In today’s world, it is common for people to use wearable fitness trackers to monitor their progress. Whether it’s an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, or a Garmin, people use them to track their steps, heart rate, calories burned, and more. But the real question is—do you actually need it, and is it really benefiting you?
Today, I will share my opinion as an experienced coach about whether fitness trackers are worth it or not.
Should you use wearable fitness trackers?
In my opinion, fitness trackers, in general, are a waste of time. The reason I think this is because, a lot of times, they can become something that becomes an obsession for you. You can focus on it so much to the point, and this can add a lot of stress and anxiety to your everyday life. For example, if you’re looking down at your watch every day to see if you slept well, and it tells you that you didn’t, your day will start off on a bad note and have you asking a million questions as to why. Now, you have the tone set for the day based on some piece of technology versus how you actually feel.
So, while these items can be suitable for people in the very beginning stages of fitness to help them get started and give them better insight into what they need to be doing more of, they aren’t necessarily the best thing for everyone. We don’t need a tracker to tell us we need to move more. We need to be honest with ourselves, reflect, and recognize that we need to be doing more in general, and we don’t need a piece of technology to tell us that.
Get up, walk, go outside, and start doing more. Move more, go to the gym, and do anything because you know it’s good for you, and you don’t need a watch to tell you that. You don’t need a watch to tell you how good you slept, how many steps you took, and how many more to take. You don’t need any of that to get an actual result. Just try to move more, get on a plan, and listen to your body, which will help you the most. But there’s no reason to obsess over it, just like there’s no reason to obsess over a scale or anything else.
Not to mention, I find that fitness trackers become a deterrent to people’s success in achieving their roles because they become obsessive to the point where, again, if you don’t hit the goals you’ve set out to, now it’s ruined your day and your ability to execute it, which can make your whole fitness journey not fun. It can make you lose motivation, get frustrated, and want to give up.
Overall, the key we always want to focus on is making sure that achieving your goals is fun, maintainable, sustainable, and consistent, and that isn’t going to come from fitness trackers. Get a coach, put a plan in place, stick to it, and listen to your body. That will be the best fitness tracker of all and get you the best results.
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