How to Choose the Best Fitness Tracker for Your Lifestyle

The fitness tracker is a staple piece of wearable tech in the lives of many health-conscious individuals and fitness fanatics. While they’re a convenient way to keep tabs on your daily steps, they can also provide useful insights into your overall wellness, including your exercise performance, sleep quality and menstrual cycle. As a result, they’re often an essential tool for helping individuals make sustainable health and lifestyle changes that will last a lifetime.

But with so many different fitness trackers and smartwatches on the market, how can you decide which one is right for you? And what are the most important factors to consider when choosing the best fitness tracker for your lifestyle?

While the wearable gadget is becoming more and more commonplace, research has come to the conclusion that fitness trackers aren’t as effective at improving health as you might think. In fact, they can sometimes cause the opposite effect and actually discourage individuals from engaging in healthy habits.

This is mainly due to the fact that many fitness trackers tend to be overly prescriptive and encourage “all-or-nothing thinking” when it comes to exercising. For example, if your tracker tells you to go for a high-intensity workout even when you’re feeling drained from work or unwell, you might feel overwhelmed and end up ditching the exercise altogether.

Another issue is that the accuracy of calorie measurements and other tracking features on fitness trackers has been called into question. According to a 2022 study, the data on physical activity that fitness trackers provide can be largely inaccurate. For instance, the study found that these devices were more likely to underestimate energy expenditure during sedentary activities and household chores, while overestimating energy expended during moderate and intense workouts.

The same study found that fitness trackers aren’t as accurate when it comes to monitoring heart rate during rest and recovery. The data was also inconsistent, as some users had more reliable readings than others.

In some cases, however, the data on a fitness tracker can be helpful if used correctly. The UCLA study mentioned above, for example, saw that individuals were able to achieve more health strides when they were provided with personalized text message feedback on their progress each day. This could include praise for hitting a certain number of daily steps, encouragement to up their time spent jogging and even analysis that they’d gotten adequate sleep the night before.

As such, it’s important to remember that a fitness tracker should be an incentive and a motivational tool, rather than a guilt trip or source of obligation. So if you’re feeling a bit bogged down by your daily workout stats, it may be time to take a break and reevaluate the reasons why you get up and move in the first place.