What Wearable Fitness Tech is Actually Worth Having?
Wearable fitness tech is exploding right now. Every time I watch a YouTube video, or I click on social media I see adverts for Whoop. Apple, Samsung and other tech companies are in on the act now. Polar, Garmin and FitBit are the OG’s of the space.
But the question is what wearable fitness tech is actually worth having?
The first question to answer is what are you using your fitness tech for? When you identify a use case, you can make better decisions on what you need.
At present, I wear a Polar Vantage V heart rate monitor. It’s a mid-range watch, tracking all of the usual suspects (activity, calorie burn, altitude, GPS, sleep etc). It does everything I need it to and a whole load more.
Personally, I only use my heart rate monitor for assessing the intensity of my workouts, and keeping a (rough) guide on my general activity levels and calorie burn. On the occasions I run or cycle, I use it to track distance, route and heart rate information.
The fact that I only use a handful of the features is the main reason I don’t go all-in and buy a crazy high level. I don’t need to know every minute detail of my body. I don’t need to know my blood oxygen saturation, the position of the satellites around the globe, the distance to the pin on my nearest golf course or the next song on my playlist.
If you want your wearable fitness tech to do something specific, pick accordingly.
Why I Like (and use) Wearable Fitness Tech
Like I just said, I’ve been a user of wearable fitness tech for years – a more than 2 decades in fact. I only use a handful of features, but it still provides enough for me to gauge my effort and intensity levels by.
I’m a fan of the accountability of the technology. There’s no hiding place from my effort (or lack thereof) during my workouts. I can tell the quality of my workouts not just by my internal feedback, but from what the data tells me as well.
I can gauge rest periods not just by time, but also by recovery status. If I’m looking to maintain a particular intensity of a workout, I can keep my rest periods within a certain heart rate zone.
The app support with the Polar heart rate monitor keeps a good training diary for me, so I know how my training year has looked. As a rule I am for 200-250 workouts per year, so this keeps me accountable to my self-imposed targets.
It gives me an idea of my NEAT scores daily, so informs me of my general activity over the short, medium and long term.
Finally, I can track improvements in my fitness over the long term. For many people, that’s really important – especially if they’re training for an event, or have a keen eye on their physical capabilities. I use it to prevent regression, rather than actively achieve something special.
My Criticism of Wearable Fitness Tech
Accuracy
Wearable fitness tech isn’t without its issues though. There are a few big problems I have with some of the claims made by the equipment…
Many of the devices on the market simply aren’t accurate. They’re not even close, in all honesty. There are ways you can improve them (I use the Polar H10 chest strap) because independent scientific testing showed it was accurate. Things like step counts aren’t amazing, and the sleep scores are basically make believe.
How does a heart rate monitor measure sleep?
Badly, is the first answer. The second answer is through a process called actigraphy. The watch contains an accelerometer which measures movement. The theory is when you’re asleep, you move less. Reduced movement is interpreted as more sleep.
The problem arises for those who are ‘active’ sleepers – those who toss and turn during their sleep. If you’re moving more, the watch will think you’re sleeping less. In my case, I’ve had fantastic sleeps only for my watch to tell me I’ve barely slept!
Subscriptions
Unless you’re a professional athlete, and your income is dependent on your physical performance being at an absolute peak, I don’t understand why anyone would need to subscribe to a health tracker such as Whoop.
I’m sure the whoop technology is great, but it feels like an unnecessary use of money. You’re paying every month for something that is tracking (with questionable accuracy) something that a watch will do, and without the subscription costs as well.
Over-reliance on ‘Data’
I’ve heard of several people who have skipped training because their watch tells them they aren’t recovered enough. That’s a concern to me, especially when you consider the data from the watch might not be accurate in the first place.
Any wearable fitness tech will use sleep as a measure of recovery. If the sleep data is inaccurate, it’ll automatically skew your recovery status, making it potentially useless.
Listen, your body has a great way of telling you how recovered you are – it’s called tiredness. If you’re feeling tired, you are tired. You don’t need a watch to tell you that. You don’t have a ‘body battery’ – you’re an insanely complex being made up of billions of biochemical reactions.
To simplify that into a ‘body battery’ is silly.
Use the information on your recovery status as a guide, not a gospel. Don’t excuse your laziness because your watch told you to rest. Likewise, if you’re feeling tired and your watch backs this up, maybe don’t go ahead with a crazy-intense workout.
Wearable Fitness Tech – Final Thoughts
On balance, I think wearable fitness tech is a great thing. It gives you a lot of information about your physical state, your capabilities and your workout intensity.
I don’t think there’s any need for a subscription such as you’d get with Whoop, unless your livelihood relied on you being in peak physical state. There’s nothing Whoop measures that you can’t measure in other ways, with cheaper, non-subscription technology.
Use the tech to inform your workouts, but don’t rely on the data as your most important measure of how you’re feeling. Go with your intuition first, then supplement it with data from your fitness tech.
If you want to follow more training, gym life and general life updates from me, follow me on Instagram here… HoylesFitness.