There are a lot of new fitness trackers out there to catalogue your health and fitness metrics and they are becoming pretty sophisticated. But this raises a big question: what if your body doesn’t change? Are your fitness efforts wasted?
Are Fitness Trackers Effective?
Fitness tends to focus on the outliers. Those who make big changes in the body get noticed and become the promoters and promotions. They are genetically blessed and usually exceptional in their efforts. The average exerciser lives in a much more modest middle zone. They make smaller gains over longer periods and have less total time that they are willing and/or able to dedicate towards fitness pursuits. These people don’t see massive change quickly. For them, an app or wearable might not be showing huge movement. What happens then?
Some might argue that if they don’t see changes in their metrics, this should be inspiration to work harder, but I fear in reality this backfires. Because we tend to focus on the outliers, what we are hoping to see is often unrealistic. In that case, what the technology ends up doing is making it very clear that you are not achieving what you’ve been conditioned to believe you should. (More about that here)
Are The Goals Appropriate?
I’m not suggesting that people don’t need to have goals or ways to track them. I am saying that not all progress is so easily captured. What if someone gets stronger, rids themselves of low back and shoulder pain, improves their posture, balance, coordination, and blood work all without changing shape? Aren’t those things worthwhile and if so, whose tracking that?!
Conclusion
One of these days it will become a little more widely accepted that it’s not all about dropping pounds and achieving beach bodies and rippling muscles. Not only are these things harder to reach than we are led to believe, but they are also not the whole point of health and fitness. Personally, I think they aren’t even in the top 5 most important reasons for pursuing a healthy and active lifestyle. For now though, I guess we will just have to keep plugging in our weight and hope that the dial moves.