MyTrak: Personal Health Coach Review

Meet the M² by Mytrak. It’s a small, personal activity coach that tracks your movement in order to help you achieve greater levels of activity gradually over time.

It also has a cool light up ring that gives you feedback on your movement levels throughout the day, but more on that later. You can also follow our tester, Jules from Big Girl Bombshell, through 2 months testing this product out in our Mytrak review series.

How it Works

There is some aerospace engineering involved, I’m pretty sure about that. But for us regular people, it gauges your movement quantity (minutes) and intensity (estimated heart rate) while you wear this this little device and translates that movement into an estimate of total calories burned throughout the day.

All this information is collected and displayed for you on a lighted, colored ring and also in a lot more detail through the software program pictured below.

The interface looks a little something like this:

The bottom menu is a list of all the types of tracking the software does: activity minutes, goals, steps taken, distance travelled, daily calorie deficit, and more.

You Set Your Goals

The real stand out for me with this device is the ability to customize your goals.  You’re not knocked over the head with lose weight, be this way or that, it’s very much just about moving more. Gradual improvement that over time may help you evolve into a thinner, but more importantly, healthier person.

There are 2 main categories of goals that the systems has: weight loss or general fitness. You choose your weight goal or activity level goal and the system helps fine turn what your activity level needs to be in order to achieve what you choose.

The first week you wear the M², it’s getting to know you, like a really long first date. It’s gathering information about your baseline activity level so that it can create a path to goal achieve in the coming weeks and months.

How does a small little space age unit do that? Well that ring slowly turns green throughout the day as you get closer to your goal activity minutes or calorie burn.  The longer you wear the device the harder it is to turn the entire circle green each day. It’s cool to check in throughout the day to see how far around the green portion is, knowing if you need to pick up the activity or if you’re on track. Through this gradual increase in difficulty you end up walking more, generally increasing your activity without really noticing that you’re doing a lot more. For someone who is already quite active, I was really surprised by that. I was getting in a lot more steps after a few weeks of wearing this.

Tracking Calorie Deficits

If you count calories, the computer interface lets you input your daily menu and calories and after that brief getting to know you period, will give you an approximation what range you should be eating to lose weight. The computer software shows you your daily calorie deficit as long as you input your food, so you’re aiming for a pound per week for a lose, it’s easy to see if you’re maintaining a 500 deficit each day in order to achieve that goal.

How Accurate is the M²?

Cool concept right? But does it work? That’s really what I wanted to know. Sure I definitely walk more and move in general when I’m wearing the M2 so that is a positive but I wanted to test out the calorie burn accuracy since this is purely based on motion and not heart rate.

I wore my heart rate monitor (HRM) with chest strap all day along with the M². The M² recorded my expenditure as 300 lower than the HRM.  That 300 “missing” calories was from my workout that day which involved a lot of isometric circuits that didn’t involve a lot of movement, however, they produce a huge heart rate response that the M² couldn’t detect.  The website does mention this and you can connect the M² to a Polar heart rate strap (an extra $49.95)  to eliminate the problem entirely. I would imagine the calorie burn would be more accurate but I didn’t test it so ultimately, I’m not sure about that.

I was pleasantly surprised that something like this was so close to the HRM while being far cheaper than my Garmin or even the more expensive calorie monitoring devices an the market.

The Surprise Benefit

Calories are not something I talk about with my daughter, who’s 4. I don’t want to pollute something as natural as eating and moving with the technical and emotionally charged subject of weight loss nor would it be appropriate.

However, having mom run around wearing a cute, pink, light up, plastic “toy” does not go unnoticed.  When I explained to her what it did, encourage mom to move around more to keep her heart and body healthy, she became enamored with it right away.

There are no number read outs on the device and it’s just fun watching it change to green through out the day. She became my little cheerleader randomly pressing the button to see how green it was. If there was still a lot of red she started suggesting we go for another walk or have a dance party.

It became a fun game about getting more active.  The M² serves as a fun way to talk about movement and wellness in our house in a really positive way.

That was a benefit that had not occurred to me initially and in this age of video games and sedentary kids, the M² might really be a helpful tool for parents to use with their children.  Being a great health and fitness role model is always the best way but making activity a game if it was previously something undesirable is always a plus. You won’t need to have them involved in the computer portion at all and not bring calories into the equation but use it as a game to turn the light green everyday.

The Nutritional Component

The software that comes with the M² integrates into the Mytrak website which gives you the same information and look as your desktop application. However, the online site has the ability to input your nutritional information from the day (with a certain membership level, see below) and there is a community forum and other tools like a nutritional analysis as well. The only real drawback I found was the nutritional input section. It was hard to find on the site, I think I looked for 10 minutes trying to locate it and then it wasn’t super easy to use when I did.

Over the course of this product review the company heard the feedback about this and has completely redone the nutrition portion of the site to be far more user friendly. The online site will either make meal plans for you, based on the type of food you like to eat, low fat, healthy carb, balanced, vegetarian, etc. or will just be a blank interface where you can input everything yourself.

 

As you can see, you can print off the menus easily, get grocery lists and it’s been made very straight forward and easy to navigate.

An Apple a Day

Unfortunately, an apple a day does keep the M² away. Mytrak software does not integrate with Mac and currently is only for the Windows operating system.

Cost

The Mytrak system with the M² has 2 different pricing options.

The M² is $79.95 and comes with a standard membership to the software that is pictured above. There is a premium membership that allows access to the meal planning software portion, personal trainers, and advanced data analysis if that’s more your speed. It costs an additional $69.95 so you’ll be looking at a total of $149.95 for the first year. After that first year, the subscription fee is $4.95 per month or $49.95 per year, paid at once.

You can see all the differences between the 2 membership levels here.

There are also a few other optional accessories, like a water proof pouch if you’re a swimmer and a general power adaptor so you can charge it without hooking it up to the computer.

The test version I have came with a belt clip and I assumed this was included until I was going through the accessories and it’s actually an additional $19.95. Personally, I thought it should be included without the additional charge. Yes, you can put it in your pocket, but depending on what you’re wearing, you pocket may be lose and having something rattle around that is basing your calories on movement isn’t a great idea and will affect your readings.

The clip seems rather important to getting optimal results from the device and I was disappointed to see you had to pay something additional for that.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for a tool to help encourage more daily activity, make it fun for younger people or want to track your daily calorie deficit to lose weight, this tool can do it all and with the recent website improvements, does it well.

It’s easy to use and the flexibility of the computer program really allows you to use the device in a way that fits your life and can help you make those small changes that add up to big ones over the long haul.

The price point and subscription does make this an investment but it is cheaper than some of the more advanced calorie management systems on the market.   However, you do sacrifice some of the accuracy without the heart rate monitor accessory that those units have standard.

Bottom line: you still have to do the work. You have to move more, eat better, and embrace the change or this or anything, isn’t going to work. It’s a tool, and used properly it can help make some of those changes a bit easier and more fun.