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Thinking of Using an Activity Tracker to Assist You Hit Your Fitness Goals? Here’s Where It Can Assist—and Where It Probably Won’t
Aug
It’s that time of year when many people start to implement their resolutions for the coming year. More physical activity is a popular and worth goal.
If you want to be more busy in 2024, you may have invested in or are considering purchasing an activity tracker.
But what are the benefits of activity trackers? And is a basic tracker enough, or do you need a fancy one with lots of features? Let’s take a look.
Read more: How to Augment Your Motivation to Workout When I Really Hate It: 10 Science-Backed Tips
Why utilize an activity tracker?
One of the most powerful predictors being busy is whether it is busy or not you are monitoring how busy you are.
Most people have a vague idea of how busy they are, but it’s often misleading. When people consciously start tracking how much activity they do, they often realize it’s less than they thought, and that motivates them to be more busy.
You can monitor your health without an activity tracker (by simply writing down what you do), but this method is hard to maintain in the long term and is much less exact compared to devices that track your every move 24/7.
Anatoly Karlyuk/Shutterstock
By tracking your steps or “busy minutes” you can see if you are meeting your goals. physical activity guidelines (150 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity per week).
It also allows you to track progress toward your personal activity goals and review progress over time. All of this would be hard without an activity tracker.
Studies have shown that the most popular brands of activity trackers are generally reliable when it comes to tracking basic metrics like: steps AND minutes of activity.
But wait, there’s something else
Many activity trackers on the market today track a range of other metrics that their manufacturers promote as significant for monitoring health and fitness. But is that really the case? Let’s take a look at some of them.
Resting heart rate
This is your resting heart rate, which is usually from 60 to 100 beats per minute. Your resting heart rate will gradually decrease as you improve your fitness, especially if you do a lot of high-intensity exercise. Your risk of death from any cause (all-cause mortality) is much lower when you have low resting heart rate.
That’s why it’s worth keeping an eye on your resting heart rate. Activity trackers are pretty good at this, but you can also easily measure your heart rate by monitoring your pulse and using a stopwatch.
Heart rate during exercise
Activity trackers will also measure your heart rate when you are busy. To effectively improve fitness, professional athletes focus on keeping their heart rate within certain “zones“during exercise – that’s why it’s significant to know your heart rate during exercise.
But if you simply want to be more busy and healthier without a specific training goal, you can exercise at a level that feels right for you and not worry about your heart rate during activity. The most important thing is that you are busy.
In addition, a special heart rate monitor with a chest strap will measure your actual heart rate much better compared to a wrist-worn activity tracker.
Maximum heart rate
This is the fastest your heart can beat when you are busy, it is not something you can sustain for very long. Your maximum heart rate is not affected by the amount of exercise you do or your fitness level.
Most activity trackers don’t measure it exactly Either way, you can forget about it.
Photos Maridav/Shutterstock
VO₂max
Your muscles need oxygen to work. The more oxygen your body can process, the harder you can work, and therefore the better shape you are in.
VO₂max is the volume (V) of oxygen (O₂) that we could maximally inhale (max) in one minute, expressed in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute (ml/kg/min). Inactive women and men would have VO₂max lower than 30 and 40 ml/kg/min, respectively. A fairly good VO₂max would be in the mid-thirties and up for women and mid-forties and up for men.
VO₂max is another indicator of physical fitness that correlates well with all-cause mortality: the higher the rate, the lower the risk of death.
For athletes, VO₂max is typically measured in a lab on a treadmill while wearing a mask that measures oxygen consumption. Activity trackers instead measure running speed (via a GPS chip) and heart rate, then compare those measurements to those of other people.
If you can run rapid at a low heart rate, your tracker will assume you are relatively fit, resulting in a higher VO₂max. These estimates are it’s not very accurate because they are based on many assumptions. However, the error in the measurement is fairly constant. This means that if your VO₂max gradually increases, you are probably getting fitter.
Read more: Health Check: Do We Really Need 10,000 Steps a Day?
So what’s the bottom line? Focus on how many steps you take each day or how many minutes of activity you get. Even a basic activity tracker will measure these things relatively accurately. There’s no need to track other metrics and pay more for an activity tracker that records them unless you’re really solemn about exercising.
