*sigh*
I guess it's for nerds trying to get into shape. I dunno, I don't check any stats, and I'm healthy and quite fit, at least compared to other Americans. Sounds like they're trying to turn an imprecise science into data on a spreadsheet.
Good for you. No, really: congratulations, it's great that you're in good physical condition. It's pretty important, and a lot of people have trouble doing it. Perhaps that fact has escaped your attention?
Or perhaps it has, quite reasonably, escaped your attention that when most people (you know, the ones who AREN'T as awesome as you) are given a way to quantify how much exercise they are getting and the progress they're making, they are much more likely to stick to an exercise regimen, becoming much more reliable about putting in the exercise and much more likely to continue it longer. I can see why you wouldn't have noticed, since you don't need it, but it turns out that there are some great recent studies that tell you this.
But I could have told them that. Fifteen years ago, I decided to get in shape. I started by walking, and then worked up to jogging. And it was a horrible slog and I hated it and I never felt like I was making any progress. And then I got a heart rate monitor and pedometer (they were a bit cruder back then, mind you), and suddenly I could actually
see my progress. I could see that I was able to run farther than I had been a month ago, and that my resting heartbeat was, on average, a couple of beats per minute lower than it was a year before. I could get a count of the approximate number of calories I was burning in a day, and compare that with my food intake. I could chart my progress, albeit on a tiny little watch screen (since there wasn't one that would interface with Macs at the time).
Shortly thereafter, I got a Walkman (ye gods, I feel old), later replaced by an iPod. And a couple years after that I received a GPS watch as a gift. These days I'm using an iPhone and a heart rate monitor strap that connects to it via bluetooth 4.0, plus a fitbit (although I'll probably just ditch that, with the M4 thing).
Result? Fifteen years later, I'm still in shape. The reason I stick to it is because I know that I'm actually accomplishing something. I know that I'm in good physical condition. When I skip a day of jogging, I can look at my stats and say, 'Meh, I did five days of jogging last week, plus a seven mile hike last weekend
I can afford to take a day off this week' instead of stressing out about being a bad person because I didn't exercise that day, something that makes it more likely that you will just quit. (And as an added bonus, I can keep track of how many miles I put on my jogging shoes, so I can replace them at reasonable intervals.) I can chart out my rest heart rate (~55, currently
not QUITE the best it has ever been but surprisingly close, seeing as I'm probably twice your age). If I wanted to, I could sit down and chart out how only getting six hours of sleep in a night effects my exercise patterns the next day, or for that matter how my exercise patterns affect my sleep. I haven't, at this point, but if I started having serious sleep issues I probably would. Because it'd be really good to know.
Basically, these kind of metrics make it more likely that more people will stay in shape, and help people understand their own bodies better. And they don't help just a little bit: the studies have been quite striking, and very consistent. Seems to me that, instead of deriding these things as 'for nerds trying to get in shape', you should be, well, a little more tolerant of other people's imperfections. Shall we say.
