This post was last updated on July 5th, 2022 at 09:09 am
Fitness trackers are one of the few trendy gadgets that encourage healthy habits. They don’t tempt you to binge-watch TV shows or scroll through your social media feed. They don’t offer to vacuum your floors or mow the lawn for you. Rather, they aim to get you off the couch, and some even buzz if you’ve been motionless too long. But do you need a fitness tracker to lead an active lifestyle?
While fitness trackers seem like the ideal counter-punch to our increasingly sedentary culture, I hesitate to enthusiastically promote them because their makers often oversell their transformative powers. They can be a great tool, but they alone cannot free you from a sedentary rut. Fitness trackers can collect and show you a bunch of data, which is useful. But no gadget can change you. Only you can change you. Ultimately, you are your best fitness tracker and your best motivator.
Keys to transformation: awareness, perseverance and a plan
The keys to transforming from a sedentary lifestyle to an active one are awareness and perseverance. And you might need a system or plan to guide you toward your fitness goals. At the heart of your transformation is your vision and your ability to see the constant choices between activity and inactivity.
Listen to your body, and it will tell you whether it’s time to get up and go for a walk. In fact, you perhaps started using a fitness tracker because you were listening to your body. Maybe you felt too winded when you climbed stairs at work. Maybe you became too easily fatigued. Whatever the reason, you listened.
A fitness tracker isn’t a prerequisite to learning how to move more. You already have everything you required, namely yourself.
If your goal is to reach 10,000 steps a day, an amount some fitness experts link to lower mortality rates, a tracker can tell you whether you’ve made it. That information might motivate you to walk more than you otherwise would, at least in the short run. But for many people who seek an active lifestyle year after year, a fitness tracker alone might not cut it.
Indeed, about one in three people stop using their fitness trackers shortly after purchasing them, according to market research. James Levine, who studies sedentary lifestyles and wrote a book about it (“Get Up! Why your chair is killing you and what you can do about it”), says many people tire of these devices after about three weeks.
“By then, most people recognize what they need to do to maintain low sit times and high activity times; thereafter, they stop using the device,” he writes in “Get up!”
Read: One house painted, 13,941 calories burned!
Use fitness trackers to monitor your progress
For this reason, Levine says fitness trackers are best suited for starting up a new activity and measuring its impact. He recommends using a tracker for only three weeks and then putting it away. After three months, pull out the tracker to see whether your activity levels are still on track. If you’re not happy with the data, use the tracker for a few more weeks before putting it away again.
I like Levine’s approach. Fitness trackers can help you monitor your transformation, but they don’t create your transformation.
For example, let’s say you decide to start going on walks every day after eating lunch. You might want to wear a tracker for a few days before starting the walks to find out your activity levels. This will enable you to compare the impact of your post-lunch walks to the period before you started the walks. Over three weeks, you use your fitness tracker and discover your post-lunch walks are adding a significant number of steps to your day.
That’s good information to have, but whether you’re getting 1,000 or 3,000 additional steps is not the point. The point is, you’re living a more active lifestyle. You’re walking more because you know it’s good for you. You can feel a difference. Maybe you have a little more energy in the afternoons, or maybe you’ve been able to lose a little weight. Maybe you’re feeling more confident. A fitness tracker might help you confirm these feelings, but you alone prove it.
How I use a fitness tracker
With all that said, if you feel wearing a tracker helps you, use it. In fact, I’ve been using a fitness tracker, a Fitbit, the past four months. I bought one as a way to quantify the impact of some of the frugalmatic activities promoted on this website. (For example, mowing the lawn adds about 6,000 steps to my day. Raking the leaves adds about 4,000. Playing with the kids—5 to 5,000 steps.) Many of us want data and numbers, and so I’m using a Fitbit to collect data to see which frugalmatic activities yield the most steps.
I assure you that many people out there are more frugalmatic than myself. They bike to work (I miss biking to work now that I work from home); they harvest firewood and chop it by hand (I don’t have a fireplace or wood furnace); they work in a large garden (we have a small raised-bed plot).
Still, I strive to build as much activity as possible into my day, whether it’s shooting hoops, doing yard work, walking to the store or making something in the workshop.
I did these activities before I had a Fitbit, and I continue to do them with a Fitbit. Few of my decisions are consciously influenced by my Fitbit. Don’t get me wrong, though. I occasionally check it. I do feel some satisfaction when I hit step No. 10,000. It’s a fun gadget. But it doesn’t change my approach to analyzing the myriad of possibilities for moving more and sitting less
How fitness tracker marketing misleads
My problem isn’t with fitness trackers but with how they’re marketed. Fitness tracker manufacturers promote their products as transformative, and some users truly believe these gadgets are transformative. But this marketing strategy inevitably sets up some users for disappointment. It prioritizes technology above the inner-strength required for transformation: awareness, perseverance and a plan. A fitness tracker can help you monitor your progress, but it’s not progress itself. And it’s not a plan.
Fitness trackers have gone beyond collecting data, as recent innovations focus on games and competitions to draw more interest. However, such novelties wear off over time. These devices aren’t calling us to examine the root cause of our sedentary lifestyles. They might remind us to move, but they’re not showing us why we need reminding. They invite reaction but not reflection.
They do invite more smartphone use, however. Many fitness trackers promote smartphones to deliver data to their users. (I link my Fitbit to my laptop, but it’s designed to be linked to a smartphone.) Indeed, Google is seeking to acquire Fitbit for $2.1 billion. Google, of course, makes the widely used Android smartphone platform. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know how I’ve linked smartphones with unhealthy and sedentary lifestyles. Fitbit’s alliance with a technology that keeps many people in their chairs is indeed ironic.
The credit goes to you
Again, I’m not saying to throw out your fitness tracker. Just be mindful of its role. You can go wrong by thinking a fitness tracker will lead you to a more active lifestyle. If you are living a more active life, the credit goes to you. You’re the one making the effort. You’re the one demonstrating awareness and perseverance. You’re the one making the decisions to move more and sit less. You get the kudos. The fitness tracker is along for the ride.