“Whether you’re training for a marathon or just trying to up your daily steps – a fitness tracker can motivate you and help optimize your overall wellbeing, health, and fitness!”
consumertestedreviews.org
“Bullshit.”
Coach Frances Zopp
Fitness trackers allow you to track how far you ran or how many steps you took. They can track your heart rate, your sleep, and more. You will never have to assess how you feel ever again, because the fitness tracker is here to tell you! That workout was exhilarating? Too bad. Your fitness tracker says you didn’t really work that hard. Are you tired this morning? Are you sure? Because your fitness tracker says you slept well. Did your workout stay in the aerobic zone? Thanks to that extra cup of coffee, your heart rate soared, even though you barely got past a slow walk. Nice work!
Gadgets that evaluate your workout for you serve to further disconnect you from yourself. They explain things to you that contradict how you know you feel. They can also get you to obsess unnecessarily about whether you closed your rings, whether you burned enough calories, and whether what you did was “enough.” And let’s be realistic. Unless you are an elite athlete training for high performance, you likely don’t even go back and look at progress over time. You look at how the device is telling you today went.
If your fitness tracker were a person, you’d rage against his patriarchal dicta about how you feel and how you are performing. You would flip him a big bird when he called you out for failing to meet some criteria he set up. Yeah, I know, he probably allowed you input at the beginning, setting parameters for yourself based on his suggestions (“Oh, you’re in your 50s? Better slow it down a notch!”). But now you feel worse, pushing yourself to do things you don’t want to do so that you get a little shot of validation from his praise. You need him to hold you accountable! You need him to tell you, “Good job!” You beat yourself up for a bad night’s sleep, ramping up your anxiety which leads to another night of bad sleep. How is that beneficial?
I invite you to say a big FU to your mansplaining fitness tracker and try one of the following options to get back in touch with how you really feel. You can hold yourself accountable. You can get that shot of dopamine from yourself. You don’t need some stinkin’ overpriced gadget to do it for you.
For Summer 2023, here are the Top 5 Best Fitness Trackers. The good news is that you probably already have all of them. If you don’t, you won’t have to spend more than $5, because only one costs money.
RPE: A rate of perceived exertion chart is a great way to evaluate how your workout is going from a physical perspective. On a scale of 0-10, how do you feel? 0 is lying on the couch. 10 is calling the ambulance because you’ll die if you keep going. If you are not used to checking in with yourself this way, it can take some practice, but it sure eliminates the cognitive dissonance of being told the metric should be X and you sure feel like Y. You get to decide what you feel like and whether that’s good or bad. Heart rate can be useful, and should be measured if your doctor says it is required for your health. For most people, though, the heart rate only tells you what you already know (this workout was hard!) except when it’s affected by outside factors (e.g. stress, caffeine, temperature), in which case it can make you think you are doing more or less than your body is equipped to do.
Feelings wheel: For those of us who never learned to identify our feelings because feelings are messy, this chart is invaluable. Any workout is going to bring up thoughts and feelings, and sometimes the latter are hard to pinpoint. A good feelings wheel will allow you to identify a broad feeling, and then, if needed, narrow it down to a more specific one. What do emotions have to do with workouts? Ev.Er.Y.Thing. How you feel going in vs. how you feel coming out of it. How you feel when a particular challenge comes up. Your electronic devices are incapable of telling you how you feel. Seriously. Those things have no empathy.
Notebook: This low-tech gadget is easy to use. Write the date at the top of the page and include anything you want about your workout. Time, what you did, what you wore, how you felt physically, how you felt emotionally, what the weather and temperature were like, who was with you, and any other factors you want to note. You can include all of these points, or only one or two. It’s your notebook, and you get to decide what you put in it. You can decide what means something and what doesn’t. Maybe you notice that every time it rains, you feel refreshed. Maybe you notice that every time you wear a particular pair of socks, you get a blister. Maybe you just like to see your progress over time. Use different colored pens if that soothes your inner soul. Put stickers on it. Make it yours and own it!
Spreadsheet: An Excel or Google Sheets tracker that you put together yourself is the high-tech version of the notebook. If you feel peace and calm from organizing things into a spreadsheet (Sort A-Z? Oh, that feels good…), this is your place to go. You can color code, you can organize it any way you want, column widths and heights customized. Oh, my. Excuse me a moment. It’s getting a little warm in here (or is that a hot flash?). Sorry. You can make a column or tab for just about anything listed under Notebook and more.
Friend: You probably already have one or two of these. Maybe you already do something active with them. A good friend can help you sort out how something went without being judgey. They can hold you accountable, and they can help you see things from another perspective (“I really didn’t need to hear the instructor yell ‘push it’ one more time!”). Human interaction is a real need, and you aren’t ever going to get it from a device.
Some of you may have a healthy relationship with your fitness tracker, and if so, more power to you. A wide variety of apps (many free) are available to help you track mileage/pace if you are training for a race or reps/weight to track your progress over time. Using trackers to keep up with external metrics can be very useful. Using trackers to tell you how you feel about your workout, either physically or emotionally, can be a drag and ultimately can demotivate you. Learn to listen to yourself, not your device. And if all that sounds overwhelming, let’s talk.