Most fitness trackers have features that can help encourage you to move more throughout the day. This is especially useful if you spend a lot of time sitting. So, how can you use your fitness tracker to encourage daily walks?
First of all, good for you for wanting to improve your health and well-being. Walking is such an underrated exercise. Many people see it as a slow and inefficient workout, and believe exercise must be done at a high intensity to see results. Yet, research has shown that even walking at a moderate pace has health benefits. So, regardless of what anyone says, walking is a form of exercise.
Think about this. If you could sneak in a 10-minute walk a day at a moderate pace, that’s 70 minutes a week, roughly 300 minutes (5 hours) a month, and 3,640 minutes (60.6 hours) a year. That’s a significant benefit to any sedentary person. Yet, many struggle to find the time to fit in just 10 minutes a day.
What Can Fitness Trackers Do?
A fitness tracker can be an essential tool to improve your overall fitness. It helps motivate you, provides valuable feedback, and tracks your progress. However, there is a fine line between helpful and harmful. Therefore, it’s vital to find a balance and use them as a tool to help you achieve your goals.
Fitness trackers have basic features, such as recording steps, distance, calories burned, heart rate, and active minutes, that show you your daily progress. These can be helpful to see where you are for the day.
Many fitness trackers let you set specific daily goals, such as steps or active minutes, while others allow you to set weekly goals. Setting goals can help encourage you to make progress, whether it’s through daily walks or any other physical activity.
Fitness trackers can also detect inactivity and gently remind you to get up and move, helping to reinforce good behavior by notifying you when you reach a goal or achieve a personal best. Some fitness trackers, along with their companion apps, award virtual badges or rewards for reaching different milestones, such as distance, steps, or active minutes.
Fitness trackers have come a long way, and they continue to add features to keep you engaged. Some measure advanced metrics such as HRV, SpO2, and VO2 max. However, it may be overkill for your average person who wants to compete against themselves.
While fitness trackers are helpful, they aren’t 100% accurate. However, they do a good enough job that they are useful for most people to track their progress. All of these features can help motivate you to be more active. But which ones are more beneficial than others to encourage you to partake in daily walks?
Helpful Fitness Tracker Features
Regardless of whether you’re starting or restarting your fitness journey, your fitness tracker can encourage you to take daily walks. At this stage, a fitness tracker can help reprogram some of your habits and build consistency. If you can consistently walk most days of the week, you’ll form a healthy habit that will make exercise second nature.
You don’t need to use every feature of your fitness tracker to reach your goal of walking every day. In fact, you only need a couple to get started.
Activity Tracking
Ideally, your fitness tracker can show your total steps, distance, heart rate, and active minutes for the day. These metrics show your progress and can be a powerful motivator to reach specific milestones.
Steps and distance are easy goals to measure because they’re achieved by simply moving. Heart rate is an important indicator of whether you’re working hard enough to improve your fitness. It doesn’t take much, but raising your heart rate to a moderate or high intensity will improve your cardiovascular fitness. So, watching your heart rate during those daily walks will encourage you to adjust your effort to maintain a steady pace.
Suppose you raise your heart rate high enough while walking so that your fitness tracker counts that time towards activity minutes. Not only does this mean you’re improving your fitness, but it’s also motivating to see this number go up. Ideally, aim for at least 10 minutes a day at first. Then slowly build up to 30 minutes a day.
Reminders And Notifications
Reminders and notifications can motivate you to move. They can also remind you to take a break from what you’re doing and get up and move around, helping to break the cycle of sitting for long periods. You may find that once you start moving for 5 minutes, it’s easy to extend that to 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or more. They can be the catalyst you need to get some movement into your day.
Some fitness trackers will encourage you when you’re so close to hitting a goal that it may motivate you to move to reach it. Some notifications can help build your confidence and celebrate those small wins when you accomplish a daily goal.
Without a fitness tracker, it’s easy to forget how much or little you’re moving. Reminders and notifications can make your health journey feel more real. Some advanced fitness trackers can learn your patterns and habits, sending smarter notifications over time instead of hourly reminders. Reminders and notifications can help keep you on track and build consistency, turning walking into a daily habit by encouraging you to move.
Fitness Tracker Features To Ignore
While many features appeal to people who participate in or specialize in running, cycling, and swimming, these features may be overwhelming if you want to use your fitness tracker to encourage yourself to take daily walks. So, let’s take a look at some features you can ignore until you’re consistently exercising and want to aim for bigger goals.
Reminders And Notifications
There are times when reminders and notifications are helpful, and there are times when they should be ignored. Your fitness tracker can send various types of notifications and reminders to encourage you to walk every day.
However, they aren’t helpful if you receive too many reminders and notifications. If that happens, you may choose to ignore them altogether, and they’ll lose their power to motivate you. If you want to use them, you should be selective about which ones you pay attention to, as not all of them will be useful. For example, a reminder to move is helpful if you can turn it off a few hours before going to sleep. Otherwise, you may feel guilt or pressure to fit in some steps or go for a walk when you should be winding down for bedtime.
If reminders and notifications are putting pressure on you or you find you’re relying on your fitness tracker too much, then turn them off. You’ll still be able to see how many steps, calories burned, distance, heart rate, and active minutes you’ve done for the day.
Streaks
While fitness streaks can be fun and motivating, they have a dark side. As they grow, you may feel more pressure to maintain them. You may even sacrifice a quality workout and rush through it to keep your fitness streak going.
When the streak becomes the primary focus, all bets are off. You’ll do what you can to maintain your fitness streak, such as going for a walk at 11 PM or jumping on the treadmill to walk your miles before the clock strikes midnight and a new day starts.
Streaks are just a number, and no one can maintain one forever, as illness, injury, or life obligations will get in the way. Focus on building consistency over maintaining your streak for the sake of your physical and mental well-being.
All The Non-Important Numbers
With so many fitness trackers from companies like 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 about what’s important to track. It’s easy to fall into a trap of recording everything. Although your data may be interesting, it may not be useful.
Instead, look at the numbers that relate to your goal. If you’re looking to walk more, you can track steps and distance. If you’re goal is to be more active, then track active minutes. Focusing on fewer numbers can help you stay focused. Collecting other numbers can be interesting, but they should be for fun. As your goals change, you can start including more numbers that help you achieve them. In the meantime, it’s best to keep it simple.
Tracking Your Progress
While you’re using your fitness tracker to reach your daily goals, there’s a bigger picture at play. While it may be satisfying to achieve your goals daily, the ultimate goal is to build a habit of exercising consistently. Tracking yourself over time lets you get a bigger picture of your progress. You can see if you’re progressively exercising for longer, taking more steps, or covering greater distances. You can’t tell that from any one day.
Therefore, take advantage of a fitness app that can collect your data over time and show you a chart of your progress. Tracking helps you identify patterns, instead of guessing why you’re struggling. It can also break that all-or-nothing mindset.
Tracking your progress shows that consistency matters more than perfection. In fact, it will show you’re still making progress even if you follow your plan most of the time. Try not to get frustrated when you miss your daily goals. One number from your fitness tracker doesn’t make or break your success. What matters is how you are doing over time.
Have A Healthy Relationship With Your Fitness Tracker
It’s important not to rely too heavily on your fitness tracker. Finding the right balance of using it for fun and getting valuable feedback that helps you improve your overall health is vital. Avoid falling into a toxic relationship with your fitness tracker by keeping the following in mind.
Always trust how you feel over what your fitness tracker says. You should take a day off if you need to rest and recover, even if your fitness tracker says you’re ready to go. Otherwise, you increase your risk of illness, injury, or burnout. Missing one or two days won’t erase all your hard work.
Track yourself, but don’t take the numbers seriously. Your fitness tracker will provide feedback on your progress toward specific milestones. However, most metrics should be treated as ‘nice to know’ and only reviewed over time to gauge real progress. So, one day of data and one specific datapoint will not make or break your progress.
Workouts still count even if you didn’t record them. You don’t need the numbers to prove it. If you keep a fitness journal, you can estimate your workout time or write about your workout. A number doesn’t represent your overall fitness. How you feel does.
The Takeaway
Using a fitness tracker can be a simple yet powerful way to encourage daily walks and build lasting healthy habits. Focusing on simple features, such as step counts and reminders, makes it easier to stay motivated without feeling overwhelmed. Fitness trackers provide valuable feedback and can spark motivation, making your progress more visible and helping you stay accountable.
However, it’s crucial to maintain a healthy relationship with your fitness tracker. Not every notification needs your attention, and no one number defines your success. Tracking your progress is the best way to measure success. Focus on consistency rather than perfection, celebrate your small wins, and remember that how you feel is more important than what the tracker says. With the right balance, your fitness tracker can help turn walking into a natural and enjoyable part of your life.
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.
