Most people I meet these days have some kind of wearable fitness tracker.
Their popularity has EXPLODED over the last few years.
Personally, I use an Oura ring, which I find pretty good. It’s more a sleep and recovery tracker which also tracks activity too.
The other day, I caught myself looking at the data from the previous nights sleep and thinking “oh, that’s nice”. I then proceeded to forget all about it and just move on with my day.
Which got me thinking about how many of us must do this.
Wearing these things is only useful if we use the information to improve our health.
Perhaps your sleep quality is poor and you want to experiment with different ideas for improving it, and want some numbers to quantify the results beyond just your subjective feeling.
Perhaps you want to monitor how your body changes as you work to progress your fitness and improve your diet.
Perhaps seeing your resting heart rate shoot up the next morning after a few glasses of wine the night before is helpful for changing your habits.
Perhaps you just enjoy the reminders to avoid long periods of inactivity.
Whatever the reason you’re wearing a wearable tracker, it can give you some really useful information and help you make quantifiable improvements to your health.
For example, I will often look at a clients sleep data and make suggestions for how to improve their sleep quality.
Sometimes I like to suggest we track a clients resting heart rate or heart rate variability in order to monitor and adjust exercise intensity.
It’s worth remembering though that wearables are sometimes incorrect, despite what their sales pitches might say! Oura says their sleep analysis has been shown to be as good as a sleep lab, yet I’ve had lovely nights sleep during which Oura thought I’d been awake for hours.
Remember to take the information as part of a whole picture and an overall trend. There’s no need to make changes based on one result you’ve seen once.