Slave To The Game

It’s the new wave and the new rage in town. Apple’s smartwatch, a Garmin watch, a WHOOP bad, an Oura ring, whatever it is people use to track their exercise, calorie expenditure, recovery levels and so forth.

It seems having these things is a must have if you are a fitness or wellness connoisseur.

While I can appreciate the utility of these tools and devices and see their value, they’re simply that; a tool that can aid in your fitness, wellness, health and so on.

I’d like to go in a little bit on how these can be useful devices in our path to whatever we deem for ourselves, while not being totally reliant on some device that isn’t capable of reading into our psychodynamic nature as human beings.

Why a fitness tracker?

These tools are great for tracking things it may be a lot harder to keep up on or do manually (and saves a lot of time too). I won’t go into specific details on what exactly they do, as I’m sure I’ll probably miss some things, however I’m sure if you’re reading this you’re probably well aware of the things they do, and to their credit does well.

They’re super convenient, sometimes you’ll even forget you have them on, and the data they give you can be super insightful and could give you the extra edge when it comes to tracking insightful metrics. Those points I will never argue.

Especially on certain metrics, such as sleep, I think a tracker of the sort will always beat human measurement when it comes to stages of sleep and quality of sleep we had gotten on a nights rest, these are things where I find them to be extremely useful, if you care to track that stuff in the first place.

Or maybe distance on a run, unless we manually measure out how far a long distance run is (and really whose tying to do all that) when a device can automatically correlate it for us, it saves us a lot of time for once again, convenience’s sake. Things that just make sense for a computer to do for us.

You may see what I’m getting at here. These watches are incredible for tracking objective measures in our training. Things that are better off for computers to handle when it comes to measurements in things that can be done at automatic.

What I’m seeing a lot more of, is people utilizing these things for subjective measures. Relying on data points from a computer that is supposed to tell them how they should feel, rather than how they actually feel. Which can only come from one source; themselves.

A misplacement of authority

Particular things I will always give credit where credit is due when it comes to these devices. However, I think often times people tend to put too much obsession over certain things and metrics, where they sort of miss the mark and aren’t looking at the bigger picture.

Where I get lost, and where I see people maybe utilizing these things for the wrong reasons, is where people use them for psychodynamic reasons (behaviors, emotions and feelings). They will often rely on the metrics of their device to come to a conclusion of how they felt about their session, rather than how they themselves actually felt about a session.

A prime example of this that has happened to me in the past;

I would have a session where it was just weight training, maybe an upper body day. Generally speaking, the calorie expenditure of weight training alone might be less than something like running, or a HIIT workout. After completing my session I would look at the total calories burned and see how I didn’t burn as many calories as “I wanted”. Then my interpretation of this data would get me thinking how “it wasn’t a great training session because I didn’t burn that many calories”, or “I didn’t close my exercise ring so it must have not been effective enough.” But why would I think that? After all, my focus of this training session wasn’t to burn as many calories as possible or to completely slay myself, it was to get a good weight training session in, dialing in on high quality movement patterns, and a good stimulus on the purpose and targeted areas of my body in developing particular qualities that I wanted to accomplish for that day. (Then again, maybe it’s my fault for getting stuck into this line of thinking of being tricked by my watch into what entails a “good training session”, but I know others have had similar experiences and thoughts as well).

And that’s the other thing to; just because you did burn a lot of calories and closed your fitness ring, was your session actually meaningful? Or did you just put together a bunch of bullshit exercises that don’t really improve any qualities you’re aiming to increase?

This is often where a fitness tracker device fails; it focuses on total output of a session rather than intent and the purpose of the session in the first place. Things that a fitness tracker or any computer will never be able to synthesize.

I’m not saying total output isn’t important information, especially lets say if you’re goal is calorie expenditure (if you’re trying to lose weight for example), but it doesn’t and can’t tell the whole story.

This is where having regulation within ourselves and learning to trust how we feel (through logic, reasoning and awareness) come into play. As we develop as lifters, trainees, or just people who enjoy exercise and training, we need to develop these qualities in self-regulation to be able to auto-regulate and have discernment in our own training approaches and decisions. How are we able to develop these levels of self-regulation if we constantly revert to some computer telling us when we should and shouldn’t train?

“Recovery Scores”

One thing I’m also suspect on is the “recovery scores” that certain devices have. Some of them even stating that if your recovery scores are low you should take a day off training. Now, I’m by no means stating you shouldn’t have recovery days or that you shouldn’t take a day to rest if you are sick, injured, or just feeling overall very beat up. However I will say “not feeling motivated to train” or “sleeping like shit” from the night before probably isn’t a good excuse to not train. Further, having something attached on your wrist telling you you shouldn’t train is very odd to me.

For me at least, this goes against the whole idea of building foundations of resilience as a core training principle.

When building upon these characteristics of resilience (in the context of physical resilience), we look for adaptations in physicality by increasing the workload, intensity or durations of workouts, thus we become more capable (resilient) by meeting these demands.

It sounds fine and dandy on paper, but what does this actually look like?

It means having that training session regardless if you’re sore, tired, don’t feel like it, don’t feel 100%. This is where the power of effort and mental toughness, or “powering through it” come into play.

Making adaptations in higher levels of fitness, capability and resilience won’t feel “good”, it’s a work in progress and oftentimes uncomfortable.

More on this to come in a future writing.

I won’t completely discredit recovery scores as it may be an insightful thing to keep in mind when looking at other factors, (to be honest I’m not even really sure how these things determine whether you are fully recovered or not). Maybe it’s a sign for you to dial in on your sleep nutrition, for example.

The Human Element

Overall, as I’ve stated I don’t think these fitness tracking devices are inherently a bad thing. They are and can be super useful in specific ways in our training and overall health and performance journey. Better yet, they can help with tracking specific outputs we deem as important metrics in our training. However, we shouldn’t rely on these things as the end all be all when it comes to how we determine if our training was sufficient or not.

Further, these devices shouldn’t be the sole proponent that directs our intent and purpose behind our goals, aspirations, reason and our why. Technology has come a long way, and I’m sure in the years to come it’ll make leaps in innovation in as far how we can further “optimize”, our training.

But I think as long as people are on this journey to make themselves more capable, resilient humans, it requires exactly that; a human approach in making decisions, using ones psychological, sociological and biological awareness to know how to take themselves to that next level, things that ultimately (at least for the foreseeable future) robots, AI and computers can’t compete with. This is also why for ultimate guidance and accountability, personal trainers and coaches are still the best in what they do, not AI. That is, if you’re a good one.