“There’s an App for That”
Do we need to track every morsel of our fitness journey?
10 min read
By: Dylan Dacosta
“Hey! Are you ready to train today?”
“I don’t know, let me check my phone.”
It feels as if we’ve entered the era of the fitness-tracker-technocracy. Every day there seems to be a new app available to track some additional component of your fitness and health journey.
From a numbers perspective, one report from straits research showed the global market for wearable fitness tracker market to be valued at 45 billion dollars USD in 2021 and is expected to be at 192 billion USD by 2030. I bring this up because with the market ever expanding, this tech-era of fitness will only grow over next while and with market growth, always follows an onslaught of scammers looking for that next piece of tech to solve all of your fitness and health problems. See Neoliberalism 101.
Today you can track your diet, your sleep, your steps, your heart rate/heart rate variability (HRV), your energy expenditure (allegedly), your basal temperate, your menstrual cycle, your recovery (as a vague term) and so on and so on.
I’m not anti-tracking either. I see utility in a lot of these potential devices/technologies. I also see the potential downsides that accompany them. Largely, it seems like too many of us have become dependant on them and are also burdened by the sheer abundance of them.
Let’s take tracking calories for example. I see utility in this for a period of time. If you have no idea what the energy/macronutrient content of your favourite foods are, tracking for a period of time can be useful. Yet, all to often, folks delegate their diets completely to the tracker and also remove the complex dynamics that make up your relationship with food. Either by neglecting less quantifiable metrics such as hunger, satiety and mindful eating practices, or even more human dynamics such as sharing meals with loved ones. An over-reliance on tracking here can lead to an example similar to how this article started:
“Have you eaten enough today?”
“I’m not sure. Let me check my phone.”
or
“Hey, Grandma made crab curry! You excited for dinner?”
“Hmm... I don’t know how to track that so I have to pass.”
Obviously this is not how everyone behaves while tracking calories, but in my experience, it’s not that uncommon. Rigid application of these practices may help short term, but tend not to be great down the line.
I bring this example up because at no point did this person reflect on anything happening in their own body. Instead, they relegated it all on the app. Which can be quite convenient, but lacks building the understanding of what your own eating patterns and cues actually are.
When we relegate everything onto the tech, we continue to remain detached from our bodies and the sensory experiences that are going on in them.
We don’t get a better understanding of our hunger and satiety cues. We get better at tracking our energy intake.
We don’t get better at modifiying our training based on our percieved recovery levels. We just follow the orders more dilligently from our whoop bands.
We don’t get better at assessing our sleep and energy levels. We just take the feedback from our Oura rings to let us know if we got enough rest.
Empowered or Reliant?
Using the example above, this is common issue I’ve personally ran into and seen among clients. Does tracking everything empower us to have more self-efficacy? Or does it lead to us becoming dependant on that tech to validate what we’re doing?
The answer is both, either, or none. Sorry to the most moderate take in the world.
Obviously some folks truly do become more empowered when getting better knowledge in something. Duhh. While a lot of folks become dependant on that tech in order to have success.
Tracking steps and tracking calories are super common in this area. Instead of a flexible application of these trackers, too many of us use them rigidly. One study even showed generally positive outcomes when using fitness trackers, but when subjects were unable to, they reported negative feelings such as anxiety, guilt and frustration. (1)
Affect scores during wearing of fitness watch and when unable to wear among current and previous users. Ryan et al. 2019.
I’ve seen and felt this countless times as well. A client of mine would have forgotten to track their workout on their apple watch and seemingly be deflated by this.
In reality, if tracking built self efficacy, we shouldn’t see negative effects when we can’t use them. This signals to me more dependance on them over anything. Or at least, those negative effects should dissipate quickly as we realize we don’t need to track it in order for it to count.
This doesn’t mean you should stop using any fitness trackers. They can still be helpful. All I’m saying is that if your relationship to your tracker is one built on dependancy, I’d suggest building up your confidence without them.
How Helpful Are They Even?
My next, bigger issue with this tech-era is disparity in these companies marketing claims versus their actual accuracy and utility.
Just like in everywhere in the fitness/wellness industry, there’s no shortage of claims made by companies that range from “pretty decent” to “outright bullshit”. With the bell curve being skewed toward the bullshit side. As my bleeding Leftist heart cried in the first paragraph, this market is continually growing and it turns out gimmicky new products come out much faster than evidence backed, genuinely helpful ones do.
Just think of the weight loss industry. Successful weight loss strategies are incredibly challenging with the majority of folks who lose weight ending up gaining back most, if not all of the weight the gained (2). Big obstacles in the way of successful weight loss maintenance being our current food environment (which is a political, not individual responsibility issue), the physiological response to weight loss, access to long term ongoing to support, and plenty of other psycho-social factors.
Yet, when we factor in all of this, it seems almost every month there is a new, reductive approach to weight loss in the ether. They often blame one culprit (carbs, sugar, meat, seed oils, even veggies??) as the problem and then market and sell you some enticing yet junky solution. These fads overwhelmingly don’t work, but the market demand for weight loss persists (magnified by our fatphobic culture) and so the grifters continuously exploit that. I bring this up as an example as to how if a market exists, it will be filled, even with ineffective and potentially harmful “solutions” because those with capital know there is a lot of money to be made there. Effectiveness comes second in this equation, if genuinely at all.
With the boom of fitness tech, the demand for the flashiest tech is in the air. Even if its effectiveness and utility is shaky, consumers want the newest swag and if they don’t, companies like Apple know how to market in a way to persuade you into wanting it. Even being skeptical myself, I’m surely not immune to their remarkable advertising campaigns whenever I see them.
One feature on most watches is “energy expenditure”. The average consumer in fitness is likely to be attracted to this feature because our culture is very invested in managing energy balance and for using exercise as a vehicle for fat loss and weight control. Yet, anyone who knows a thing or two about energy expenditure knows how impractical it is to track that with a simple equation from a watch. Here’s a quote from paper by Hajj-Boutros et al. 2021 (3):
“The Apple Watch 6, Polar Vantage V and Fitbit Sense showed poor accuracy for energy expenditure during 5 different physical activities. Healthcare care professionals, athletes/coaches and the general population may want to proceed with caution on the clinical utility of energy expenditure of these devices during the implementation of an exercise training or nutritional programme.”
I’m quite positive this analysis won’t be making into the marketing campaign of any of these companies when they discuss this feature.
Another popular metric to track is HRV for managing training programs. At it’s core, I like the idea. Essentially when you HRV is higher, it indicates higher parasympathetic nervous system activity and vice versa. Making lower HRV indicative of being less recovered. If your HRV is lower from baseline, you would train at a lower intensity or even rest another day. If it returned to it’s baseline or ever higher, you would have the green light to get after it.
Two issues that I see come into play here:
We need to have tech that is accurately measuring heart rate and heart rate variability.
We need to factor in our life constraints into our training programs.
For wearable devices, the new Apple watch and Garmin watches seem to be the better ones on the market for tracking heart rate (4), with Apple being the best and was within 3% measuring error 71% of the time in that data sample. The polar chest strap is the best option for measuring heart rate, but is also the least comfortable one and I doubt most folks want to wear them daily as they would a watch.
Secondly, if you have an accurate HRV reading, does following it really matter? At it’s core, a lot of this tech is more suitable for advanced trainees looking to get those 1% edges into their training. If you’re like me and just need to get your training done in the week however you can, I’m less inclined to see something like this being very useful.
For strength training, one study on young men used HRV led training and compared it to fixed template training for 20 weeks. Both groups gained significant muscle and strength, but no group gained more than the other (5). The one positive upside of the HRV training group was they finished the 20 sessions in 5.1 weeks compared to 7 weeks for the fixed group. In that context, it’s not like HRV led training is giving you a huge advantage, but using that metric can allow you to potentially get more training in by following your recovery via HRV. Once again though, I’m not sure that’s useful for non-athlete trainees just looking to recreationally train to get stronger while still juggling everything else in life (myself and most of my clients/readers).
For endurance training, which is not my forte, there is evidence to support it being helpful for creating a flexible approach to your training (6). Using recovery metrics (including HRV) to guide training did lead to statistically significant better outcomes than the fixed training plan group. What can get lost in this that the fixed group still saw positive benefits from their training intervention too. So data like this does show that HRV may be better, but standard programming is also still great. HRV tracking has a potential upside but it also has barriers including buying that tech, tracking it daily and using said data to inform your program. While the fixed template is more straight forward.
It might seem benign to track that data, but what if you’re already tracking your diet, your sleep, your screen time, your menstrual cycle, your meditation streak etc. etc. etc. In a vacuum, it’s innocuous. In context, it can just add more labour to the overwhelming amount of sheer data we track in our fitness and health pursuits.
What Should You Do?
In short, whatever you want. This is not meant to deter you from tracking anything. It’s not meant to turn you away from any sort of technology in fitness. It’s simply meant to encourage you think critically about your won fitness-tech consumption. I want you to realize you don’t need to track it all — even if the market leverages FOMO (fear of missing out) and fancy gimmicks that aren’t as revolutionary as they seem to entice you to become a loyal customer of just one more fitness tracking app or tech. I’m sure there are some tracking metrics you genuinely find helpful. If so, that’s great! You don’t need to stop using it. You just also don’t need to fall for the marketing of every new shiny toy that comes out.
There is upsides and downsides to it all. The sheer novelty of all this tech (which usually means lacking in validation) combined with the data-driven lifestyle that seems to becoming more popular, gives me great pause. If anything, I hope this article helps in giving you pause as well. None of this tech can do much without the basics locked down. And when it comes to getting the basics locked down, that is not a problem that any sort of product or fancy tech can solve.
Worded alternatively:
“there’s no app for that.”
