FOR OVER SEVEN years, I was a slave to Fitness Trackers. It started with a Jawbone and ended recently with a Motiv Ring.
I’m a regular visitor to California, where my children were born, and in early 2013 I noticed a few friends with an exciting bracelet. They told me this was the latest thing, a bracelet that measured your daily steps, sending the data to your phone. It also looked very stylish – an attractive, sleek, black twisted bracelet, an incredible, functional conversation piece. I ordered one before I left.
I loved wearing one. I knew all about the declared health benefits of doing 10,000 steps a day, so I set mine at 15,000 and was motivated to not only do this daily but sometimes exceed it. It was my challenge, but I was also inspired by the bracelet’s attention and by answering the curious questions. It felt good to be noticed. These were early days for fitness trackers, so I don’t remember it doing much more. The Jawbone can track your sleep and monitor your calorie intake, but that’s all additional data entry rather than watching your activity level.
I soon moved onto a Fitbit bracelet and again enjoyed monitoring my steps. However, I soon got tired of the bracelet as it didn’t quite fit my clothes style. I found a Fitbit that would fit on my bra and wore that for a while. It still didn’t do much more than monitor steps and rarely picked up my cycling, which was my primary sport.
It didn’t take long for me to realise how easy it was to take 10-15,000 steps a day and, as I was already reasonably fit, I stopped seeing the benefit. I realised that steps were one thing but what mattered was increasing my heart rate.
So then started to look for a fitness tracker with a heart rate monitor. My husband bought me one of the first Apple watches, but I hated that from the start, mainly because it had such useless battery life – it was worthless. The Fitbit did have a heart monitor bracelet, but it wasn’t that sexy.
My solution again came from California with the Motiv Ring. This totally worked for me. I wore it on a finger on my right hand, and to me, it was stylish, discreet and very functional. It measured my heart rate, so I quickly reached and exceeded the recommended 250 minutes of active minutes a week, often doing that in just one day. You could tell it what activity you were doing: swimming, cycling or even having sex! It also showed me my max heart rate and resting heart rate, so I could monitor myself doing HIIT sessions. Also, as a bonus, it would record my sleep pattern to assess how much sleep I got each night and the quality of the rest. And people noticed it and asked questions.
However, I soon realised the limiting aspects of a fitness tracker. Initially, I liked monitoring my heart rate but soon questioned what to do with that data. I didn’t have a heart problem that I needed to keep under control; that if I got out of breath and not able to perform, I needed to stop, bring my heart rate down before I could continue. The level of effort and quality of my breath was enough of a monitor; I didn’t need actual numbers.
The same was true of the sleep monitor. It showed me how many hours of vertical activity I got at night, so how still I was compared to how twitchy I was and recorded that. I realised the only way for this to be helpful was to write down what and when I ate or drank before I went to sleep and what I did, like watching a movie or checking my phone before bed. I could analyse this and edit my activities to see if my quality of sleep improved. Ultimately, I realised I didn’t have a sleep problem, and I couldn’t be bothered to analyse my non-situation too profoundly.
So my Jawbone, Fitbits, Motiv Ring and Apple Watch are now lying in a drawer, not collecting data. They served their purpose, and all the devices have moved on significantly since the first models I bought. My Apple phone now records my steps as I carry it everywhere, and I look at it occasionally to show off how far I walked that day, but nothing more. They are only as good as the data they can collect or the data you enter, but after a while, for me, they had served their purpose.
