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The Moov Now’s been on my wrist for two days now, and things are going well.
One thing I've noticed: I’m not a massive fan of the small metal rectangle that holds the band in place, as it feels like it could pop off and get lost quite easily.
That said, it’s still sitting firmly on my wrist (and stayed around my ankle when running yesterday and today) so perhaps that’s less of a worry than it needs to be.
For the second day of training I decided that things needed to be stepped up a little bit - it wasn’t good enough to just dabble in light workouts, I needed to push the limits of the wearable.
The morning session saw me back to circuit training, and having scrolled across to find there are (at least) 31 levels to attack, I decided to skip ahead to level six and see how much extra effort I would need to put in compared to level one.
Where I was doing five reps per exercise at the start, now the Moov apps asked me for 15, so the progression was pretty clear.
It wasn’t in the ‘crazy hard level’ just yet, but I got more of a sweat on over the 13 minutes I was rolling through the three sets of exercises than yesterday.
Top logging
Again, the repetition tracking accuracy was superb on the Moov, and the form hints really helped to keep me in check. It was only in the third set of crunches, the very last exercise, that the tracking accuracy started to fall apart, and that could have been as much to do with my fatigue as anything with the hardware.
I will admit that I’m already getting bored of the same six exercises each day - I would love it if there were more circuit training options, or I could set up my own routine, but neither of those options are available.
If Moov had the same range of exercises as Nike Training Club, for example, then this wearable would be unstoppable.
The afternoon saw me take on the interval training session - a variety of levels are again on offer with different speeds to take on over mile repetitions.
You’ll get a five minute warmup then straight into all-out running, with regular updates on how long to go and more useful tips on how to improve form.
My ego tells me I’m a pretty good runner, but putting each command from Moov into action (‘tighten your abs’ ‘pull your shoulders back’ ‘stop breathing like a broken steam train*’) really did improve my form - the regular nudges are useful.
In fact, it makes me want to cover my body in Moov Now discs and have the app tell me every single limb that’s not doing its proper job. But... that would be weird. Right? Yeah, it would. Cool.
The intervals were tough, but just about manageable. The app was telling me that it would upgrade me to a higher level if I managed to beat the targets, but then when I’d finished it told me I had to swipe to raise the intensity level.
No thanks. I was already struggling with the 3:57 minutes per kilometer efforts, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of making it harder.
Plus - like most people - my phone was stuck in my armband and taking it out would be a massive effort.
But that’s where the app should have been a bit more forceful and changed the level automatically - when I reviewed my efforts over the 10 kilometer run, I could have probably managed a higher speed.
If the app had automatically upped my pace targets, and the only way to make it easier was to rip the phone from my armband and manually drop the speed down, I’d have worked harder. Yes, I do expect the machines to do everything for me.
The one thing that’s really irritating me about Moov’s system is that DAMN ROBOTIC VOICE. It’s bad enough that it sounds so terrible, but the way the text-to-speech system works on the app means that the words sometimes get garbled.
Every update on how I was doing yielded a cryptic ‘your average speed is three minutes fiftykeepyour shoulders back’... Three minutes fifty what?
OK, it’s not a massive thing. But why can’t she just have a normal voice like the Vi from LifeBEAM?
Overall, I’m still impressed with the Moov Now system after two days. The tracking of my daily efforts is decent (although some automatic exercise pickup would be nice - for instance, noting I’m cycling to the train station for 10 minutes per day would be nice on the timeline, but the lack of GPS probably harms that).
The dedicated workouts are detailed and useful, with genuine progression each day. I’d love to see a personalised training plan in here, or some more options beyond the basic circuit workouts on offer, but given I’ve not tried all the options out yet I can’t really criticise the app yet.
To the next day. I feel the need to ‘cardio box’ coming on….
*OK, the last one didn’t happen. Would have helped though.
