A Months-Long Journey in Search of the Ultimate Fitness Tracker
As wearables gained in popularity, Outside Magazine gave me the opportunity to do a deep dive into behavioral science and feedback—and how fitness trackers can both support and derail attempts at personal improvement.
After two months testing 16 different fitness trackers, I’m sitting on the sofa watching Game of Thrones, jiggling my wrist to push the step count on my Garmin Forerunner smartwatch to the 20,000 mark.
I am a shallow, petty man.
A local 10K in the morning, some yard work in the afternoon, and the constant motion that comes with being the father of an infant brought me to 19,841. Even though I’ve already determined step counts to be a pointless metric for athletes, I’m too obsessive-compulsive to just leave it at that. Yet, walking around the block to reach a specific count of an imprecise measure of an activity I don’t even care about seems less honest than just lying to the Garmin. Better to deceive the watch than myself. So I sit there waving my arm back and forth while Jon Snow strikes an uneasy alliance with the Wildling leader.
It’s no secret that fitness trackers are a mess of a success story. Manufacturers shipped 9.7 million of them in 2013, a number expected to hit 135 million by 2018. The proliferation of wearables was supposed to change our lives. We’d run faster and sleep better, get injured less and lose weight. The problem, of course, is that change is hard. While wearables have undoubtedly helped spur millions of people to be more active, the effect for many can be temporary. Indeed, a report last year from consulting firm Endeavour Partners found that more than half of the people who buy fitness trackers eventually stop using them. A third do so within six months.
“What’s the common experience for individuals? They get a fitness tracker, and it sparks them to start walking,” says John Bartholomew, a professor of health education at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in exercise psychology. “So they walk three miles in the morning, and that gets them 4,000 steps. Over the course of a day, maybe they get another 3,000 and do an extra walk to get to 10,000. After a couple of weeks it’s, ‘I do my walk in the morning, and then I go about my day and I hit my goal.’ The novelty of the information is removed. The step count is no longer useful. And that’s why people set these devices down.”
But that’s a sweeping generalization, data averaged out across the masses. Move a couple of standard deviations away from the center of the bell curve—out toward the motivated fitness junkies who wake up at 5 a.m. for pre-office workouts—and things look different. I started using a bike computer to track speed and mileage 25 years ago and have been getting real-time performance data like power and heart rate for more than a decade. As both an athlete and a tech journalist, I wanted to know how wearables were evolving for more specialized users: those of us accustomed to, say, comparing steady-state power output on Strava. The masses can have—and abandon—their Jawbone Ups. What’s out there for us?
I spent months working my way through fitness trackers built into watches, bracelets, belt clips, apparel, and jewelry. (See here.) I didn’t start a new training routine or pick up any new sports; I didn’t change my bedtime or set weight goals. I incorporated these gadgets into my life, not vice versa, and then watched what happened. Eventually, I settled on a few that made me not just a fitter athlete but also a more effective worker and a better husband and father.
And I have the data to back that up.