Ask What Your Fitness Tracker Can Do For You.

You can get one to clip to your clothes, wear it on your wrist, it can even be disguised as a fashionable watch, you maybe even wearing one right now! Fitness trackers the only accessary you wear that collects data about what you do during the day or at least how much you move around. Fitness trackers track your steps, your sleep, your movement. Super you have all this data about your physical life now what?

The data that is acquired from fitness trackers while not 100% accurate do in part to technology limitations, and user error (aka you have to remember to put it on or sync it). The data you do collect can help you make subtle connections between what you did and how you felt, or how much movement you really do in a day.

Three major and almost universal things fitness trackers track are Steps: (10k being the goal), Sleep (how long, how much movement while you slept), and how much sitting you are doing or how little you are moving. While all great things to track do what do those numbers really tell you?

Steps: 10k steps a day has been shown to be the number of steps you need in a day to say you are active. This number has been debated as to its accuracy to this point, but it is a place to start. By keeping track of your steps you can then compare your activity level from one day to the next. Tracking your steps helps you to know what moving feels like, once you know what being “active” feels like you can start to make your days more active and start to notice when you are not being active. For example: on a whim you walk to get coffee at 3pm down the street instead of in the office kitchen. Looking at your data you realize you added almost 500-700 steps into your day with minimal effort plus the added benefit of better coffee. Win-Win. So while you may not always get coffee you can keep the habit of the short walk. Some trackers will slowly increase your daily steps goal (as you keep hitting or exceeding your goal) so that you are always pushing yourself.

Sleep: Fitness trackers say they track sleep, but the tracker does not actually know if you are asleep (unless you have one tracking your brain waves) or lying still in bed. So this data could seem a bit useless, but it can still be used to help you create new habits. Lack of sleep has been proven to people making poor decisions, increase in calorie intake, and obesity, so getting enough sleep is important. While your tracker doesn’t know if you are really asleep, it does show you how much you move through out the night. You can take that data and add in how you felt when you woke up that day, or maybe you think you slept great, but your movement shows that you were tossing and turning all night.   The sleep data can also help you to find out what are you best sleep hours.

Movement: Different trackers come with different ways of telling you if you have been sitting or inactive for too long. Some vibrate some send a notification to your phone, and some just show you a red bar after you have been inactive for a set amount of time. This might be one of their better features. You know that sitting too much can kill you, so anything that makes you move or at least makes you more aware that you haven’t moved in an hour is a great tool for training yourself to get up and get moving for a few minutes. Stepping away from your desk for a few minutes every hour will help to keep your desk chair from killing you, with the added perk of making you more productive when you sit back down.

Fitness trackers will not fix bad habits or get you in shape, but they can help you to notice you of the bad habit, hopefully you to make the correct action to change the bad habits to good ones. Moral of the story? Just don’t sync all the data your fitness tracker logs, look at makes notes on how you felt that day, any progress toward a goal you had, any steps backward and what were the circumstances around that backward progress. While the data isn’t necessarily perfectly accurate it can help you to make habits that fit into your lifestyle.

Need help finding a fitness tracker. Check out this post comparing a few trackers on the market.