In recent years, fitness trackers, otherwise known as wearables, have surged in popularity. If you’re wondering why the buzz around fitness trackers, read on. Here is Embracing Nutrition’s round-up of how you can tap into the latest science to help optimise your behaviours and enhance your wellbeing.
These devices monitor and record various aspects of your health and physical activity. For example, they can track the number of steps you take, your heart rate, and sleeping patterns.
They’re intended to inform wearers about health metrics to motivate them towards healthier lifestyle behaviours.
At their most basic, fitness trackers count steps, measure distances walked or run and estimate calories burned. They can monitor other activities like running, aerobics and swimming. They often synchronise with a smartphone app to store data over time. However, more sophisticated wearables are becoming available with numerous additional features.
Heart Health
Measuring heart rate can enable you to target different heart rate zones during workouts and to adjust workouts when needed. For example, knowing your resting heart rate, working heart rate and the time your heart rate takes to reduce after strenuous exercise, known as heart rate recovery, can be useful. Meanwhile, measuring respiratory rate can help you best tailor your workouts. A strain measurement in some devices calculates exertion levels during exercise by analysing cardiovascular load and muscular effort combined.
Some wearables measure heart rhythm variability. Previously, this was only possible using ECG machines, accessible within a hospital setting. Knowing your heart rate variability can reveal your resilience to stress. More variability between individual heartbeats is correlated with reduced negative effects of stress on the body.
Other trackers can monitor blood pressure. This allows users to identify any trends in blood pressure readings. These can then be correlated with factors like sleep, diet, and activity levels.
Blood Glucose
Continuous glucose monitoring devices have revolutionised diabetes care. However, they can also be useful if you are looking to optimise your health or prevent disease. Knowing which foods or situations provoke a spike or dip in your blood glucose can help anyone to better manage blood glucose levels. Blood glucose imbalances are an early risk factor for type 2 diabetes and are also associated with elevated inflammation, obesity, and cardiovascular issues.
Oxygen Levels
Some wearables measure blood oxygen level, known as Sp02. Aside from being helpful if you suffer from sleep apnoea, knowing your blood oxygen levels could help detect whether respiratory issues might be affecting your exercise performance. Measuring blood oxygen levels may be helpful to inform workout style, training progress and recovery.
Sleep
During non-waking hours, wearables can track sleep duration and quality. By measuring how you move during sleep, sometimes alongside breathing rate, skin conductivity and temperature (also useful to detect infections, or for women to monitor their menstrual cycle), as well as blood flow, they can give an idea of the stages of sleep. For example, they’ll often report on how much light, deep and REM sleep you’re getting, as well as periods of wakening and restlessness during the night, along with general patterns of your sleep. If a wristwatch feels uncomfortable in bed, try a sleep ring.
Over time, fitness trackers can help build healthy lifestyle habits like movement and sleep. These habits tend to persist, with associated benefits for long-term health. The data they reveal can be illuminating. For example, many people don’t realise how little they move in a day until they use a fitness tracker.
Having real-time data can be very motivating. The ability to track progress towards a goal – the number of steps taken, for example – can encourage the wearer to reach this goal by going out for an evening walk rather than slouching on the sofa. The feeling of accomplishment when reaching a goal can be a powerful motivator for change. And of course they can be used to achieve smarter workouts when training.
Many fitness tracker apps foster accountability by sharing achievements with friends, family, or online communities. Social support has been shown scientifically to improve adherence to lifestyle changes 1
Some wearables have a reminder function, for example after a certain sedentary period. This can be useful when sitting at a desk when it’s easy to lose track of time.
Continuously tracking trends can inform early risk detection for chronic illnesses like heart disease or type 2 diabetes, before symptoms are noticeable. Meanwhile, you can share metrics obtained from wearables with your GP or practitioner.
As anyone who’s walked around the house in pursuit of the last few steps towards a daily goal will know, over-reliance on data from trackers can lead to health anxiety and frustration at missed targets. It’s easy to become fixated on the data. In turn, health anxiety can increase stress and encourage negative lifestyle choices.
Because the science around fitness trackers is evolving, their measurements may not be completely accurate. So, it’s important to use them as a guide only. They can provide useful insights when combined with expert-led medical or practitioner advice.
In conclusion, while fitness trackers provide valuable insights into health and enable you to set goals towards healthier lifestyle habits, they can’t replace expert advice. Functional Medicine uses the incredible power of nutrition and lifestyle to allow the body to heal itself and achieve optimal health, using detailed functional tests to uncover the root causes of disease and a skilled practitioner to assess your health history, symptoms, and goals.
Do you need help with your fitness and health. Having a functional medicine practitioner review your lifestyle could be the answer. Speak to one of our practitioners by booking a FREE discovery call to see if Functional Medicine is for you.
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