Oh man, remember when I got my Moov NOW and I was all like, "Yeah, I'll totally get a review up for you guys"? Yeah, that was a while ago. I'll go ahead and blame the holidays even though ours was pretty low-stress.
The Moov is super cool.
What? You wanted more than that?
Ok, fine.
The Moov NOW is part activity/sleep tracker, and part personal coach. It is NOT a pedometer. That is one of the main complaints I have seen about it. But it also doesn't claim to be a pedometer, so really people just need to do a little research before they buy things. Other people have somehow lost the pebble/sensor out of the band, which baffles me because I've been wearing mine for weeks and it has never once fallen out.
Here's an example of the activity screen. I was clearly a sleep glutton the other day.
The Moov comes with 2 bands, because you wear it on either your wrist or your ankle, depending on the workout.
Wearing it on your ankle will cause your friends to crack jokes about house arrest. Just a heads up.
It keeps track of most activity, though things like yoga don't register as "active minutes." What I really like are the running features. There are different interval options to work on speed and cadence and you can also just set it to "open training" and check out your stats after the fact.
You do have to have your phone (and their app, which is free) with you for running workouts, which is sometimes a pain for me, but definitely not a deal breaker.
The little coach chimes in with pace and distance from time to time, and lets you know if your impact is too high. Mine always is on the downhills, I haven't figured out how to run downhill gracefully yet.
Here's my (slow) run from Sunday:
If you're doing one of the interval workouts, the coach lets you know when to start, stop, if you are off pace, and it even gives little updates so you know how far into an interval you are. This is really nice when doing the speed endurance training because the intervals are just long enough for me to start wishing they were over. Knowing how much more I have to do definitely helps. Also there's no way I do intervals on my own out on the road, so this is really handy.
I have also used the 7 minute+ workout, which runs you through 3 sets of jumping jacks, squats, planks, lunges, push ups and crunches.
The Moov keeps track of your reps for you, and most of the time, I've found it to be pretty accurate. There have been a few times that it randomly decides not to count some of my jumping jacks (as though I am somehow doing them wrong - they're jumping jacks for crying out loud!), but it's right most of the time.
Here's an example of the details it gives at the end of the workout from a few weeks ago:
I actually built up some arm strength when I was doing this workout consistently for a few weeks, but started slacking off right before Christmas. Oops!
One thing I love about the Moov is that it doesn't have to be charged. My Fitbit was constantly dying on me, and don't even get me started on their screwy charger! The Moov takes a little coin battery and is supposed to last about 6 months. I haven't had to replace mine yet.
There are other features that are totally wasted on me, like swim and cycle "coaching," and cardio boxing. The swim and cycle are just open workouts, not guided coaching, that's why I used quotes. The cardio boxing pretty much requires that you have two Moovs (one for each wrist), and that just seems excessive to me.
The Moov is very cool overall, and you get what you put into it. It can be a passive activity tracker, or you can use it to its full potential, and use the coaching features. It doesn't remind you to work out, or set a schedule for you, but we're all big kids, we don't need that much hand holding, right?
