FITBIT PREMIUM: DO YOU NEED A SUBSCRIPTION FOR YOUR HEALTH TOO?

COMPLETE INSIGHTS ON FITBIT PREMIUM TO HELP YOU WITH YOUR FITNESS DECISIONS

Fitbit Premium is the subscription version of the app’s fitness and health tracker. It gives you more with an advanced sleeping tracker, stress insights, health guides (videos), and the amalgamation of the data gathered about your overall daily well-being to gauge through their “Daily Readiness.” With an overload of subscriptions these days for our entertainment, services, food, etc., do we need one for our health too?

IS BEING BASIC ENOUGH?

First off, can you use the Fitbit app without a correspondingly branded tracker or smartwatch? Yes, you can track simple activities such as steps, distance, and calories using your phone. However, you will lose out on great insights that a Fitbit wearable can offer. So, unless you have a Fitbit watch or tracker, you can try out other fitness trackers apps like MyFitnessPal or Nike Training Club.

The free version of the Fitbit app gives you the core functions, which provide the following:

• Activity tracking: Like the app’s function without a wearable, Fitbit can track steps, distance, and calories burned. But, with a tracker on the wrist, you can trace more of your activity with floors climbed, heart rate, and active minutes (exercise time).
• Weight tracking: Though this feature is more of a manual effort, you can opt to purchase an additional smart scale that has the function to be synced with the Fitbit app for ease of logging your weight. By weighing yourself and by keeping watch of your progress toward your goal, the app can help you by giving an understanding of your body fat percentage and Body Mass Index (BMI).
• Sleep tracking: Sleep is one of the most critical aspects of our health. Some of us may forget just how necessary to get enough of it, but as an action junkie (adjunkie), fitness and health are part of our lifestyles. You might know that sleep has different stages, and they’re categorized as:
  - Awake: Part of our nights are spent awake. We may not be aware of this, and most of the time, we don’t remember this during our cycle.
  - REM: Rapid Eye Movement (REM) is when our eyes move rapidly while asleep. Our brain activity at this stage is similar to when we are awake, and this is when we have our dreams.
  - Light Sleep: This stage is considered NREM 1 & 2, where our heart rates and breathing slow down, and muscles relax. Eventually, our brain waves slow down, and the body temperature drops.
  - Deep Sleep: This is NREM 3, where our brain waves and heart rate are at their slowest. We are hard to wake up at this point, but deep sleep is one of the most important stages as it is the restorative portion.
  With a Fitbit app and wearable, we can track our sleep duration and time spent at each stage. With the help of technology, we can find out our sleep quality and improve our efficiency for our rest.

• Nutrition tracking: This feature is also on the manual side of things, allowing you to log food and water intake. To make it easier to register, Fitbit has a barcode scanner to aim and shoot at food products that will automatically record what we’ve partaken in (as long as it’s a food product with packaging or a box). One can set their nutrition goals and let the app do its job of counting calories. Of course, at its best efforts since not all foods are the same in substance.
• Fitbit has a database of foods you can log, but most of the time, I find it lacking, especially for us Filipinos, who have a wide array of dishes that isn’t necessarily common to the rest of the world. I think some users from other countries would also find this a similar concern. Am I right, my fellow South East Asians? That said, it is possible to go through the extra step of inputting your food entries. But, this will take more time as research, quantifying, and encoding is at hand.
• Insights and motivation: With all the data gathered above, the Fitbit app can help connect all of them and give insights on making changes to improve your overall health.

PREMIUM OR SURCHARGE?

Now, what puts the premium into Fitbit Premium? The subscription is essentially a deeper dive into your activity, sleep, nutrition, and even your stress. Meaning, with the features presented above on the basic level, the data, and analytics the app can provide goes beyond through a more comprehensive report readily available for subscribers.

Fitbit likes to connect and make sense of every tracked aspect it offers. With Fitbit Premium, once the app helps make you aware of your daily performance or functions, the helpful guides in video format are more appreciated as a support to aid you in leveling up. These encouraging recordings come in the form of 3 different varieties, namely, Nutrition, Workouts, and Mindfulness, to help with our stresses in life or Manila traffic, or office dramas.

The Premium plan of Fitbit is offered in 2 ways. A monthly paid membership where you’ll have to fund 519 Philippine Pesos per month. Or an annual paid option where a one-time big-time payment of 4,190 pesos is spent but has the reward of saving over 30%. To break down what Fitbit Premium provides, here’s a list below:

• You get all the features from the free app.
• Stress Management: This tool by Fitbit helps you track and manage your stress. It collates the data from your heart rate, activity, and sleep. With the gathered insights, the app turns this into a score of 0 to 100 and a dashboard to help us appreciate how our day-to-day affect us. Of course, Fitbit Premium follows through and allows us to manage our stress through recommendations and Mindfulness sessions. These sessions give us breathing exercises and guides to relax our bodies and mind and wind down to sleep.

• Sleep Tools: The basic app of Fitbit already gives us Sleep Tracking, but with Premium, there’s more on the table. Many things are hard to understand about our health, but one facet I like about Fitbit Premium is that it gives us an ease of understanding things through scores. With Fitbit Sleep tools, we can better understand the times we are resting through a Sleep Score breakdown. This tells us a score of 0 to 100 and gives us a gauge of how well we slept. Through Sleep Insights, Fitbit can also offer tips on improving sleep quality and provides a breakdown through “animals”:
  - Bear: These people keep a consistent sleep schedule and sleep earlier than most. They tend to sleep in long and restful portions and have a high tendency to spend their sleep in the deep and REM parts of the cycle. Daytime naps are rare for them too.
  - Dolphin: Dolphins have an inconsistent sleep schedule, sleeping later and for shorter durations than others. They are light sleepers and take longer to reach deep and REM sleep. Their sleep is often disrupted and less restorative, leading them to rely more on napping to catch up.
  - Giraffe: Giraffes sleep later and wake earlier compared to others. They have a consistent sleep schedule and quickly achieve quality sleep. Despite a shorter duration, they still manage a good proportion of deep and REM sleep. This results in fewer disruptions and wake-ups, reducing the need for daytime napping.
  - Hedgehogs: They tend to fall asleep later and wake up earlier, resulting in shorter overall sleep duration. They are light sleepers and take longer to reach deep and REM sleep than others. Despite some disruptions and occasional wake-ups, hedgehogs usually have a relatively restful sleep, which allows them to avoid daytime napping with their short sleep duration.
  - Parrots: Parrots maintain a consistent bedtime and don’t sleep too early or too late. They quickly achieve sound sleep and generally get good sleep each night. While they sleep deeply, they tend to have less REM sleep. Parrots may experience brief wake-ups during the night, but these are quickly forgotten, allowing them to have enough sleep to avoid daytime napping.
  - Tortoises: These people have varying bedtimes but generally fall asleep earlier than most. They also wake up slightly later, resulting in more overall time spent in bed. While they manage to get a good amount of sleep, it takes them a while to reach sound sleep, affecting their deep and REM sleep, which is slightly lower than average. Although they may experience occasional prolonged awakenings, overall, their rest tends to be restful, but it can lead to daytime napping due to difficulty getting back to sleep.
  I’m personally a bear sleeper. How about you? Would you try Fitbit Premium to find out, or what sleeper do you think you are?

• Advanced skin temperature details: This feature is only for the Fitbit Sense wearable line. But this gives us a look at our varying skin temperatures when we sleep. This part can provide us with more insights into our circadian rhythm, menstrual cycles, and even an onsetting fever.
• Wellness Report: Connecting the dots is one of those things Fitbit is good at. And with a Personal Wellness Report, insights about your sleep, heart rate, and activity and how they impact each other are presented. Download that PDF Summary about your overall fitness and health; maybe you can help your physician better understand how you can reach your best self.
• Daily Readiness Score: Don’t we love easy-to-understand scores? With this feature, you can get a score every morning that considers your Activity levels for the past few days, Heart rate variability, and how well you’ve slept to estimate a score for you if you’re ready for a workout or must continue focusing on recovering.

THE VERDICT: BASIC OR BOUJEE?

While writing this article, I actually had a bit of a challenge trying to remember what the basic version of the Fitbit app offered. I used to rock a Fitbit Charge before moving into a Fitbit Sense as my daily driver. The moment I switched my Fitbit wearable, I opted in for Fitbit Premium to try out what the subscription was like. Since then, I’ve long forgotten and used the benefits the premium plan can give to my advantage.

Life, as we know it, can be hard to manage at times. We often squeeze our time within 24 hours for work, working out, or staying healthy, our hobbies, social life, and getting enough sleep, among the other things we also have to do. The most assistive aspect of Fitbit Premium has offered me is its ability to assess my overall fitness and health in different areas and give me a comprehensive yet coherent report.

One day, within the hustle and bustle of work, I felt sick, and my body was wearing down in ways I’d long seen coming. Upon generating a report on Fitbit Premium for my sleep, I found that for the past year, I was only sleeping an average of 4 hours per night. This came from the long hours of working in a job I was passionate about, little to no weekends, no time to exercise, and the stress that came with it. With that, I found one of the reasons to leave a job I loved but had to move on from. There are some things in life for me that have to be prioritized, balanced, and enjoyed.

The verdict: when starting on your fitness journey or only needing the simple features that might be able to help in your everyday life, the basic Fitbit app is worth it. This means this is for those who work/study, get some exercise, try to eat healthy, and try to get enough sleep as much as possible.

As for those needing more, who might want to be more optimized with their health and want to see a more thorough data-based review of their metrics, then the Fitbit Premium is sufficient. Especially with the expensive health services, a subscription is a viable and efficient option for preventive measures that keep us in tip-top shape. Also, for serious athletes that have to perform at their best, the Fitbit Premium is a great way to get additional insights on becoming the creme de la creme.

With that said, it is still up to you to decide whether to subscribe to a service for your health. Maybe the minimum is enough, but the premium is the way to go to enhance your overall health and fitness.