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Ankle weights seem to have tunneled through a wormhole from the 1980s to the present moment, appearing in countless TikToks and Instagram posts. Do they really help tone your legs? Are they worth buying at all? The promises are overrated, but in some cases ankle weights do actually work. Here’s what you need to know.

Where ankle weights work best

Ankle weights’ best use is to add a little bit of resistance to exercises where you are moving your legs against gravity. For example, side-lying leg raises become substantially more work for your muscles with even a pound or two of weight on the ankle that you’re raising in the air. Donkey kicks and hollow body holds would fall into this category as well. Weights like these, with 2.5 pounds per ankle, may be a good option if you’re new to strength training or new to these particular exercises.

The ankle weights aren’t necessarily making your ankles or legs work harder, in these examples; they just add resistance to what is still an exercise for your hips, butt, or abs. And the main source of weight is actually your leg itself. If leg raises are challenging, leg raises plus an ankle weight will be more challenging.

These uses of ankle weights make sense, because they’re a way to add resistance over time. To continue progressing, you’ll need to use heavier weights when your current ones become too easy. Eventually, you may get to a point where an ankle weight exercise is no longer challenging and you’ll need to work those same muscles in a different way.

Ankle weights work best for exercises where you’re using muscles toward the center of your body (like abs or hips) to move your legs. In these exercises, your legs provide most of the weight; the ankle weight is just adding to the difficulty. Ankle weights being light, you need to put them at the end of a long lever. In a leg raise, your legs are basically a very long third-class lever. Or to put it another way: the farther away a small weight is from your body, the heavier it feels.

When ankle weights won’t help

If you’re running, jumping, or walking, ankle weights can make the motion a little bit harder, but they’re probably not a good addition. Think about why you’re doing these exercises in the first place. If your goal with running or walking is to burn calories, you can do that more efficiently by running faster or farther, no ankle weights necessary.

Some trainers even warn that wearing ankle weights while running or walking may set you up for muscle imbalances or for injury; though it’s not clear if that’s really the case or not. I couldn’t find any solid evidence about injury either way, but historian Conor Heffernan pointed me to a 1988 paper that concluded ankle weights don’t provide any significant extra calorie burn, and aren’t worth the potential risk. That may be the source of the warning, which I recall hearing way back in the olden days of the 1990s.

How much a small weight can actually help you

Any time you’re looking at a small weight—whether it’s a pair of ankle weights, or a tiny dumbbell, or anything else—think of it in terms of progressive overload.

Progressive overload is one of the basic principles of strength training. To keep getting results, you have to use heavier and heavier weights over time. That’s how somebody who starts deadlifting with just the bar can end up strong enough to lift hundreds of pounds. Small weights can help you get started on that journey, but they won’t sustain it.

Ankle weights are often just one or two pounds each, although I have a set like this one that can be loaded with about ten pounds if you put all the little sandbag inserts into just one cuff of the pair. It was handy when I was rehabbing an injury; my physical therapist recommended side-lying leg raises. At first I was doing them without added weight, but I ended up needing most of the weights in the set by the time my rehab was through.

Fitness products often exist only because they’re easy to sell

Looking through ads and Instagram posts for this article, it became clear why ankle weights are popular all of a sudden. You can advertise them by putting them on a model with great legs in a snazzy pair of leggings, and having her work out by a beach or in front of a vibrantly colored wall. They just look cool, especially some of the newer styles that look like blocky bangles.

Also, being fairly lightweight, they’re cheaper to manufacture and ship than, say, a kettlebell. So while they may have a place in your workout routine, it would be a mistake to think you’re buying a versatile or long-lived piece of equipment by treating yourself to a pair of ankle weights.

Abstract of a paper featured on NBER: How has aggregate income and welfare in the United States been affected by globalization and rapid productivity growth in emerging economies? We use the class of constant elasticity trade models to provide quantitative evidence on these questions. We find that reductions in worldwide trade frictions over the period from 1960-2020 reduced the share of the United States in global GDP but raised its aggregate welfare. Similarly, productivity growth in Japan and China led to a decline in the relative income of the United States, but brought aggregate welfare gains from the resulting expansion in global production possibilities. Trade integration and foreign productivity growth have relatively modest effects on domestic income and welfare compared to domestic productivity growth.

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Game developer Vince Zampella, known for his work on many popular first-person shooter franchises, has died. According to Los Angeles news channel NBC4, Zampella was killed in a single-vehicle car crash on Sunday along with one other unnamed person. He was 55.

Zampella has helmed several well-known first-person shooter titles. He was a founder of Infinity Ward, where he was a creator of the Call of Duty series. Zampella remained at the company for the launch of the hugely popular franchise’s first few installments. In 2010, he co-founded Respawn Entertainment, the studio behind Titanfall, Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends. Respawn was acquired by EA, and most recently, Zampella was leading DICE’s studio in Los Angeles and headed up the Battlefield franchise, another FPS series that just saw the launch of Battlefield 6 earlier this year.

We have reached out to EA for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/call-of-duty-co-creator-vince-zampella-killed-in-a-car-crash-204046354.html?src=rss

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2025 was a fun year to review fitness devices. We saw three companies introduce devices that could have been Whoop killers, and one definitely came closer to the mark than others. One running watch gobsmacked me with its accuracy, one device was so inaccurate it sent me down an investigative rabbit hole to figure out why, and two devices delighted me with how well they solved a real problem no other device even tried to tackle. Read on for the winners of my very subjective award categories.

Most accurate: Garmin Forerunner 570

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Garmin’s Forerunner 570 and 970 were new devices this year. I felt ambivalent, on average, about the upgrades they made from previous devices like the 265. But I want to call out the heart rate sensor on the 570 for being so accurate it confused me. 

See, Garmin’s previous watches, like the Forerunner 265, had a perfectly good heart rate sensor. I’d put them in the same tier as most Coros watches, a smidge higher than the Apple Watch, and generally as good as, or better than, most other high-end devices. 

But Garmin put its very best heart rate sensor in the Forerunner 570. This same sensor, the Elevate version 5,  is also in Garmin’s Forerunner 970, Venu 3 and 4, and Fenix 8. I was not prepared for how much better it would be. I test all my devices against an electrical heart rate chest strap, the gold standard for this sort of thing, and a good wrist-based sensor will only show a few small deviations between its heart rate graph and the one I get from the chest strap. But the 570 sometimes showed exactly the same data. The graph below shows what I expect from a good sensor (top) and what I got from the 570 (bottom). Yes, there are two lines in the bottom graph. 

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

At first I thought I had screwed up, and gotten the chest and wrist data mixed up somehow, maybe uploading the same file twice—that’s how close they were. But with further testing, and also zooming in to see the occasional tiny difference between the two lines, I confirmed that the 570’s sensor really was that accurate. Damn, Garmin. I’m impressed.

Coolest concept (that actually works): Core 2 Thermal Sensor

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The summer heat is a problem for every runner in a climate with warm summers. Not only are those hot runs unpleasant, the heat literally slows you down, and puts you at risk of heat illness. If you can manage to adapt your body to the heat, you can withstand it better and make your summer training a lot more bearable and productive. You don’t need a specific gadget to do heat training, but there’s a lot of guesswork in the process, and it’s hard to know whether you’re doing enough heat training (or too much). 

The Core 2 sensor promised to handle this for me, and it worked well. You can read about my experience here. You clip the device to your heart rate chest strap, and it measures your body temperature in two different ways: a temperature sensor detects your skin temperature, and a heat flux sensor paired with a heart rate algorithm delivers an estimate of your core (internal) body temperature. From that data, the device can tell you when you’re hot enough that your workout counts as useful heat training, and it can warn you when you’re getting too hot and need to take a break. 

The biggest downside was that I only got my training data if I wore a heart rate chest strap for every hot weather workout, which I couldn’t always be bothered to do. But once I had gotten through the spring and early summer, and hit 100% heat adaptation, I found I didn’t really need the device. 

I found the device incredibly useful, especially since it could broadcast my temperature data to my Garmin watch during runs. I could also log sauna sessions in the device’s app (without taking the device into the sauna) and see how heat-adapted I was becoming. The data I got from the app seemed accurate, and as a result I had probably my most productive and enjoyable summer of running ever. 

Runner-up: DFC

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The Data Fitness Connector is a little box that you connect to the cables on the back of your Peloton Bike (original Bike only, not the Bike+) It felt a little sketchy to order this device from a crowdfunding site with few reviews available, and unfortunately it can only give power data, not speed or distance. But it works! You can read my review here.

I took a chance on the DFC because I had canceled my Peloton subscription, but still wanted to use the Bike and sync my workouts to my fitness watch. The DFC did exactly what it promised: beamed power data over Bluetooth so that my watch or phone could pick up the information and log it in a workout. My Garmin was able to give me an FTP estimate and recommend power-based workouts, and there was no ongoing cost. (The $125 price costs less than three months of the Peloton All-Access subscription.) I can highly recommend the DFC for anyone with an OG Bike who wants to opt out of the Peloton subscription world. 

Best upgrade and best overall: Coros Pace 4

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Coros’s running watches tend to lag a little behind Garmin’s, in terms of features, but they more than make up for it on price. I’ve consistently found the Coros Pace line (Pace 3, Pace Pro, and Pace 4) to be reliable, accurate, and conveniently usable. The Pace 3, in particular, has long been one of my favorite budget watches, even though it has a few small downsides. 

But late this year, Coros introduced the Pace 4. Between the new features in that watch, and an extra thing or two that dropped in the December software update, it’s hands down the best fitness watch for the money and is my overall pick for the best fitness watch of 2025. 

You can read my review here to learn more about why I feel this way. In terms of upgraded features, the Pace 4 improved on the Pace 3 by adding an AMOLED screen, better battery life, and a new button and microphone. Those last two items unlock two features that seriously upgraded my runs and training sessions: voice pins, which let me quickly make notes about a location while you’re hiking or trail running, and voice training logs, which mean I’m prompted to record a 60-second voice note right when I finish a workout. 

These notes are transcribed and attached to the workout in the Coros app, giving me information that I would pretty much never get around to adding after the fact. And then the December software update added a major feature that has kept Coros lagging behind Garmin and other watches: the ability to control media that is playing from your phone. The interface for that isn’t as smooth as I would like, but it’s there, and that’s huge.

Runner-up: charging features on the Pixel Watch 4

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The next best upgrade of 2025 belongs to the Pixel Watch 4. You can read my review here, where I found the upgrades to be a mixed bag. (Dual band GPS? Great! Brighter screen? Eh, not really.) But the headline improvement here, to me, was the ultra-fast charging. 

I only needed half an hour for nearly a full charge—specifically, I charged the watch from 3% to 97% in 31 minutes. No other smartwatch out there charges this fast. The Pixel Watch 4 also ships with a new magnetic dock-style charger that is far more convenient than the back-of-watch puck that previous versions used.

Best Whoop alternative: Amazfit Helio Strap

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

This summer, a somewhat unexpected competition popped up: three different device makers (Garmin, Polar, and Amazfit) were rumored to be working on screenless fitness trackers that could compete with Whoop. All three companies released their promised or rumored devices over the following months, and I tested them all. 

Garmin’s device turned out to be a $170 sleep tracker; fine, I guess, but not what so many of us were hoping for. Polar’s $200 device looks and acts more like a Whoop, in terms of hardware, anyway. It’s a welcome addition to the market, since Whoop had this product category all to itself for too long, but I have to admit I couldn’t get too excited about it. 

The winner, surprisingly, turned out to be the Amazfit Helio Strap. At just $99, it does everything the Polar device does, but (in my experience) more reliably, and it costs half as much. It goes without saying that it leaves Garmin’s sleep band in the dust. You can read my review of the Amazfit Helio Strap here. 

None of the devices are even attempting to compete with Whoop’s subscription app on software features, which is to be expected—Whoop is really a software company that gives you a cool gadget to go with the app, while the other companies in this space are hardware companies that figure their app doesn’t matter very much as long as you’re happy with the physical device. I think that’s a fair take on the market: These new products are for people who like the idea of a screenless tracker but don’t want to pay for a Whoop-caliber app. I expect Amazfit will have a lot of happy customers.

Biggest disappointment: Powerbeats Pro 2

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The idea of putting a heart rate sensor in your ears is intriguing, and I really wish it had worked out for the Powerbeats Pro 2. But the company that placed their bets on this technology this year—Beats—just didn’t execute it well enough. 

As I discovered through extensive testing (here, and then more in my review here), the heart rate sensor doesn’t make good contact with your skin unless your ears are a particular shape and size. Changing out the silicone ear tips doesn’t change the fit of the heart rate sensor (or at least, not enough to fix the issue), so some people simply end up with unusable or unreliable heart rate data. 

From my limited data, it appears that people with larger ears get reasonably good data, while smaller people may have more issues. I suspect the flaws affect women more than men, but Beats hasn’t shared any data with me that would confirm or deny that hypothesis.

A September software update improved the heart rate algorithm slightly, and included a feature that warns users if their fit is poor enough to affect heart rate readings. That’s a good start, since otherwise you wouldn’t even know if you’re getting inaccurate readings. But if you’re one of the people for whom tweaking the fit doesn’t give you usable data, you’re out $250 for a device that doesn’t actually work for you. On the bright side, they are good gym headphones even with the heart rate feature turned off.

Australian restaurants facing a mounting cost-of-doing-business crisis are turning to automatic service charges as a way to shore up revenue. The practice is legal under Australian consumer law as long as customers are notified beforehand and can opt out, but it risks alienating diners in a country where tipping has traditionally been optional.

Wes Lambert, chief executive of the Australian Cafe and Restaurant Association, said only a handful of businesses in central business districts currently add automatic tips to bills, but the practice may spread as cost pressures continue. Automatic tipping is more common at venues frequented by international tourists, who view the practice as normal rather than exceptional. With international tourism now near pre-COVID levels, Lambert expects more restaurants to include tips on bills by default.

A Sydney wine bar recently abandoned its 10 per cent automatic tip after a diner’s social media post triggered public backlash. University of New South Wales professor Rob Nichols said Australia’s resistance to tipping stems from the expectation that hospitality workers earn at least minimum wage, unlike in the United States where tips constitute most of a server’s income. Australians and tourists tip an estimated $3.5 billion annually, and tipping transactions grew 13% year over year in fiscal 2024-25.

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If you watched Avatar: Fire and Ash in James Cameron’s preferred high frame rate 3D format and noticed certain sequences appearing unusually smooth while others had the traditional cinematic look, that visual inconsistency is entirely intentional. The third Avatar film continues Cameron’s frame rate experimentation from The Way of Water, selectively deploying 48 frames per second for underwater and flying sequences while keeping dialogue scenes at the standard 24 FPS.

The human eye perceives somewhere between 30 and 60 FPS, meaning viewers can detect the shift between frame rates. Cameron argues the tradeoff is worth it: discomfort from 3D viewing isn’t eye strain but “brain strain,” caused when parallax-sensitive neurons struggle to process jumping vertical edges. Higher frame rates smooth this out. When critics questioned the approach, Cameron was characteristically blunt. “I think $2.3 billion says you might be wrong on that,” he told DiscussingFilm, referencing The Way of Water’s box office.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Roku Sticks have useful features that can make your dumb TV smarter (or replace the interface on your smart TV), and they are seeing great discounts right now. In particular, the Roku Streaming Stick 4K with HDR and Dolby Vision is $24.99, the lowest price it has ever been after a 50% discount, according to price tracking tools. It’s also my personal favorite option, and the one I would recommend to most people.

Roku Streaming Stick HD 2025

$15.99
at Amazon

$29.99
Save $14.00

$15.99
at Amazon

$29.99
Save $14.00

Roku Streaming Stick Plus 2025

$19.00
at Amazon

$39.99
Save $20.99

$19.00
at Amazon

$39.99
Save $20.99

Roku Streaming Stick 4K

$24.99
at Amazon

$49.99
Save $25.00

$24.99
at Amazon

$49.99
Save $25.00

Roku Ultra – Ultimate Streaming Player

$75.00
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $24.99

$75.00
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $24.99

There’s a lot to consider when choosing a streaming device for your TV. I’ve tried many, and Roku is one of the best. It’s user-friendly, responsive, organized, simple to navigate, and affordable. Out of all the Roku options, the Roku Streaming Stick 4K with HDR and Dolby Vision is the best bang for your buck—for just $5 more than the Roku Streaming Stick Plus, you’ll get support for Dolby Vision, which will deliver more dynamic HDR. It’s also much cheaper than the Roku Ultra, which offers WiFi 6, an Ethernet port, and Dolby Atmos for $50 more.

The Roku Streaming Stick 4K is compatible with Alexa smart devices, Apple AirPlay and HomeKit, Google Home, and with Roku Smart Home, meaning you can mirror your devices, use voice commands, or control them from these respective smart apps. If you have Bluetooth headphones, you can pair them with the Roku so you can watch your shows in silence, and the voice activated remote is a game-changer if you lose your clicker as often as I do.

Linux’s share of the desktop market has climbed to as much as 11% by one count, but that figure includes Chromebooks, and the traditional Linux desktop remains hamstrung by the same fragmentation that killed Unix decades ago. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in The Register, argues that the proliferation of Linux desktops — more than a dozen significant interfaces exist today, and DistroWatch lists “upwards of a hundred” — makes it nearly impossible for ordinary users to know where to start.

Linus Torvalds has long agreed with this hypothesis. “We have way too many desktops,” Vaughan-Nichols notes, summarizing Torvalds’ position. The deeper issue lies in software delivery: traditional package managers like DEB and RPM “simply don’t scale for the desktop,” forcing distro builders to constantly rebuild programs for their specific environments. Containerized solutions like Flatpaks, Snaps and AppImages should solve this by bundling dependencies into universal packages, but the Linux community remains divided over which to adopt.

Linux Mint, for instance, refuses Snap because “Canonical has too much control over the Snap store.” Hardware support further complicates this challenges, the veteran journalist writes. While Dell sells Ubuntu machines and specialist vendors like System76 and TUXEDO Computers cater to enthusiasts, “none of them make it easy” for mainstream buyers, and no major OEM strongly backs Linux. Torvalds has pointed to Chromebooks and Android as the model: Linux won on smartphones because “there’s a single, unified platform with a unified way to install programs.”

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Once you start down the path of DIY, you’ll soon realize that any time you find yourself wishing someone had created a tool to serve a specific purpose, someone probably has—no matter how narrow the use case. Case in point: The cordless blower/inflator.

This tool is exactly what it sounds like. Shaped like a power drill, it simply…blows air (though sort of like a handheld leaf blower, these tools typically come with an array of nozzles to give you a bit of precision with the flow of your forced air). You might think this sounds like a tool you’ll never actually need, because you have lungs. But I’m here to convince you that you’re wrong: A cordless blower will absolutely be one of the most useful tools you ever acquire.

Makita XSA01Z Brushless Cordless High Speed Blower/Inflator

$174.99
at Amazon

$183.81
Save $8.82

$174.99
at Amazon

$183.81
Save $8.82

One tool, many uses

Handheld blowers have a lot of uses that make every DIY job you do a little bit easier and faster:

• Cleaning. Probably the most common use case for a blower is to quickly clean a work area by blowing away dust, sawdust, clippings, shavings, and other small debris. You can use a blower to quickly clear off a workbench, blow dust out of keyboards, engines, or anywhere else. This is also really useful if you have a tight spot where you can’t fit a tool—the blower can clean it out in a jiffy. It’s also useful for a quick cleanup on outdoor furniture or even my deck—while you might want an actual leaf blower for full-scale yard cleanup, a handheld blower can do an adequate, quickie cleanup on demand.

• Shortening drying times. If you’re waiting on something to dry out before you can move on to the next stage of your project, a blower can speed up that drying time considerably.

• Cooling other tools down. There’s nothing more irritating than an overheating tool that forces you to stop and wait for it to return to a safe operating temperature. A blower can speed up that process, acting as a high-powered fan with a very precise, narrow blast of air to cool down hot components.

• Redirecting dust and debris. When working inside, you often want to use a vacuum to collect dust as you work, but outside, a small, handheld blower can be more convenient. Using it to redirect dust and debris away from you as you work can keep grit out of your eyes and your workspace clean as you go.

• Inflating stuff. These blowers come with attachments that not only allow you to be as narrow or wide with your airstream as needed, but also fit into standard nozzles. Need to inflate an air mattress, pool ball, or anything else? The blower will make short work of it.

Once I started using a blower while I worked, I found myself reaching for it constantly just to keep my workspace clear of dust, and then I started grabbing it literally any time a blast of air seemed helpful. You might not think you need a blower in your tool chest, but you probably do.

Choosing a blower

Most cordless blowers are similar in terms of shape and function. The two from major brands you’ll come across most are Milwaukee’s M18 18V Brushless Cordless Precision Blower and Makita’s 18V LXT Brushless Cordless High Speed Blower/Inflator. They’re both solid tools, but I prefer the Makita because, in my experience, its battery life is much better (the Milwaukee has a bit more power, but I’ve never had a scenario where I needed more power). The Makita tends to last 45 minutes to an hour on a single charge, but when I borrowed a Milwaukee it died about a half hour into the job. Obviously, this will depend on a lot of variables, including what you’re using it for, but the Makita wins for me because every time I grabbed it there was enough charge left to finish the job.