Why my fitness tracker had to go
What had once been an inspiration to train harder had become a kettle ball chained to Michael Donaldson’s wrist. So he’s given it up.
Early in our love affair we were tight. Always touching. Hearts beating as one. We slept together every night. In the morning the question would be: how did you sleep?
It was wonderful . . . intense . . . until it wasn’t. The first sign of stress was the sleeping arrangement.
It was two things: I couldn’t bear to have you touching me any longer and your reports on how well I slept started to bug me. Were you telling the truth? Was I really not getting enough deep sleep? How much REM sleep does a man need? I didn’t trust your reports. And when trust is gone – well, that’s the end right?
But we still went out during the day, walking, biking, to the gym.
Before I stretch this metaphor to breaking point, you’ve probably worked out I’m talking about my fitness tracker, a relationship that hit the wall faster than a hungry cyclist.
At first, I loved knowing how much energy I used up – how many calories in particular. At 55 and conscious of my weight, I figured paying more attention to details would help; that increasing my ‘‘intensity minutes’’ and counting my steps would keep me honest. Instead of thinking I’d worked hard at the gym, I’d know for sure.
I’m the first to admit I can get obsessive. When I bought my Garmin Vivosmart 3 I got deeply obsessed. The watch defined my day’s success. Enough intensity minutes, enough calories, enough steps and I was happy.
I loved the challenge of doing more, beating my previous week’s efforts. Seeing my resting heartrate come down. Seeing my steps go up. I linked it
to Myfitnesspal to track calories consumed.
But then the watch started to let me down. In the gym, pedaling 100rpm on the bike, sweating up a storm and the watch tells me: ‘‘No, sorry, you’re not doing anything. You’re barely sitting up straight.’’ The heart-rate monitor on the bike recorded 150 beats per minute but the watch mockingly suggested 78bmp.
Soon enough I was Googling ‘‘garmin vivosmart inaccurate heart-rate’’ after one of those workouts where I was dead on my feet after 40 minutes of high-energy burn and the watch told me I’d been lying on the couch watching Game of Thrones.
I shook the watch, tightened the strap, loosened the strap, changed it from the left wrist to right and back. I repositioned it on my wrist – was the sensor correctly over the vein? – but to no avail.
One piece of advice was to hit ‘‘restore factory defaults’’. What the heck, I did, and for a while it seemed to work better. Then it didn’t.
Exercise was turning into a source of frustration. I desperately wanted this watch to recognise my efforts, to reward me by clocking up the data that proved how hard I’d worked.
I wanted validation, approval. When I didn’t get it, I got angry. What had once been an inspiration to train harder had become a kettle ball chained to my wrist. My gym life was a prison sentence of
frustration and disappointment.
One day, when the watch failed to respond to my elevated HR, I stopped exercising and went home like a spoiled child.
More Googling about fitness trackers took me into a deep dive about calories. I have a degree in physical education so I thought I knew this stuff. Calories in, calories out and the difference is weight gain/loss. Turns out I knew zilch but that’s because most of the scientific world knows only a little about calories.
The science of fitness devices is now catching up to the trend for wearing them and I’ve learned the heart-rate measurements can be off by 5-10 per cent (the wild inaccuracies in mine were perhaps just bad luck or a bad device), but I was stunned to learn even the most accurate device was 30 per cent off when measuring calories.
Stanford University researchers weren’t sure why the estimates for calories burned were so inaccurate (the worst devices were out by 96 per cent, a figure that basically says: why bother?). They thought the algorithms for calculating energy expenditure made assumptions that don’t apply to most people in real life.
And reading the Death of the Calorie in The Economist I learned that measuring calories in food is as inaccurate as trying to track their expenditure. The bottom line is that if you’re relying on trackers of any shade to measure calories in and out you are almost certain to be way off.
Does it matter?
Well, yes. If you think you’ve done great work but the numbers have been underestimating your success then that Big Fat Burger reward could be a punishment.
Or perhaps it’s the other way round and you think you need to work harder but all you do is run out of energy, feel tired and don’t eat enough to fuel your day. The extremes in either direction are getting too fat or too thin.
While the motivational benefits of a fitness tracker cannot be denied – and if yours is working for you, then great – but for me it took less than a year for my expensive motivational tool to become an anchor that sank my day if things went wrong.
I did what I had to with this dysfunctional relationship: I got divorced from my fitness tracker and went to the gym unshackled.
At the same time I changed my eating to cut out sugar – another thing to get obsessed about instead (and that’s another story – one with a happier ending, reader).
Suddenly exercise was fun. Again. I did what made me happy and worked out until I had had enough.
It’s a bit old-fashioned, but I’m being guided by how I feel rather than being ruled by numbers that don’t always add up.