Gear Patrol

Most of us are out of touch with our bodies. We clueless about calories, how much we’re walking in a day, or even how to check our own heart rate. Luckily, there’s a host of new fitness trackers that make training truly personal. Strap them onto your wrist or toss them in your pocket and they’ll track your every move — every step you take, every minute you sleep, every calorie you inhale or burn off. Read on for our five best bets for prying you off the couch — and tracking your efforts.

Scrambled eggs, Canadian bacon, homestyle potatoes, a bowl of oatmeal and two cups of coffee: when preparing to take on Squaw Valley with Chris Davenport, simply a two-time World Champion skier who recently scaled and skied Mt. Everest, one must fuel up. So I did.

Sitting on 3,600 acres northwest of Lake Tahoe near the California and Nevada border, Squaw Valley offers skiers the chance to take on wide open runs (groomed and not) of greens, blues and blacks, most of which are clean of trees (death sticks), allowing the average skier to be more daring with less severe consequences. This range in terrain, altitude and weather presented the perfect setting to test my new gear — a Bern helmet, Gordini gloves, and Obermeyer jacket and pants — while being guided by this veteran pro.

Coffee and cycling go together like beer and brats. It may be because the local coffee shop is the ideal spot to hook up with your buddies for a ride, or because you want to get a quick jolt so you can drop them at the county line sprint. But the simplest explanation lies in the data, which strongly suggest that caffeine improves performance for endurance athletes — cyclists, triathletes, runners, you name it.

It’s apparently no longer enough to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve — or wrist. Under Armour’s new Armour39 system attacks the digital performance monitoring question with a new “bug” device, which comes with a special sleeve that straps to the chest; like other bluetooth-enabled fitness computers, it records exercise data and stores it in the cloud.

Obstacles XRT ($2) (XRT stands for extreme reality training) isn’t particularly exciting from an innovation standpoint, and it won’t have Quantified Selfers jizzing in their Under Armour. What it does provide is a genuinely useful tool for motivated exercisers to do unique high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts from the comfort of their home or, more importantly, in the office common room, wearing a tank top.

It’s widely known that swimmers and rainy weather joggers (and really all audiophiles hindered by humidity) are more than a little jealous of the ease with which their fellow athletes can take in tunes while exercising. Sony’s whipped up the next in their line of wet-weather answers: the Sports W Series Waterproof MP3 Player, a…

You’re outnumbered. At the time of battle you are one man up against a battalion of holiday comestibles so enticing and made with such love that it’s near impossible to imagine not eating them all: cheeses and charcuterie, spiced pistachios, herbed popovers, potato mash, various crostini of unknown constituents, assorted root vegetables — roasted — cassoulet, a standing rib roast. It’s not like you haven’t been wading through poultry and roasted meats since Thanksgiving. Plus, the harsh reality is that between extra-fortified eggnog and Champagne you’re two sheets, approaching three, to the wind.

The holidays are here again. Time for family, friends and wondering what to do when Grandma pulls that five-stick-o-butter apple pie hot and fresh from the oven. Finding ourselves wedged between the gorging holidays with New Year’s resolutions right around the corner, we’ve all hopefully considered some version of an exercise regimen. Personal trainers, however,…

He shows up at Christmas dinner with new scars and less digits from his latest cage dives and winter Alpine ascents. His tales, most of them true, scare Aunt Betty to tears and enchant the kids. And while the adventurer’s gifts for you usually amount to a carved tribal trinket or a rock from a…

Beyond catering to the fitness obsessed, this wonder watch would have been useful during that little apoplexia-inducing turkey feast we like to call Thanksgiving. Known as the Mio Alpha Heart Rate Monitor, this wristwatch on steroids “senses” the amount of blood under your skin and replies with a digital readout of your heart rate. Through…

When Nike released the first Air Max in 1987, its Tinker Hatfield design became an instant icon. The first set of sneaks to visibly feature Nike’s synonymous air bubble had kids of all ages clamoring to walk on clouds (and others poking them with pins for proof). The Nike Air Max+ 2013 (available in January)…

The fitness fanatic is the man that puts in a quick 5K before the rest of us have even tossed the beans in the burr grinder. His body fat is measured in fractions, and biceps in feet. His dinner conversations involve things like basal metabolic rate; his pecs flex, noticeably, when he passes the pepper….

Whether crisping up a bacon breakfast or searing your latest Month of Beef experiment, quality cookware separates the men from the boys, pans down. The West Elm Greenpan 14 Piece Cookware Set ($350), an eco-friendly arsenal with a natural non-stick coating, gives you professional-grade hardware at an affordable price. Using Thermalon, a mineral-base ceramic, rather…

The average human being spends somewhere around 200,000 hours of their life asleep, which seems like a lot of important time wasted dreaming of the Swedish Bikini Team. But, like your doctor, your mother and every health teacher you’ve ever had has droned at you again and again, sleep is important to a healthy life….

Not yet convinced we’re living in the future? Check out the Therapik ($13), a Star-Trekian device that cures bug bite itch and pain rather than Klingon disasters. The somewhat unwieldy, pen-like creation uses heat — yes, that’s it — to neutralize the discomfort-causing saliva or venom in mosquito, bee, hornet and even jellyfish bites and…

Editor’s Note: This series was predicated on the idea that Ironman has become a thing guys aspire to do — so we decided to dispatch our correspondent Jeremy Berger to do just that. Along the way we learned about avoiding injuries, eating right, training effectively, bonking, and the importance of appropriate gear. Hopefully you have…

If you watched any women’s beach volleyball in the Olympics this summer, you surely noticed some of the athletes wearing bright tape (and little else) on their bodies. In fact, this kinesiology tape is popping up in many other sports too, like cycling, swimming and tennis. That’s because athletes have discovered that the tape actually…

Editor’s Note: Let’s start with honesty. Triathlons aren’t an everyman sport. 95% of participants in Ironman Louisville had a post-secondary education. Triathlons are a big commitment in terms of training time and resources committed to everything from gear to nutrition. The longer the race, the greater the commitment. In Road to Ironman, Jeremy has taken…

Every four years, the Olympics come along and gym memberships go through the roof. After watching chiseled swimmers climb out of the pool night after night, we all think a few laps in the pool will make us look like Lochte. Think again. Olympic swimmers not only put in countless miles in the pool but…

Nowadays, there are more health-monitoring apps than we can shake a Powerbar at. The Cardiio ($5) uses accurate (and somewhat mind-blowing) MIT innovations to give you a simple, easily obtained BPM heart rate. Just point your iPhone’s front-facing camera at your face, and Cardiio measures the light reflection on your skin (which is directly affected…

I’m out of the water in 46 minutes. Not setting any records, but this is only the second time I’ve ever swim 1.2 miles — and the first time took 80 minutes. I have to pee. Badly. It’s hard to pee while swimming, plus it doesn’t seem like good karma to pee a few feet…

Sports scientist and professional cycling coach, Dr. Allen Lim, noticed that the sports drinks his riders were ingesting weren’t doing much to aid their performance and in some instances were even making his athletes sick. But instead of reaching for the haterade, Lim began making his own drink — one with all-natural ingredients, far lower…

Today we’re one month out from Ironman Louisville, one day out from a Half Ironman in Enfield, New Hampshire (more on that next time), and two months on down the road from when we kicked off this series. In hindsight, this whole goddam proposition was questionable. But we’re not the type of folks to dwell…

I was having a conversation with Kyle Kranz, an ultramarathoner and Ironman finisher who works for Skora, a relatively new company in the zero-drop shoe market. (I’ve been running in the Skora Form for the last 100 miles or so. More on that in the coming weeks.) Kranz told me about his latest experiment with…

We’ve learned over the years not to consult WebMD in place of medical professionals. You can develop sleep disorders just by browsing the skin disorders section. We don’t even want to know what lurks beneath the sexual conditions header. So for this series we turned to one of America’s leading orthopaedic surgeons to talk about…

Editor’s Note: We’ve been curious about Ironman for some time now. We’d seen reliable intel that more guys than ever are adding it to their bucket lists, training hard in excess of a year for one very brutal day of swimming, biking, running, dehydration, and hyponatremia (body’s lack of sodium). It sounds like one hell…

Now that beach season is here, we all could use a little help shedding the last of our hibernation weight. Luckily, the Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale ($130) leverages high-tech tools to help speed up your battle of the bulge. Like the portable Fitbit Ultra, the scale tracks a variety of useful health metrics including…

The vast majority of us are guilty of taking better care of the various gadgets around us than we do our most personal hardware: our body. Bruce Perry’s book focuses on the only thing that really matters: making you the healthiest person you can be, not transforming you into a hulking tower of meat and…

While we’re big fans of running (barefoot or not), it’s hard to beat swimming for a full-body, heart rate jacking workout. Unsurprisingly, what keeps people out of the pool is the fear of breathing, or, rather, lack thereof. Well fear no more, we’ve found what could be the solution to all you oxygen lovers sitting…

By now if you’re an endurance athlete and you don’t know about the importance of staying hydrated, you probably deserve to become a desiccated roadside carcass. But most smart runners and cyclists know that being hydrated means more than just sucking down liters of water. Your body needs electrolytes, those sugars and salts that keep…