The rise of wearable fitness trackers has been like the rise of many new technologies. For years people counted on the calories on the screen of our treadmills, and heart rate monitors that wrapped around our chests, but when FitBit launched it’s first wear fitness tracker, we entered a new age of fitness-related data.
Since then we’ve seen this market explode. From watches, to rings, to innovative trackers like the WHOOP band, there are so many ways to tap into your physical data to better understand your activity levels, sleep, fertility, and even see yourself getting sick before the symptoms really hit you.
But is this tech really worth it? Should you be investing in something that sits outside your body to tell you if you’re ready to train, or if you got a certain amount of REM sleep? I am going to dive into this topic from the perspective of a personal trainer, but also a consumer of wearable tech.
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Are They Worth It – From a Personal Trainer’s Perspective
When you hire a personal trainer, you are hiring someone to take in all the qualitative data about your health (exercise history, experience with exercise, feelings towards diets, etc.), combine it with limited quantitative data (weight, bodyfat %, body measurements) and put together a workout plan that helps you achieve your fitness goal.
As a personal trainer, I would always do my best to assess the client’s energy levels before the workout, and keep an eye on them during the workout to ensure I was respecting their body’s response to the exercises. But observation is never a perfect system in this situation.
Truthfully, when I was a personal trainer I always wished that I had access to my client’s fitness tracker dashboards. To see how physically active they are outside of our 30 minute – 1 hour sessions would be a gold mine of information. Better yet, if they tracked what they were eating as well, I could offer more tailored advice to them. And of course, if I understood their sleep patterns, I could also personalize their program even further knowing how sleep impacts readiness, stress, and recovery.
There’s one caveat though – my client would need to be tracking perfectly for any of this information to be truly useful. The main issue, in my professional opinion is that you always have to wearing the wearables in order to get the best data analysis from them.
WHOOP Band, Recommended by Personal Trainers (and Elite Athletes)
I think that’s why I believe that the WHOOP band has been really well designed, with constant tracking in mind. When they designed the WHOOP band, they made sure to design a portable, waterproof charger that could be attached to the band, instead of having to remove the band to charge it, only to forget that you left it on the charger and have now lost a day’s worth of data.
So as a personal trainer, I would recommend my clients get the WHOOP band.
Although it feels like WHOOP has thought of everything, including plenty of colour options, a portable charger, a well-designed and intuitive app, clever marketing, and clothing designed to fit the WHOOP tracker, there is one challenge: the cost.
WHOOP is a great business because they decided to follow in the OURA ring‘s footsteps (no pun intended) and offer the WHOOP band on a subscription model. So you’re paying for your band, and then paying a monthly or annual subscription fee to access their app and accessories and upgrades, should you choose that subscription level.
They are offering a trial period, which I think is a great way to get more people using the device, but if this is out of your budget before the trial period, it will likely be out of your budget after the trial period – you’ll just be more sad about it after.
Ultrahuman Ring and OURA Ring
As mentioned above, the OURA ring is another wearable on the market that offers great tracking and a new way to wear our fitness trackers. However, recently, the Ultrahuman Ring has been making a splash in the health and wellness space.
In the last 3 months I have found that more and more people and fitness enthusiasts have been talking about how they prefer the Ultrahuman Ring over the OURA ring.
Let’s face it, all of these more premium style trackers are going to be offering the same data. Things like sleep tracking, heart rate variability, physical activity, temperature and an app that helps make sense of the data. The thing with the Ultrahuman that is making it stand out from the OURA ring is the fact that it is a one-time fee.
That’s right. Just buy your ring for $349 ($120 less than the latest OURA ring) and that’s it. You get access to their app and all of the amazing technology in the band.
Again, as a personal trainer, I like these types of fitness trackers because I find the quality of the data is so much better. I have been a long-time Fitbit user, and have plenty of friends with Apple watches and Garmin’s, and all of these are great, but I have always found that they lack high quality tracking.
Before I move onto my recommendations based on being a consumer of these products, I just want to say that although rings are a great option, they can get in the way when you are lifting weights. Lots of people complain that the pressure on the ring hurts, or is uncomfortable during exercises like deadlifts and bench press.
Are Wearables Worth It for the Everyday Consumer
Now that I am in the world as someone who works out before my day job, instead of working out being my day job, my perspective on wearables has shifted. I may still be a data-junkie who would love to invest in a WHOOP band and and Ultrahuman ring, but that isn’t the most common experience for everyday folks who are looking to stay active and stay motivated with the help of a fitness tracker.
For the majority of people, having a step counter will actually suffice. And this isn’t to minimize people’s fitness goals, it is the truth. When I go see my friends for an event like a festival, or after a big day of walking around the city, the number one thing people are comparing is their step count.
Step count is a simple way to see how active you’ve been throughout the day, and in a society that is increasingly sedentary, I genuinely believe that having a device with a fairly accurate step counter will do the trick. In the video below you can see the creator tests common fitness watches to see which one tracks 1,000 steps the most accurately.
From this video, you can see that the Pixel Watch 2 got the closest to the actual number of steps taken by the creator. It is worth mentioning the Google, who makes the Pixel watch, also purchased Fitbit, so I think both are good options if you’re looking for a wearable fitness tracker that will give you all the basic information you need, with a user-friendly dashboard in their app.
I have to confess that I really love Google’s Pixel lineup of products. I bought the Pixel 2 phone back in the day and loved it and would truthfully buy it again if I wasn’t committed to the iPhone due to my social circle all owning iPhones.
I also was very close to buying a Pixel watch last spring when I was looking to replace my Fitbit Versa 2 that had been damaged. However, due to my budget constraints at the time, I decided to go with a Fitbit Versa 4 over the Pixel watch.
And again, as someone who is now just getting to the gym as part of my daily routine to keep myself in shape, a wearable watch like the Fitbit, Pixel watch, Apple watch or the Garmin vivo series are great. They’ll track physical activity, they typically have different exercises you can track on the watch and in their app, they have great features like timers, alarms, and activity reminders, and tick all the boxes that the general population would look for in a fitness tracker.
In conclusion: What Wearable is Worth it to YOU?
Wearables in the fitness industry really have changed the way we think about and track our health and wellness efforts. I think from both a personal trainer standpoint, and from the perspective of someone who cares about human health, the fact that we have these devices available to us is amazing.
I think with all technology and anything that stores data, we have to be mindful of the fact that major corporations have our health data, but if this is something that truly concerns you then there are ways to protect yourself.
Which leads me to my concluding statement: wearables are worth it depending on the worth you place on having that data available to you.
For example, I really value having as much data as possible because I like the idea of fine-tuning my exercise, diet, sleep, etc. to see how it impacts my workouts. This is why the higher-end wearables with better tracking technology are worth the investment to me (when the budget is available). At the same time, buying the Fitbit versa 4 was worth investing in at the time, despite not having all the bells and whistles of the Ultrahuman Ring or WHOOP band, because I needed that basic data to keep me motivated when I was going to the gym.
If you are someone who likes the notification that says you’ve hit your steps or closed your rings for the day, then I do believe wearables are worth it for you. If you want to keep track of your after work run to see if you’re getting faster or running farther, then again, these wearable fitness trackers are definitely worth it because they make tracking that so easy.
Regardless of where you are at in your journey, wearables will always be an investment. So if we are talking about if they are worth it or not, then it ultimately comes down to what worth do you give your health data? My best friend is in great shape, stays active, eats well and has never worn a wearable fitness tracker in her life. She just doesn’t put value in the data. Whereas I am the total opposite.
With that in mind – do you value health data? Have you found wearable fitness trackers help or harm your fitness goals? Let me know in the comments below! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Riley Pearce 