Do I need a Wearable Fitness Device?
Fitbit | Garmin | Whoop | Apple
Remember when you could just rock your timex and it had a stopwatch and you felt pretty badass?
Seems like everywhere you look someone has a new fancy fitness device that they’re showing off.
Question is, are they really necessary? The answer is (as always), it depends.
It can get easy to get wrapped up in the latest products and get tricked in to thinking we need something we don’t. We love to think that once we get the new watch suddenly we’ll have all of the motivation and energy to get our butts to the gym. That’s not what these watches are for!
That said, these wearables can be handy when used for the right reasons.
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Insight
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Accountability
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Fine tuning
Insight:
It can become very easy to get wrapped up in our day to day lives and not really realizing some bad habits that have snuck in. Maybe you’ve hit a plateau at the gym or with your weight loss and you’re struggling to figure out what’s going on.
These watches can give us a little bit of a deeper look at how & how much we’re sleeping, if we’re more sedentary that we realized, and if stress is affecting us in negative ways.
Accountability:
Maybe we know we sleep like crap and our stress is too high. By being able to see our stats in real time, right in your face… it can sometimes give people the boost they need to focus on it the way they should. Maybe we know we don’t move enough, but if we can see in real time how much we’re moving it can be the kick in the pants we need to get moving.
Fine Tuning:
If you’ve got most of your ducks in a row but feel like you’re ready to take it to the next level, fitness watches can help us stay consistent. The more data you have the easier it is to know when and where you need to make changes (if any)
What not to use it for:
Counting Calories:
Although fitness trackers do give us an estimate on how many calories we’re burning in a day, it’s not a number we should rely on.
For one the numbers can be highly inaccurate as they do not take in to consideration your current fitness level. What’s more, they can get us in the habit of believing that we only had a good workout if we burn a certain amount of calories. This can lead to a distorted view of exercise and why we do it.
Obsessing:
Dovetailing off of the last point…
Fitness should be a fun way to stay healthy and keep your body moving. If using a fitness tracker is making you obsess over always reaching a certain intensity or hitting a certain amount of calories in such a way that it’s becoming less and less enjoyable for you… it might be time to take a step away and just begin to focus on the basics again.