How Fitness Trackers Can Sometimes Be Bad For Your Health

Mar 4

NGL, I LOVE a gadget. Despite being aware how toxic being on the phone 24/7 is, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

I’ve had a similar love/hate relationship with fitness trackers— with my favorites being the Apple watch (affiliate link) and Whoop band (get $30 off with my affiliate link if you’re curious…and only after you read the rest of this article!). They’re an example of how innovative and useful tech can be— but also how negative for our overall well-being they have the potential for too.

At the end of the day, liking your friend’s photo on IG isn’t really connecting with them, and the metrics on your fitness tracker aren’t as useful as actually checking in with, and ultimately, trusting your body’s cues, over a piece of steel designed by a hoodie clad bro in California.

Fitness Trackers Can Disrupt The Mind Body Connection

Sometimes, I’ll get a pop up alert at like, 9pm, saying “a quick 20 min cardio workout will help you meet your move goal for the day, finish strong blah blah!” This is cool…but sometimes I get it even when I’ve taught 3 classes and walked the dog 4 times and barely had time to sit down. Were I to blindly follow the watch’s suggestions, I’d be verging on burnout and exhaustion— not to mention by 9pm I’m usually halfway through a murder show and that pop-up could make me feel guilt or shame if I let it.

I truly think it’s awesome that the Apple watch reminds you to stand- I ride or die for that function, same with the reminders to breathe and perceive my heart rate during times of stress. While I’m thankful to get a pop up that asks me to move it if I’ve been at my desk answering emails for too long (this is the whole reason I created the Midday Moves series on IG, because getting stuck in the work zone can make your body feel like shit), I do think it can encourage us to rely on the tracker to tell us what to do and when, vs taking the time to body scan and ask yourself what it is you really need in that moment. If you use the Apple watch like this, just be sure to not use it as an excuse to disassociate until Tim Cook chimes in with a notification. (Fun fact: in my first draft of this blog I wrote Tim Rice, in a Freudian, musical theatre nerd slip)

Fitness Trackers Aren’t Always Accurate

The metrics on fitness trackers are more of an estimate. With all tech, each generation is better and better- but there’s still a lot to be desired in terms of really nailing exact metrics.

There’s also the bias of the engineers to consider, with most trackers being created for cis white men, by, drumroll…cis white men. It’s not that the people making are tech are purposefully excluding other populations (we hope) but that the majority of people working in tech are white men, and no hate intended, I’m literally marrying a white tech guy— but, we know for a fact when there’s more diversity, more scenarios are considered and our tech is more accurate.

They’re also designed for the small age range of people in their 20s-30s with a “purposeful gait”— meaning if you’re out on a power walk they can track that pretty easily, but if you’re gliding along with a stroller or shuffling around doing chores at home (it counts as movement!) those steps aren’t as easy for the trackers to read. To top it all off, children and athletes and older people and people of varying physical abilities move with different qualities, and trackers have a hard time differentiating this through their sensors.

Trackers aren’t even really clocking every individual movement— they use electromagnetic sensors to inform an algorithm that makes assumptions about your movement— and yeah, if algorithms can tell when I’m out of toilet paper before I can, then you’d think they’d be able to read my physical activity pretty well- but… wrong. Because they’re created with a specific archetype of person, those algorithms can be way off if you don’t fit the description.

Fitness Trackers Encourage Obsession With Calories

Calories get a bad rap. They’re literally energy, and you can’t live without them. Diet culture has convinced our whole society that it’s more virtuous to live on as little energy as possible (and then buy fancy supplements to help us with our lethargy and sluggishness, natch. TRUST, I love me a tincture or potion— but sometimes the answer is as simple as eating more nourishing meals!).

A big reason I took a break from my Apple watch initially, was because I felt myself getting a little too intense about closing my rings. Admittedly, I have a history of disordered eating and exercising, so I’m hyper aware of those feelings- but I’m not the only person in the world to feel that way either. Our watches are not only mostly inaccurate when it comes to the calories burned displays, they glorify the idea burning them without any context. You set a calorie goal once when you’re setting up the watch, and it doesn’t know if you’ve hiked 10 miles in the Grand Canyon or if you’ve been watching Netflix all day so it can’t predict what amount of fuel you need to take in or expend with any real life relevance to your current situation.

It’s for this reason, I prefer the Whoop band for all around health tracking- because it measures recovery and quality of sleep, and for me, helps build that mind body connection by showing you more in depth statistics that require you to reflect more fully about what’s going on with your body. Ideally, though, using the band is more of a jumping off point to start to understand your body’s rhythms WITHOUT relying on the band.

Pro tip: if you have an Apple watch and want to de-emphasize the calorie counter- choose a watch face (you can even upload a photo— mind is my dog, naturally) that doesn’t showcase the rings as your background instead! (I don’t have a Fitbit, but I assume there’s a way to customize the face there too!)

Conclusion

You gotta know what’s right for you. Trackers can be great tools- but they’re also easily abused (and over relied upon). If you are still actively working to have a healthier relationship with movement- I believe relying on a mini computer’s calculation to validate the experience keeps you disconnected from your body. The ability to control my music from the other side of the room, text, and check my calendar are aspects of my Apple watch I now can’t live without, but I use my watcher with a strict boundary set around relying on the physical metrics to protect my mental wellness.

If you’re interested in physically challenging but body neutral at home workouts, check out Helen Phelan Studio with a free 10 day trial to access over 200 pilates based workouts.