Fitness technology has come a long way in the last few years. In the past, we had to make do with gadgets that didn’t really tell us all that much about ourselves. But with the rise of the fitness app, wearables and AI, all that has changed. Whereas just a few years ago, people laughed at the idea that we might have some sort of Star Trek style tricorder that would monitor our every move, now it’s mainstream.

With the technology continuing to move apace, we’ve seen many innovations over the last few months. In fact, the pace of change is sometimes so fast that it's hard to keep up. Here are some of the most impressive new fitness techs to reach consumers this year.

Social Fitness Apps

People have loved going biking in the wilderness since the 1980s after it became popular in California From around the year 2000, mountain biking went mainstream, and companies invested huge sums of money into their bikes. If you want to see progress, just take a look at the top of the range mountain bike in 2000 and compare it to one in 2017. The evolution is stunning.

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But despite all that progress on the mechanical side, bikers still had to put up with poor communication between each other. There certainly wasn’t a social network they could sign up to.

But now things have changed a lot and not just the complications of choosing a bike. Thanks to apps like Strava, bikers can keep in contact with each other and track their routes, comparing their times to other people who have traveled down similar trials using GPS. Of course, it’s not just biking - it’s been adapted for all sorts of outdoor sports, like running, hiking, swimming and canoeing too.

Body Composition Scales

For the last fifty years, during the rise of the obesity crisis, we’ve been used to the concept of weight - the total mass that our body has. But weight alone is problematic - it doesn’t say anything about whether our weight is healthy or not. A woman who goes to the gym five times a week and has a lot of muscle mass might be classed as overweight, despite that additional weight being healthy.

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Entrepreneurs and fitness companies realized that there was a problem with this and so they developed

scales that measure body fat, along with other relevant variables, like visceral fat, metabolic age, and bone mass. The hope is that these technologies will give users better information about their health so that they can more accurately track their fitness outcomes and whether they are at risk of certain diseases.

Wireless Headphones

If you hit the gym on a regular basis, there’s a good chance that you listen to music. But in the gym, that cord going from your ears to your pocket is a pain. That’s why companies like Kuai Wear have developed wireless headphones.

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The interesting thing about the Kuai Wear headphones is that they go beyond simply allowing you to listen to music. They also have biometric sensors that provide you with data about your exercise performance. Connect them to your phone via an app.