Buzz
This article is part of Find Your Fit Tech, Mytour's guide to choosing fitness wearables. I explore challenging questions about whether these devices truly enhance health, how to select the best one for your needs, and how to effectively utilize the data they provide.
Fitness trackers and health apps are often purchased with the goal of improving well-being, making it tempting to focus on the metrics they display. However, these metrics are designed for algorithmic simplicity, not because achieving perfect scores daily will necessarily lead to better health.
Discover 10 ways your fitness apps might mislead you and learn better strategies to achieve your health goals.
Skipping proper warmups
Every running app or device can measure the distance and duration of your runs. Using these two metrics, the technology calculates your pace automatically. You might glance at your watch and think, 'I’m only running 12-minute miles?! Next time, I need to push harder.'
Most running routines should begin with a gradual warmup, such as a slow jog or transitioning from a brisk walk. The actual workout begins after the warmup. However, if you record the entire session, the slower warmup drags down your average pace. Additionally, you may struggle to maintain an appropriately slow pace on easy runs if you view your total time as a reflection of your performance.
What to do instead: Either log your warmup (and any rest intervals) as a separate segment or disregard your overall pace entirely.
Oversleeping
Sleep trackers can help determine if you're getting sufficient rest and suggest ways to improve. However, they often prioritize grading each night's sleep, leading you to ask, 'How can I boost my sleep score tonight?' instead of focusing on long-term sleep quality.
Imagine you aim to wake up at 6 a.m. If you stayed up until midnight, the easiest way to improve your sleep score is to skip your morning exercise and sleep until 8 a.m. However, if your goal is to enhance overall sleep quality, it’s better to stick to your 6 a.m. alarm regardless of how late you stayed up. This way, you’ll feel more tired the next evening, encouraging an earlier bedtime and helping you regain a healthy sleep routine.
What to do instead: Concentrate on developing habits that promote better sleep, such as maintaining a dark bedroom and a consistent schedule, rather than treating each night as an isolated performance metric.
Avoiding workouts due to low scores
Devices and apps that provide 'readiness' or 'recovery' scores claim to help you decide how intensely to train. However, any experienced coach will emphasize that progress is difficult if you fear fatigue. A well-structured program will include periods of intense training, during which you may feel worn out for days or even weeks.
Sleep trackers can help ensure you’re recovering as effectively as possible despite the demands of your training. However, if you took a rest day every time your recovery score was low, you’d miss numerous valuable training opportunities. Your body is capable of handling the stress of exercise, I assure you.
What to do instead: Follow a solid program (or work with a trainer or coach) and trust the process. Evaluate your scores based on your training expectations. A low score after a challenging week? That’s expected. A high score after a tough week? Perhaps your program isn’t pushing you enough. A low score after an easy week? Now it’s worth considering if you’ve been overtraining.
Skipping workouts that don’t count toward your step count
Step-tracking gadgets, including smartphones, are excellent for motivating you to stay active throughout the day. Every errand or dog walk brings you closer to your goal—though keep in mind, 10,000 steps is an arbitrary target, and you can adjust it to suit your needs.
The risk is that you might start prioritizing activities based on how many steps they provide. Choosing between a spin class or a hike? A run or a weightlifting session? It’s easy to let step count become the deciding factor.
What to do instead: Focus on what your body truly needs and desires, rather than obsessing over maximizing your step count.
Overlooking the key benefits of strength training
Strength training offers numerous health advantages. It helps prevent minor injuries, makes daily activities easier, ensures a better quality of life as you age, and maintains a healthy body composition during weight changes. Its purpose is not to sustain an elevated heart rate for a specific duration. (That’s cardio’s role.)
However, if you use a device to monitor strength training, you might feel pressured to maintain a high heart rate as you would during cardio. This can lead to shorter rest periods between sets, reducing your ability to lift heavier weights. As a result, you’ll miss out on many strength training benefits by pursuing the wrong objectives.
What to do instead: Either avoid tracking strength training with heart rate devices or use the data simply to log your workout and its duration. Take adequate rest between exercises and discover your true strength potential!
Believing your fitness watch accurately tracks calorie burn
Fitness trackers often claim to accurately measure the calories you burn during exercise or daily activities. However, calorie expenditure isn’t so easily predictable, and your device is essentially making an educated guess.
What to do instead: If you’re managing your diet, monitor your food intake and observe changes in your weight. Adjust your calorie intake based on results. For example, if your watch estimates you burn 2,500 calories daily but your weight remains stable at 2,300 calories, your actual burn is likely 2,300.
Stressing over sleep quality metrics
Sleep trackers are decent at recording time spent in bed but poor at accurately identifying transitions between sleep stages. I vividly recall wearing both an Oura ring and a Whoop band simultaneously—the Oura claimed I lacked REM sleep, while the Whoop suggested I had too much.
What to do instead: Treat sleep app scores skeptically. Overanalyzing sleep quality can trigger a 'nocebo' effect, where you feel exhausted simply because you expect to. Focus instead on the total hours and consistency of your sleep.
Setting unrealistic expectations with streaks
Longtime Mytour readers know this is a personal gripe of mine: Apps that claim to encourage healthy habits often end up rewarding you with a streak that you’ll eventually break, leaving you feeling guilty.
All streaks come to an end. Do you really want to be the person who sets reminders to log a meditation session daily on vacation just to maintain a streak? It’s not worth it. If it is, acknowledge that you’re playing a game with your app—it’s not fostering a healthy habit.
What to do instead: Break the streak intentionally. Skip tracking a workout on purpose to liberate yourself. Take a weekly rest day—you likely need it anyway.
Overthinking calorie intake
Rigid diets can lead to disordered eating for some individuals, and calorie tracking can have a similar impact. If you can monitor your calories without compromising your mental health, that’s excellent. However, it doesn’t mean you should fixate on every calorie.
For instance, you might feel anxious about consuming a large meal. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying an 800-calorie lunch if it consists of nutritious foods (like protein and vegetables). But if you’re afraid of recording a high number, you might eat only half and end up hungry, raiding the snack cabinet later. Alternatively, you might skip logging snacks or condiments to avoid a high total, but honest tracking could reveal your body can handle more calories than you assumed.
What to do instead: Recognize that eating is essential for fueling your body. If you’re committed to tracking calories, use an app like Cronometer that presents data in a less judgmental way.
Obsessing over achieving a 'good' number for anything
What counts as a good HRV reading? A healthy resting heart rate? An optimal VO2max? A decent running pace?
I wouldn’t label these numbers as 'meaningless,' as they do hold some value. However, they aren’t metrics you should use to evaluate your worth as a person. Each figure is meaningful within its specific context but loses significance outside of it.
For instance, if your current running pace is 10 minutes per mile, it’s irrelevant whether that’s considered 'good.' You can always train to improve if you wish. Similarly, HRV (heart rate variability) is a useful indicator of stress from training or life, but it’s not something you can meaningfully compare with others.
What to do instead: Reflect on what truly matters. A number on your screen has no real-world significance, but improvements in heart health or race performance do. Focus on these tangible outcomes rather than daily scores.
