The rise of the fitness tracker app has been huge over the last 2 years, with My Fitness Pal, Sweatcoin and Lifelog being staples on most peoples phones, plus with the addition of Fitbits and other worn pedometers we are all becoming slightly obsessed with tracking our steps, calories, heart rate, sleep patterns and all sorts of other health related things. And this is all great news as it should mean we are starting to take our health and fitness a bit more seriously, it’s just so easy to see exactly how much exercise we are doing on a daily basis and to keep track of what food we are eating.
So if we are paying so much attention to our own health and fitness what are we doing for our furry best friends? Keeping your dog active and healthy is of utmost importance for a responsible dog owner. Research done by the Kennel Club have the rate of obesity in dogs at around 30%-60%, which is both sad and shocking. Just like in humans, being overweight can have great impacts on their overall health, from diabetes, heart problems and joint issues, plus that can lead to financial implications for us owners too.
Just like a tracker app for humans Pedigree Tracks App will help you keep track of what your pooch is eating and how much exercise they are getting. It’s super simple to set up your dogs profile, just input their name, age, breed, sex and weight, plus how active they currently are and it will calculate an optimal amount of food they should be having on a daily basis, and weekly dog treat allowance.
The only downside for me at the moment is that it only has Pedigree products (obviously its a Pedigree app so that is to be expected) and doesn’t include fresh food, like meats and vegetables which we often feed Opie. You can change the products between cans, pouches, wet and dry food depending on what you (and your dog) prefer, and also add in their favourite snacks and dental treats so you can get a good overall idea of how many calories they are having in relation to how much is optimal for their age and breed. I found this quite interesting as Opie is a very energetic Working Cocker Spaniel breed but my parents dog Pasha is an English Cocker Spaniel, who is slightly overweight, but Opie eats double the quantity of food Pasha does!
The activity tracker is a great way to gauge whether your dog is getting enough exercise for their breed and age. Opie as I said is a very energetic dog and spends much of his time romping around our garden, chasing balls (or birds!) or just exploring all the fun smells, plus he usually gets 1 good walk a day. The app allows you to pick between 4 types of exercise: Indoor Play, Garden Play, On-Lead Walkies or Off the Lead Walkies and you simply start the timer when you start the activity and stop it when you’re done, then it can calculate the % of your daily activity goal this exercise covers. You can also manually add in activity if you don’t have your phone with you at the time. It stores your previous days too so you can look back and se how well you’ve done in the past. It becomes a bit of a personal challenge to reach your optimal goals each day, just like it does with your Fitbit!
You’ll also find loads of helpful videos in the training academy to help show you how to teach your dog things like leaving objects, recall, high five, playing hide and seek and ways to stop them jumping up and pulling on their lead. Its an all round helpful app for any dog owner.
The only major glitch I’ve found so far is the ability to upload photos, although it asks you to upload an image when you start the profile it continued to crash and failed to upload when I attempted to add anything from my gallery and would only save if using shots taken straight on the camera, but this is a minor issue I am sure their future update will fix.
If you love this post, don’t forget to PIN IT!
This post is a collaboration with Pedigree, but all thoughts are my own. For additional dental care information you can read the following Pedigree Reviews article for tips and advice