFit too. It’s fantastic. It’s community, fun, health, fitness. It’s the antidote to the boring gyms I forced myself to go to for years and hated every minute.
