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Under Armour's New Fitness Tracker Has Arrived

time:2025-02-06 03:08:36 Source: author:

Last year, Under Armour made headlines when it outsold Adidas for the first time in overall sportswear apparel, making Steph Curry's favorite brand second only to Nike. So it makes sense that UA would want a piece of the fitness-tracker market. And now here they are with their HealthBox, a combination of, well, everything: heart-rate monitor, diet log, fitness tracker, and scale.

The premise of the HealthBox—which retails for $400—is simple, if a little Orwellian. The smartphone app, UA Record, is your ground control: Everything runs through it. Weigh yourself, and it goes directly into the app via wi-fi. Finish a workout, all the heart-rate-monitor data goes directly to the app via Bluetooth. Wake up in the morning, all your sleep data from your fitness tracker goes directly to the app via Bluetooth. It makes for a comprehensive (and somewhat overwhelming) health app that attempts to tell you everything about your body.

But do you really need all that shit? I tested it out for a month to find out.

Features You'll Use

Sleep tracker. Over the last month, I found myself checking the app every morning just to see how much I had slept the night before. Understanding your sleep patterns—the app monitors your quality of sleep throughout the night—is the first step toward getting healthier sleep. And healthier sleep is the first step toward healthier wakefulness.

Nutrition tracker. Trying to better track your eating habits and cut back on, say, sugar or unrefined carbs? You can input everything you eat into the app—synced through MyFitnessPal's nutrition-diary software—to calculate how many calories you're consuming. I was kind of spooked out by the precision of the food database. It has what appears to be every goddamn foodstuff on the planet, even the grocery-store tortillas my girlfriend's sister brought from Houston (shout out to H-E-B!).

The feature offers real service, whether you're a diehard weight lifter tracking every ounce of steamed broccoli or a dude trying to eat better and run your first 5K.

Features You Might Use (That I Don't Care About)

Scale. I think religious focus on weight is unhealthy. Eat right, exercise semi-regularly, don't drink too heavily, and your weight will follow suit. I didn't need a digital Big Brother scale to tell me I gained four pounds the morning after I had seven beers and four slices of pizza. That much was clear when I woke up.

Features That You'll Use (for Three Weeks, Then Forget About)

Heart-rate monitor. Unless you're an Olympic marathoner trying to run 20 miles at an insanely specific threshold, you don't need a heart-rate monitor. It tells you what you already know: that you are hopeless and breathing heavily. You worked hard! That's the point of exercise.

It turns out that the HealthBox, like all fitness trackers, is more useful in providing data for you to contemplate than in giving you any sort of blueprint for moving forward. For that sort of advice, you may still have to pony up and pay for a trainer.

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