Getting Up and about

I always like things that help you learn more about yourself so when I was asked if I'd like to try some fitness equipment I fell up the Jawbone Up tracking wristband and I was intrigued. Not only did it track your activity, but it also tracked your sleep, your food, even your mood. So I thought I'd give it a go.

I've had it for just over two weeks now and it's quickly become a part of my life. The band is slightly big for my wrist but doesn't get in the way. I can wear it in the shower (but not in a swimming pool) so you can add your efforts to get clean to your daily movement. After a while, you do honestly forget you're wearing it. Because it's on your wrist, you won't lose it easily so it's almost a case of fit and forget.

The idea of it is it's like a pedometer that senses movement. You set yourself goals for a number of steps per day, hours of sleep and it measures movement like an accelerometer on a phone. If you are active, but don't necessarily do running or walking for your exercise, you can time an exercise or you can add it afterwards. This is good for me as classes like Body Pump don't need much horizontal movement. Even interval training using bodyweight exercises may not register in the same way as a step.

At night time, when you go to bed, you set it into sleep mode by pressing the end of the band until it buzzes. Then it picks up the movement of your arm to assess what level of sleep you are in - awake, light or deep sleep. As an extra, I've set alarms so that it wakes me within 20 minutes of a target time, the theory being that it wakes you when you are sleeping lightly and therefore wake more easily. It wakes you by vibrating on your wrist which is gentler than a loud alarm. However, I find I'm nearly always already awake, such is my body clock. I find looking at my sleep cycles fascinating although I seem to have developed a habit of longer night time wakings which might be related or entirely coincidental.

In order to look at your data, there are accompanying free iOS and Android apps. I have used both, since I have an Android phone and an iPad. They work pretty much the same way and are very easy to set up. You sync your band by plugging it into the microphone socket and it's updated in seconds. I have a slight preference for the iOS app, purely because it gives you an overview of what you've just uploaded since last sync. I find it easier to mess around and view things too but I am conscious I am using a bigger screen. It's easy to look back at your data and you've always got a running total for the day in terms of sleep and steps moved. At the top of my "feed" every day are interesting snippets called Insights that are interesting topics related to fitness or your data in general.

There are many things I love about it. It is easy to use, and the battery genuinely does last for days and then only takes an hour or so to charge back up (which you do via a USB adaptor). It's simple and it's really effective at making you consider how active you are even by just adding a few steps here and there, they all add up.. In particular, understanding about your sleep is really interesting and it does genuinely make me try to get to bed at a reasonable time most nights. I still have not reached my sleep target though!

There are some things that I do not like. I set idle alerts to remind me to move if I've not moved in 30 minutes during the day but if I'm standing and moving gently (like cooking and doing stuff in the kitchen), it doesn't seem to register and the alert will buzz on my wrist whilst I'm standing up. Annoying. And I tried to log food intake with it and found it horribly complicated - although you can add as much detail as you like. I've stopped using it because it should be intuitive and easy; I found it to be neither. I also think they missed a trick not to have added some way of tracing your heart rate or pulse so you can get more information about how hard you are working or have worked when working out. Steps are not everything and adding an activity isn't a perfect solution.

Something I haven't got around to is adding friends as the community is relatively limited in size so far. You can also connect Up to various health and fitness related apps like MapMyFitness but I don't use those. It does link to MyFitnessPal but I've gone off that a bit recently.

On the whole, I do love the Up band and I think the more you use it, the more you will get out of in terms of understanding your lifestyle and improving your overall health and fitness levels. This could be a great Christmas present for a special someone who is planning a serious January health kick but wants to build a genuinely active lifestyle. It's not uber cheap at £99.99, but I think it's good value.

This post is in association with Argos. I have not been paid a fee to write this post and all opinions are my own. 

Celebrating great mornings with Pampers

This is a sponsored post. 

Pampers are celebrating ‘great mornings’ and asking mums to share pictures & their sleep tips for a chance to win a professional photoshoot and appear in Mother & Baby magazine!

You can tell just by looking at your baby’s beautiful morning face whether they've had a good night’s sleep or not, and we want mums to show us what works for their baby to have a great start to the day.

Pampers, whose Baby-Dry nappies are recommended for up to 12 hours of Golden Sleep by 92% of UK mums*, are celebrating these great morning moments by inviting you to share images of the great morning moments you share with your little one along with your tip for a good night’s sleep. Simply email a recent photo of you and your baby, and your tip in no more than 50 words to pamperscompetition@hkstrategies.com. Remember to include your address and a contact number.

A selection of the entries will be shared each week on the Pampers Facebook page, and three winners will be selected to have a professional photoshoot and appear in a Pampers advertorial in Mother & Baby magazine!

Missy Woo in characteristic pose

In our house, the children's sleep habits as a baby have followed through into childhood. Monkey was dreadful for the first few months and even when he was sleeping through, he'd still wake early. He still wakes early now - I'm hoping the teenage year kick in soon but I'm sure he won't be the kind of person to sleep in all day. 

Missy Woo, on the other hand, slept so well as a baby, I used to have to wake her to feed or she would get too hungry, guzzle milk, bring it back up and get into a hungry/sick cycle. Now she's older, she tends to sleep the best - if Monkey leaves her alone, she'll happily lie in and we often have to tell her to get out of bed in the mornings. I'm not hopeful of her as a teen, I have to say! 

I'm way past the stage of being able to pass on sleep tips to mums of babies but my mantra when dealing with sleep issues was "Be consistent, be persistent". In other words, once I'd decided what I was doing, I would keep doing the same thing over and over, unless my instinct told me otherwise (eg if I really felt anything unusual was going on like illness, or teething etc). It certainly stood me in good stead - along with a healthy dose of "This too shall pass".

Closing date for entries is 9th July 2013 so don't hang around, get entering now and you could be a magazine model very soon.

*Based on a survey by 704 mums.

Sleepyhead

She's asleep. She actually looks as if she knows the camera is there and she's pretending to be asleep just to humour us so the photo can be taken, a hint of a knowing smile on her lips. Knowing her as I do now, I wouldn't put anything like that past her but she's only a baby here, right? In fact, I just checked - she's eight days old in this picture. The angle has cleverly disguised the baby acne she had so I think I got her best side. And I'd forgotten how dark her hair was at birth. 

My little sleepyhead, now known as Missy Woo. 

This is my entry for this week's Gallery at Sticky Fingers. The prompt this week is Body Parts. Why not take a look at visit some of the other entries - or even join in yourself?