Who has a fitness tracker? Or easier question – who hasn’t? Given no one was wearing them 10 years ago and so many of us do now, the marketing around them has clearly been successful.
But are they doing what they're designed to do (making and keeping us active!) or have they just become another stick to beat ourselves with if we don’t reach our steps goal or our target calories burned every day?
(Spoiler alert – this is not a run down of the best trackers out there, nor is it aimed at runners already successfully making use of their tracker and all its data!)
Instead this is an attempt to offer a little context and perspective if your tracker is regularly causing you guilt, or you’ve reached the point where any walk, run, or workout feels completely pointless unless you’re wearing it.
First the big news - research currently shows that for most people, fitness trackers alone do not actually motivate them to change behaviour or become more active. Say whaat??
It’s also true that where they are successful in increasing activity it’s generally a short term boost; there’s little evidence of their long-term sustainable impact.
This may or may not be news, though it does feel like a pretty big stumbling block right?
But before we go deeper into some of these drawbacks, let's just quickly review the well touted benefits and why many of us bought them in the first place.
For those who are already active, trackers can be incredibly helpful, particularly as part of a wider personalised approach with goal setting.
Runners of course find them brilliant for monitoring performance and gains. The feedback is motivational, indicates areas to work on, and makes a difference to prep and training. Especially as many newer models of tracker can now account for so much data - strike rate, vertical oscillation, and other metrics specific to running (fab if you're into it, though a potential minefield if you're not).
Another plus - trackers can enable community. For individual activities like running or cycling, linking and sharing the data and routes on Strava and the like involves others in your journey and helps with all important motivation and accountability (and there are a lot of Strava fans out there these days right??)
Then alongside the more widely understood benefits of a tracker, some now provide a whole new further world of incentives for kids and children alike.
For my 6-year-old son, his kid's tracker (that he had to have for Christmas last year as ‘all’ his friends had one) can be set to incentivise health rewards beyond activity. He finds it most exciting that his watch will time a 2-minute tooth brushing session and then as a reward, will transform this effort into a piece of virtual gold. Like some crazy, modern day, dentally motivated Rumpelstiltskin.
For me, simply meeting the requisite daily steps count or doing a workout without any target other than heart rate zone (as set by the watch itself) brings other rewards. This is because my recorded activity is linked to my life insurance premium. This arrangement – born of this corporate, interconnected and slightly bizarre world - actually now means the less I move now, the more I will have to pay for my premium next year. By keeping active I can also earn free coffees and cinema tickets.
The downsides potentially increase though when there is more at stake, as I can now kick myself anytime I forget to wear it or I let the battery run out. Also, as someone who does a lot of lifting at the moment and less running or cycling, its a problem that my watch and reward programme isn't so clever at monitoring this type of activity. So the account given to my life insurance provider isn't exactly reflective - not least as I also have to remove it for netball matches alongside any other jewellery - and that's 40 minutes of high intensity exercise going untracked right there.
So it does feel like for people without a programme, and/or with goals more related to strength and performance areas that aren't so easily measured, trackers can have limited use.
And the list of drawbacks does unfortunately go on.
As with much technology, trackers can increase our screen time and take us out of the real world. Too often we can take our head out of the activity we’re doing and find we are not really present or enjoying it. Some people will find themselves stopping midway through a set of star jumps just to check their calories burnt or heart rate.
We can also fail to notice the environment or scenery around us when running, cycling or walking – something that is beneficial in itself (see previous blog on nature) as we’re so keen to look at the distance, average pace or split times.
Trackers can also make us less inclined to listen to our bodies. For example, they can reinforce a solely transactional idea of exercise, and it is only about calories burned and calories earned. Rather than thinking as to whether we are actually hungry, people report seeing they’ve burned more calories and therefore eating more regardless.
Also, these trackers do not understand our lives and are pretty unforgiving when we're having a bad day. They don’t recognise when we are poorly, injured or even simply walking whilst pushing a buggy instead of driving (and therefore failing to clock your well deserved steps!).
The targets are the same every day regardless, with no distinction between weekdays and weekends, training days and rest days. Run a marathon one day and your tracker will still ask you to do 10,000 steps the next.
This all means many of us using them can be left with a sense of guilt or failure when we don’t meet our steps or ‘close our rings’, and this certainly doesn’t serve us in getting active - the reason most will have got themselves a tracker in the first place.
That they are or at least can be linked social media accounts can also have its pitfalls. How does it feel when at 8pm a friend shares they have done 20,000 steps or run 10km, and you are knackered from work but only sat somewhere around 2,788 steps for the day? Are you always genuinely happy for them, totally inspired, and reaching for your trainers and heading out for that walk yourself? Or can it ocassionally have you feeling bad and being really hard on yourself because you haven’t done the same?
We also need to remember that there is a range of accuracy with these trackers. The models get better all the time as the tech develops, but not every one is made equal.
Research before purchasing and thinking hard about how you plan to use it, is necessary to ensure you don’t spend over the odds for functions you will never need.
Many of us, perhaps unfortunately, are very interested in calories burnt. And this can be one of the least accurate metrics across the board. If watching calorie burn is your thing, just try to remember this and that the number your tracker may seem to favour some activities over others. For example, after HIIT and some resistance training (as opposed to steady state cardio like running or cycling) you will burn calories not only during your workout but for up to 24 hours afterwards.
This is because you will experience EPOC - Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption, which is an oxygen debt that must be paid, and requires significant energy from your body and therefore an increased metabolism in the period after your workout. Most trackers calculate calories burnt during a session only using temperature, heart rate and what it knows about your body – weight etc. They don’t account for the period afterwards. So definitely don’t opt out of something you love just because you don’t think it’s getting you that same burn! That’s no way to stay motivated.
More potentially useful knowledge – fulfilling 10,000 steps a day, though recommended by the World Health Organisation and the NHS, is an arbitrary number born from a marketing campaign ahead of the 1964 Olympics.
It’s a nice big round number and it goes without saying that in the main, more steps are generally better than fewer. However, there is little evidence that 10,000 has significant benefit on things like heart disease prevention, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases than 7500 steps a day. Also this recommended step count does not take into account intensity. If you do a 5km run but clock up only 8,000 steps for the day overall, those benefits are still likely trump walking 10,000 very slowly. Finally, it is a blunt tool - going from nothing to 10,000 with a heart condition can be risky, so a wider more bespoke discussion about your health and goals with someone who can help will always be worth it.
So bottom line? Trackers are awesome - and as a personal trainer I do make use of them with clients as the data they provide is very helpful. And perhaps we are lucky to live in an age where we can make use of them. Sometimes and for some people, they really can make us more mindful of our bodies.
But our interactions with them – perhaps more than with any other piece of tech we use so frequently – can be so emotionally loaded. So if yours becomes another stick to beat yourself with, please consider it might be time to take it off even if just for a day or two. Or try one run, a class or walk where you don’t wear it. See how it feels.
There is so much value in moving our bodies, for our minds, mood and the physical benefits too. This has always been the case, long before these little guys were ever around.
This doesn’t mean trackers can’t support our activity if we want them too, or they are not incredibly useful if you are already active and want to monitor performance more effectively.
Just with a little understanding of our trackers and our very human response to them, we can build a healthy relationship and make sure we have them work to our advantage. We just need to question their ‘wisdom’ on occasion and make sure we see both the pros and cons. 😃
N x