Can you really keep up with the rings on your watch…
Let’s head down the rabbit hole of digital and real life shall we?
What do the metrics on our watch show and do they really tally with real life?
I’m a big fan of tech and it has a place for sure, it can help us understand many metrics, including pacing, distances, patterns and lot’s more on top.
I deliberately missed out heart rate as that’s the top question we get asked about wearable tech, it is now such a vast market that I could write many pages on all of the nuances, so we are going to talk generally and I encourage you to read reviews on any device you like the look of.
Accuracy – Most modern and well regarded heart rate recording watches are within 4-6% or 2-5 beats per minute, this is more than accurate enough for the vast majority of us.
Erroneous readings – there have been a number of studies released across different brands, for the most part they were found to be accurate (within the listed tolerances above) and align with ECG readings within the same tolerances. There are a number of factors which can affect readouts, these include sweat, tattoos, higher impact activity such as heavy footed running which can offset the readings. Important to note that as the algorithms improve so does the overall accuracy and the removal of erroneous readings.
Challenges or goals – many devices now offer a step/calorie/floor goal, these are great incentives to keep us moving and active. One of themes we have noticed is that the goals are increased as a wearer starts to complete them early in the day, on a more frequent basis etc. This leads to a continuing upward rising of the goal, over training then becomes a concern, along with the time/distance require to complete these.
When looking at exercise time, starting with a 30 minute exercise goal per day may not seem that bad, in fact it broadly fits in with the general guidelines for healthy adults. So a little while back I started asking some our members about their goals, very interesting feedback, this clearly doesn’t apply to everyone but offers some insights into what happens in the real world.
I leave the goals the same, that way I feel good completing them – very valid point and you could argue that it keeps everything ticking over.
I used to up the goals using the suggest ones, but it got too high, so I manually changed to to a fixed number – interesting, how much extra does the algorithm think we can do?
I don’t use the goals I just measure my steps and workouts so I know where I am – awesome works for you and makes total sense.
Some other comments from interactions during sessions:
My watch says warming up – half way through circuits, and yes a lot of effort was being put in!
My watch says my heart is 180 – we checked and had it placed at 135 (so between 125-145 with a large margin for error).
To be fair these are a small number in the large use of the wearables, and I think generally display the use case for them being more helpful with monitoring progress and performance.
When looking at the goal side of things, we should consider what is achievable for ourselves and look to keep moderate increases. Look at keeping the increase on the smaller, more sensible side and be aware of the extra time and distances/volumes required to met those daily goals.
We can’t continually increase the goals without end and progress is never as linear as the data would suggest it can be, especially when starting out.
Do we think wearables help, obsoletely, should we be cautious of how they work out what we should be doing, very much so.
Stuck on how it works and what we should be aiming for? Give a member of Team SF a message to help you out info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.