Fitness Gift Trends to Skip: Choose Function Over Flair and Save a Bundle

Whether you are looking to give someone the gift of fitness this year, or want to add some fitness items to your own wish list, the great news is that there are more options than ever. Conversely, this also means there are some less-than-stellar options out there putting loads of marketing dollars into scoring a spot in your shopping cart. Here are a few Holiday fitness gift trends you can skip, with a better (and often more cost effective!) option.

Cross it off: BodyBugg. This pricey little piece of tech will run you about $230 for the hardware, plus requires that the user pay a monthly subscription to use it. The pitch? It tracks your movements and gives you a total calorie burn for the day. You just track the calories you eat and, voila!, you lose weight. The issue here is that the “calories out” piece of the equation is the lesser problem for most people looking to lose weight and the BodyBugg subscription food tracking service is not nearly as robust as free services like Livestrong.com’s Daily Plate and free apps like MyFitnessPal. Also, the BodyBugg doesn’t give you any real-time objective feedback on your actual fitness that would allow you to ramp up your workouts when your fitness improves, work through calorie-torching interval sessions, adapt your workouts on days when you might be slightly overtrained, or see your fitness improve over time. The Better Option: A heartrate monitor, like the ones in the Polar line, lets the user see calories burned PLUS gives actual numeric data for workouts and real-time feedback that will motivate a fitness buff for years to come. With quality options starting in the $80 range, a heartrate monitor is a must-have for anyone embarking on a fitness or weight-loss journey.

Cross it Off: Ab Circle Pro. Priced at about $200, this “As Seen on TV” mainstay promises to sculpt your abs while giving you a cardio workout by placing you on your knees and elbows while you tail-wag your way to health and fitness. At the risk of being redundant, it’s worth mentioning again that there is no such thing as spot reducing, so if your concern is fat around the midsection, your number one goal should be burning the most calories, not spending all your cardio time working your midsection. Even if the exercise itself were an efficient way to get a cardio workout, unbiased online reviews are unanimous that this is a shoddily-manufactured piece of equipment that is ergonomically questionable and most likely will leave your floor covered in metal shavings after every workout. What’s more, a recent study proved that all the newfangled core workout equipment doesn’t activate the core any better than the good ol’ crunch. The Better Option: A core ball and a jumprope. You can get a quality core ball from Gaiam with exercise bands for about $30 for a whole range of full-body and core exercises, add some jumproping, go for a brisk walk, or put on some music and shake your tailfeather to get your cardio and leave the tail-wagging to your dog.

Cross it Off: Shake Weight. For thirty bucks, you get one really noisy “barbell” and a six-minute, cheaply-produced exercise DVD that targets only three muscle groups. I guarantee you can get a better workout in six minutes doing push-ups, pull-ups and chair dips than you can with the ShakeWeight. The Better Option: A quality set of resistance bands will run about thirty bucks and deliver a more robust, full-body workout that can evolve as the recipient’s fitness increases. What’s more, they are super-portable and can slip into the smallest of spaces.

So, this holiday season, don’t get caught up in the hype and purchase a “one trick pony” what will be gathering dust by the Super Bowl—think about giving the gift of a quality piece of equipment that will grow with the recipient and encourage them to hit new heights of fitness in the new year. 

Heather Hawkins is a certified personal trainer and fitness nutrition coach based in San Francisco, CA, who works with clients over the internet through FitLifeSF Coaching and blogs at FitLifeSF.com. Please send your fitness and nutrition questions to Smurf@FitLifeSF.com for use in future blogs.