Regular exercise works with nutrition to help with mental well-being, longevity, and the prevention and control of chronic diseases. You’ve probably also heard that “sitting is the new smoking”, weight training is the key to longevity, and walking pads with standing desks are a must. As you navigate your next step in health and fitness you may have turned to, or considered a fitness path to turn yourself around.
Maybe you started tracking your step count to try to reach 10,000 a day, you started entering all your activity into a calorie counting app, you get it. indeed to HRV, or just want that reminder to pop up during the work day. Whether you’re interested in the data or you already use it for motivation, it’s important from a physical and mental health perspective to understand the pros and cons of fitness trackers. Not only will this help you use them in a practical way that works perfectly with other fitness tools, but it may also help you decide if a tracker is right for you at all. The end goal is to find the tools to improve your life after all, not to give you something else to stress about. So, read on to see if fitness trackers are right for you.
How Exercise Benefits Mental Health
Before we talk about good and bad, we must acknowledge the great role played not only in physical health, but also in mental health. Some refer to the effects of global unemployment as an epidemic while the surgeon general says parents are too stressed to work, with 48% reporting most days their stress is overwhelming.
Exercise provides everything from a quick endorphin release to a long-term increase in self-confidence. While they benefit those struggling with mental illness, these benefits extend to anyone under normal stress, including those parents mentioned above.
Endorphins are often referred to as “feel-good” compounds. When you are active, there is a natural release of chemicals called “endogenous opioids” and “endocannabinoids”, which are credited with improving mood and mood. Although quick responses help reduce stress, evidence shows that exercise is associated with lower levels of stress and anxiety and increased quality of life.
In addition to the short-term endorphin release, studies from various groups show long-term benefits of exercise including improved self-esteem and confidence with one study of adults showing a correlation between the level of physical activity and positive self-esteem and body image (regardless of a person’s weight!).
Time as a Barrier to Exercise
I know, I know, how does anyone, especially those stressed out parents, find time to move more? A lot may come down to habits. A 2019 study showed that regardless of race, gender, or economic status, Americans have hours of free time each day, but they choose to spend that time using devices like their phone, tablet, or TV. I’m the first to admit that I love watching a few episodes of reality TV each week to take my mind off my depression. I also know when we take a family trip versus a night in front of the TV, we all feel better and sleep better.
Don’t let these statistics feel like a personal attack. Use them as a way to evaluate your current habits and see where you can fit in on the move. Whether you use a tracker or not, you may find that you can trade social media scrolling for an evening walk, a run between your kid’s sports practices, or 15 minutes of You Tube yoga on your lunch break.
Common Benefits of Fitness Trackers
As we explore the pros and cons of fitness trackers, let’s start with the positives! We have come a long way from the original pedometers and FitBits and now in addition to counting steps, many trackers come standard with the ability to measure the distance traveled, heart rate, altitude, measure calorie expenditure, and whether you are sitting or standing. This information used to only come with expensive GPS/HR monitoring devices like Garmin and Polar. Now even your Apple Watch provides information on blood oxygen levels, sleep quality, fall detection, and even VO2 max while allowing you to keep your phone away and only receive important alerts and calls while you need to be productive to eliminate distractions.
Regular movement data and heart rate information taken when in “exercise” mode can be very beneficial from a motivation and accuracy perspective. I find my Apple Watch compares well to my Polar running watch when it comes to distance and heart rate, and I have customers who have their Whoop and Garmin data like distance and HR, too.
For those with high levels of activity in terms of scheduled exercise, such as daily gym sessions, running or riding, trackers can be helpful to increase movement throughout the day, even if it means walking for five minutes in the afternoon after sitting. 6 hours. Although 10,000 steps per day is not necessarily a scientifically based goal, and 7,000 steps per day may be a more accurate goal for health benefits, anyone can use their own tracker to determine personal goals that work for their stage of life, or even for the day. of the church.
On a personal anecdote, on days of the week that I weight train in the morning compared to running, biking or swimming, my step count can be much lower. This exercise replaces going to school with my son, too, and is often followed by computer work. While I’m not aiming for 10k, or 7k steps these days, my apple watch data has allowed me to make an effort to get up more during the day, even if it’s just a walk around my yard or a few flights. of stairs in the house. It totally improves my mood again my productivity.
While I personally don’t like wearing trackers at night while sleeping, some people get a lot of benefit from their sleep data, too. Seeing information can encourage them to put down their phone earlier, or set a goal for when they should go to bed if those are habits they need to work on. For some, it doesn’t even require wearing a tracker and it can just mean setting your iPhone to remind you when it’s time to sleep!
Athletic Benefits and Top Risks for Fitness Followers
For those under high stress or chronic illness, real-time data and alerts on abnormal heart rate, pulse, and blood oxygen levels can be key to health management. This can also be beneficial for athletes in intensive training in hot and humid environments, for example. My current marathon client has been dealing with a lot of life stress as she is in a tough training period, and while she has dropped a mile while focusing on nutrition, her Garmin lets her know at night when her heart rate is at its highest. unsafe range as he sleeps. This data helps inform his health care team and helps him feel more confident in detecting when a cardiac event occurs.
Devices like the Whoop ring and Oura provide information on “push” and “readiness” to help you decide if you’re pushing yourself too hard in your current training. This data – and your performance – may be affected by health pressures, lack of sleep, nutrition and so on, so it is important to check why your difficulty and your readiness may be different and remember that these are not only a tool, but one piece of your health or sports puzzle.
Fitness Tracker Drawback: Accuracy
If you have ever worn a fitness tracker, you should know that it is an imperfect tool and will never be 100% accurate. That’s in terms of estimated calorie expenditure (it doesn’t know your body weight, genetics, or microbiome), minutes you’ve spent exercising, how long you’ve been standing, and more.
Some people know that these numbers are not accurate and still allow it to annoy or frustrate them. If that’s you, and you feel like your walk or weight training “didn’t count” because you forgot to hit the start button on your Apple Watch, it might be time to re-evaluate your relationship with data. If, like me, you can go through 45 minutes of weight training, PR on your deadlifts, and laugh that the clock has entered 4 minutes of exercise and 24 calories burned, then feel free to use the data if it is accurate.
You can also relate to being in the kitchen cooking and cleaning for 2 hours, only for it to warn you “it’s time to stop”. If you were standing, moving, and doing your thing, great! Your body reaps the benefits even if your clock doesn’t log them. Stressing about accuracy is certainly not good for your health.
While distance traveled is usually pretty accurate (as long as your battery isn’t dead!), steps may be another matter for people of different builds. My colleagues and I have noticed that some devices track steps incorrectly for tall customers compared to short ones.
Fitness Tracker Drawback: Mental Health
While we may be traveling for mental health, being obsessed with these trackers can have the opposite effect on some people. Anyone with a history of anxiety, eating disorders, dieting, or who tends to use exercise as their only way to cope with stress may want to reconsider their use of a tracker. These people may be working hard, or working on listening better to their body’s signals compared to numbers.
Having a device attached to your body, warning you to move more can take away from listening to your body’s signals when you need to rest, slow down, or have a day where the amount of movement you desire is not possible. Similarly, seeing numbers related to calorie expenditure, even if you know they are inaccurate, can be very triggering for anyone who has struggled with an unhealthy relationship with food, exercise, or their body, making them second-guess food or exercise. they had come down that day.
If comparing yourself to others is something you work on, I encourage you to use a fitness tracker without connecting to friends. Your progress toward health goals should be based on internal motivation, rather than doing a workout just so your friend, sister, or co-worker gets a notification that you’re done.
Is A Fitness Tracker Right For You?
If you want more motivation and accountability, and can let the mistakes of fitness trackers off your shoulders, go ahead or grab a device that can work for you. If you just want the basics, this could be a Fit Bit, Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch or similar.
Want to take it a step further and check your heart rate, blood pressure, and fitness? Whoop or Oura can be yours. Just know when to take a step back if there is more stress or anxiety from your work or sleep data.
If you’re struggling with your relationship with exercise and your body, get frustrated when the tracker goes wrong, or feel overwhelmed by the numbers, it’s a good idea to skip the tracker. Consider writing down your daily activity and think about how the movement makes you feel in the short and long term. This mental connection may be all that some people need to move forward with changing habits.
