10 Reasons Why Listening to Health Apps May Backfire (and What to Do Instead)
This post is part of Find Your Fit Tech , a fitness wearable buying guide from Lifehacker. I ask tough questions about whether wearables can really improve your health, how to find the one that’s right for you, and how to make the most of the data wearables have to offer.
Typically, you buy a fitness tracker and install health-related apps because you want to be healthier, so it seems natural to chase whatever metrics the apps give you. But these metrics exist because they’re easy for an algorithm to measure and evaluate, not because you’ll be healthier if you try to maximize each point every day.
Here are 10 ways your fitness apps may be confusing you, and what to do instead.
Hurry up with your warm-up
Every app or gadget that can track runs can tell you how far you ran and for how long. From these two numbers, the little chips in your phone can’t help but calculate your pace. “I run 12 minute miles?!” – you might say, looking at your watch. “Well, next time I’ll have to run faster.”
Many running workouts should actually start with a slower warm-up, where you jog slowly or gradually increase the intensity after a brisk walk. The real workout begins after the warm-up is over. But if you write it all down, a leisurely warm-up will slow down your overall pace. And you’ll also have a hard time running slow enough on easy runs if you’re taking the overall time as a personal judgement.
What to do instead : Either mark the warm-up (and any active rest between intervals) as a separate circuit or segment, or ignore the overall pace.
It’s too late to sleep
Sleep trackers can help you understand if you’re getting enough sleep and how you can get more sleep. But they’re so focused on assessing sleep every night that you often find yourself wondering, “How can I get a better sleep score tonight?” rather than “How can I even sleep better?”
Let’s say that ideally you would like to get up at 6 am. If you’ve been up until midnight, the best way to improve your sleep quality is to skip your morning workout and see if you can sleep until 8am. But if your goal is to sleep better overall , it would be smarter to leave your alarm for 6 a.m., no matter how late you go to bed. Tomorrow evening you will be even more tired, so you will go to bed earlier and be back on track pretty soon.
What to do instead : Focus on developing habits that promote good sleep (like a dark bedroom and a consistent daily routine), rather than treating each night as a different test to pass.
Skipping workouts when your performance is low
Apps and gadgets that give you a “readiness” or “recovery” score often say they do this so you can make informed choices about how intensely you want to train. But any good coach will tell you that it will be difficult for you to make progress if you are afraid of fatigue. If you follow a well-designed program , you will have days, and sometimes entire weeks, where you’re training hard and feeling a little overwhelmed.
Sleep trackers can help you make sure you recover as well as you would under training stress, but if you took a rest day every time your recovery rate was low, you’d be missing out on a lot of good training. . I promise that your body is resilient enough to withstand the stress of training .
What to do instead : Find a good program (or trainer, or coach) and trust the process. Compare your results with what you would expect given your training. Low score after a tough week? This is fine. High score after a hard week? Perhaps your program is not challenging you enough. Low score after an easy week? Now you may start to wonder if you’ve been training too hard.
Avoid workouts that don’t give you “steps”
Gadgets that track steps (now on every phone) are great for motivating you to be more active throughout the day. Each shopping trip or walk with the dog brings you a few steps closer to your goal, although remember that 10,000 steps is an arbitrary number and you may want to set a different goal.
The danger is that you start thinking about your workouts and activities in terms of what will get you the most steps. Trying to decide between a spin class or a hike? Jogging or strength training? It’s easy to think that steps are the deciding factor.
What to do instead : Think about what your body needs and wants, not just how high you can increase your step count.
Missing out on the best parts of strength training
Strength training is beneficial in many ways. It helps you avoid minor injuries , perform daily tasks more easily, have a good quality of life as we get older , and maintain a healthy physique as you gain or lose weight. Its job is not to keep your heart rate high for a certain number of minutes. (You’re thinking about cardio.)
But if you’re using a gadget to track strength training, it’s tempting to try to keep your heart rate the same as during a cardio workout . This means you’ll have to take shorter rest breaks between exercises, which in turn means you won’t be able to lift as heavy weights. You’ll end up missing out on a lot of the benefits of strength training because you were pursuing the wrong goal.
What to do instead : Either don’t track your strength training with a gadget that measures your heart rate, or use the data only to note that you completed a workout and how long it took. Rest between exercises and find out how strong you really are!
Assuming your watch knows how many calories you’ve burned
One of the benefits of fitness trackers is that they know how many calories you actually burn when you exercise or even when you go about your day. Unfortunately, calorie burning isn’t that predictable, and your watch is simply making bold guesses .
What to do instead : If you’re trying to figure out how much to eat, track how much you eat and see if the scale goes up or down. Adjust accordingly. If your watch thinks you’re burning 2,500 calories a day but your weight remains constant at 2,300, then you’re burning 2,300 calories.
Worries about the quality of your sleep
Sleep trackers are pretty good at telling you how much time you spend in bed, but they’re bad at telling you when one stage of sleep ends and the next begins. I’ll never forget the first week when I wore both the Oura ring and the Whoop bracelet and Oura told me I wasn’t getting enough REM sleep and Whoop said I was sleeping too much.
What to do instead : Take sleep app ratings with a grain of salt. Focusing too much on the quality of your sleep can create a “nocebo” effect, where you feel tired because you expect to feel tired . Instead, pay attention to the overall amount and consistency of your sleep.
Set yourself up for failure with the streak
Longtime Lifehacker readers know this is a pet peeve of mine: an app that thinks it’s pushing you toward healthy habits, only to reward you with a habit streak that will inevitably leave you broke and feeling terrible .
The stripes are ending. Each episode ends. Do you really want to be one of those people who sets reminders to track a meditation “workout” every day on vacation so you don’t lose a single episode? It’s not worth it. Or, if so, admit to yourself that you’re playing a game with your app—it’s not healthy.
What to do instead : Honestly? Break the streak. Do the workout without tracking it specifically to free yourself up. Take a weekly rest day. You’ll probably need it anyway.
Worry too much about your calories
Crash diets can be a gateway to eating disorders for some people , and tracking calories can sometimes have the same effect. If you can track your calories and stay mentally healthy, that’s great. But that doesn’t mean you need to focus on calories.
For example, you may start to feel shock from any large meal. There’s nothing wrong with eating an 800-calorie lunch as long as it consists of foods that fit into your diet in a healthy way (like lots of protein and vegetables). But if you’re afraid of logging too much food, you might decide to only eat half of that meal and then find yourself hungry and rummaging through the snack cupboard later. Or, to take another example: you might avoid logging certain snacks or condiments for fear of adding up to a large number, but if you logged more honestly, you’d see that your body is actually capable of processing more calories than you thought. .
What to do instead : Accept that eating is part of how you eat. If you’re sure you want to track calories, use an app like Cronometer , which is less visually judgmental.
Chasing the “good” number in almost everything
What is a good HRV reading? What is a good resting heart rate? What is a good VO2max? What is a good running pace?
I won’t call these numbers “meaningless” because there is some usefulness to them. But these are not the assessments by which you should judge yourself as an individual in the Universe. Each number means something in context and means little outside of that context.
For example, if you’re currently running at a 10 minute mile pace, it doesn’t matter if that’s “good.” If you want, you can train to run faster. Or take HRV, which stands for heart rate variability. This number can be useful in determining whether you have been under a lot of stress from training or life; it is not something that can be meaningfully compared to others.
What to do instead : Ask yourself what really matters. The number on your screen doesn’t mean anything in real life, but you might be improving your heart health or your ability to race. Focus on those end results rather than your daily score.