Fitness trackers are useful tools to help you achieve your fitness goals. However, they can also lead to information overload and unhealthy behaviors. So, how can you have a healthy relationship with your fitness tracker and the data it tracks?
Why Use a Fitness Tracker?
Fitness trackers can be a great tool regardless of athletic abilities or fitness goals. Fitness trackers take care of the heavy lifting by tracking your data automatically. While your motivation and discipline can wane, a fitness tracker can help keep you accountable. In fact, a study suggests that those who wear fitness trackers tend to average more steps per day.
Fitness trackers can track you every minute of every day. The data can be helpful to learn about yourself while you sleep, rest, and exercise. As a result, you can use your data to adjust your efforts to help guide you toward your fitness goals.
Fitness trackers can provide feedback in real time. For example, you can monitor your heart rate while you exercise to determine if you should increase or decrease your effort to hit your target heart rate. On the other hand, you can use a fitness tracker to see how much sleep you get each night, which can be valuable if you’re trying to improve the quality of your sleep.
Seeing results can provide insight to adjust behaviors sooner rather than later. Fitness trackers also let you celebrate the small wins when you hit a milestone or daily goal, which can help you stay motivated. As a result, you may reach your goals more quickly from the insight your fitness tracker provides.
Unfortunately, there is a dark side. Relying on your fitness tracker data can cause stress. It can be overwhelming and demotivating if the numbers don’t reflect your expectations.
Becoming Too Reliant On Your Data
With so many fitness trackers from companies such as Fitbit, Garmin, and Polar, it’s unsurprising that competition has added features for metrics such as HRV, SpO2, VO2 max, and more. Unfortunately, all this data from your fitness tracker can be overwhelming and confusing on what’s important to track. It’s easy to fall into the trap of recording everything. Although your data may be interesting, it may not be useful.
The key is to know why you’re tracking a particular metric. For example, tracking your steps makes sense if you want to walk 10,000 steps a day. On the other hand, if you’re tracking your runs, you don’t necessarily need to track your steps. Instead, you may track your average and max heart rate, time spent running, and distance.
The danger of ruining a good thing is to become reliant on your fitness tracker data to determine whether you’re making progress in the short term. For example, let’s assume the first thing you do when you wake up is check how well you slept. Even if you had a good night’s sleep, research suggests your performance will be on par with someone who had a poor night’s sleep just because your fitness tracker said so.
If you focus only on the data from a fitness tracker, then it can remove the fun of exercising. It could also affect your mental health. How would you feel if you exercised less than planned or missed a day altogether? You may be too reliant on your fitness tracker if that makes you feel like a failure.
The metrics from your fitness tracker can be important, but they shouldn’t be the primary focus. Instead, the data from your fitness tracker is useful for tracking your progress over time. It is not useful to base your success on the results of one day. It’s all about progress, not perfection.
How to Have A Healthy Relationship With Your Fitness Tracker
Track yourself, but don’t take the data seriously. Your fitness tracker data can be important if you’re trying to hit certain milestones, such as a target heart rate or pace. However, most data should be treated as nice-to-know and only looked at over time to judge real progress.
Just because you didn’t record it doesn’t mean it never happened. Workouts still count even if you didn’t record them. You don’t need to have the numbers to prove it. In fact, you don’t need to record your workout to exercise. If you keep a fitness journal, estimating your workout time or writing about your workout without any data points is okay.
Always trust how you feel over what your fitness tracker says. Even if your fitness tracker doesn’t tell you to take a day off, you should if you need to rest and recover. Otherwise, you increase your risk of illness, injury, or burnout. As a result, you may stop exercising altogether. Thankfully, missing one or two days won’t erase all your hard work.
The Takeaway
Fitness tracker data can be fun and valuable to help you achieve your fitness goals. Although, you shouldn’t rely on it to measure your success. Becoming too reliant on your data can negatively affect your mental health and increase your risks of illness, injury, and burnout. Listen to your body, and take a day off if you need to rest and recover. One day of data can’t show you how far you’ve come. Instead, look at your fitness tracker data over time to better judge your success.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your activities and workouts. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect certain smartwatches and trackers to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
