Since this year started, I’ve been more conscious about my health. As I mentioned in my previous entry The Year I Tell Myself to Choose Yourself, I have been getting into habits helping me to be more healthy and fit. Among the more obvious ones people see me do is eat tuna and grilled chicken breast every lunch. Another is my daily walk to achieve 10,000 steps a day, and when folk in Greenhills see me jog every weekend.

While it’s been great, I decided to take it a notch further and get myself a fitness tracker. I believe it’s important to truly be able to measure one’s efforts to see if one’s being successful–but more importantly, to know how to push yourself even further. What did I get? A Jawbone UP3.

I just got it last Tuesday, so I haven’t been able to tinker with it so much. So, for now, all I could share with you would be my initial thoughts on it. As seen in the box, the tracker is able to monitor your heart rate, measure your sleep, and your activities as well. Will get to those in detail later.

When you open the box, you’ll be prompted to lift the inside which will reveal the cable needed for charing the Jawbone UP3 and a piece of paper which will tell you to download the UP app. If you’re using iOS you can download it here, if Android, here.

The charging cable is short, and it’s quite awkward to charge your Jawbone UP3 with it. One could bend it if you don’t want it straightened as it would leave you no choice but to position your laptop closer to the edge of your desk. Charging time is quite fast. In less than an hour it has fully charged, and I haven’t had the need to charge it since. You can see the battery life of your Jawbone UP 3 through the mobile app. And now, it’s telling me it still has 34% left, meaning it should be able to last me one more day. Nice!

I have been using this since Wednesday and I’ve been really enjoing it so far. The sleep analysis is quite thorough. It tells you when you’re awake, your light sleep, deep sleep and when you’re in REM. Unfortunately I haven’t been getting much REM and deep sleep. Something I have to fix in the coming days.

As a Fitness Tracker, it tracks several things such as your Active Time, longest time you were active, and idle, calories burned, among others. Quite helpful if you are the type who wants to see what activities yield the best results, if anything.

The heart rate tracking is also pretty thorough. I have yet to fully understand the importance of the trends of the resting heartrate and the passive heartrate, but hopefully in the coming days I would!

For now, I’m still very much over the moon with my Jawbone UP3! Shall be updating everyone once I have fully tinkered with the app and the tracker itself. If you’re interested to learn more about Jawbone, you may check their website here.