It all began with a lie.
The 10,000 steps you’re supposed to be clocking up daily was a number chosen by a Japanese company back in 1965 for a marketing campaign leading up to the Tokyo Olympics to sell a pedometer.
A number that wasn’t quite pulled out of thin air. It was used because the Japanese character for 10,000 looks like a figure walking.
So whatever the scientific underpinnings of perhaps the most widespread health message of our time are, they’re founded more in the psychology of marketing than on any physiological basis.
[In a subject for another post, fitness— and indeed, life—is full of this type of contagion: not common knowledge but common bullshit.]
And like much of this other bullshit—the eternal justification is that 10,000 steps are better than none, and so another falsity gets indelibly written into common sense law.
And you can’t argue with better than none. What you could argue is that:
Step count gives a very narrow measure of both health and fitness.
And walking this distance will take most people the best part of an hour.
When those same people will also cite time as the greatest limiting factor to their getting and staying fit.
And were they to use that time more usefully, they could do some strength and mobility drills and then wash it all down with a mere 5k steps.
Further accruing as much incidental movement as possible throughout the rest of the day.
Just for example. But today I will argue none of those things. Today we’re going to look at the rise of fitness trackers full stop. Piggybacking off the ubiquity of the smartphone you’ll now see these devices wrapped around the chest, wrist or fingers of the active and the wanting-to-be. Or the wanting to appear to be.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that. Indeed, I have gifted these devices to loved ones and, as we’ll get to, have used one myself, but should we Zoom out a bit the inescapable fact remains: if these devices were tracking any measure of societal physical activity they would only be recording our ever declining fitness.
I don’t suggest all fitness problems can be laid at the fitness-tech door, but I do think the problems here are, as I’ve argued since 2010, for much the same reason.
Disconnection from the body.
But first—as goes for anything you might read here—if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. You might keep the following caveats in mind but if you’ve got a tracker and everything is humming along nicely, great.
If that’s not the case, or more pointedly, if you believe a tracker might solve that issue then, on balance, I would suggest not.
What Gets Measured… And All That.
You’ve heard the quote attributed to Drucker, ‘What gets measured, gets managed'? Well, we’re now looking at much more than step count. It varies, but physiological measures like heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), sleep quantity and quality, calories expended, blood oxygen levels, VO2 max, abnormal heart rate alerts, menstrual tracking, ‘strain’ and ‘recovery’ are commonplace, along with distance travelled including gradients and GPS mapping. With damn near everything being tracked, all the time, you can trust your push notifications will be giving you one critical heads-up or another roughly every 78 seconds.
But just how reliable is all this data? It depends.
In terms of absolute accuracy, not really.
Even before it’s further weighed and interpreted by some proprietary software it’s to be viewed with some scepticism, as proven by reports of those wearing multiple trackers telling different stories. If you can further confirm your data from other (credible) sources and have reason to believe the absolute value of your heart rate or any other metric is accurate, great. Otherwise, a grain of salt.
But even if the absolute value is meaningless, that doesn’t mean data viewed relatively— referenced against your data as recorded from the same device—is not useful and the longer you use a tracker and correspondingly collect data you build an ever more accurate picture of changes in your day-to-day health and performance.
Even so, that doesn’t make it useful. Drucker’s statement has merit but here my argument would be for tracking— the verb— not trackers.
Tracking, in the form of a logbook, is the key distinction between the dice roll of random exercise and the steady progress of training. In noting the relevant details you’re not just forced to consider them and your progress or lack thereof, but the very act of writing it down makes it real. A world of difference from believing sweat and fatigue will equate to better.
When necessary, I have clients track various other metrics. Objective ones like weight and waist measures and, as importantly, subjective measures like energy, mood and hunger also. The key reason for doing so is simply because to track something you have to look.
To wear a tracker is to have something do the looking for you.
It also means we are tracking what matters not what is measurable. Trying to rack up 10k a day can be unrealistic for many people, leading to frustration and burnout. As can a focus on any meaningless metric.
If we’re looking at numbers we’re trying to determine if a given behaviour is having a desired outcome and without which we’re guessing. And tracking subjectives like fullness, hunger and fatigue (re)establishes a relationship with the body, recalibrating it so that you come to recognise and trust your bodily signals.
Anything— or anyone— else in the loop that might contradict, confuse or even confirm what you’re experiencing is only a hindrance.
Again, it’s not that a tracker can’t be useful, but here too I would aim it at a specific problem not well addressed via other means, the best example being sleep quantity and quality. But only in so far as it was useful because it’s possible any focus on this data would only cause further worry and corresponding sleeplessness.
So be careful what you measure.
If you’re already doing everything you reasonably can—or are prepared to do— then further information may only lead to unnecessary stress or demotivation. This is not to be misinterpreted as an argument for denial, only that a tracker can be demoralising to a fitness practice in ways that make memories of even the worst P.E. experience look like a picnic, because it’s very hard to pit yourself against the reality of (negative) hard data.
Conversely, a health scare often serves as the ultimate—meaning final— fitness motivator. A negative catalyst the wakeup call for people who have forever struggled to exercise regularly and from that point never miss a beat.
In any case, you can’t unring the bell so before you go looking under the hood, consider that you may be asking questions you don’t want the answer to.
Equally problematic is that it’s easy to use the data to make a case for you. One that absolves you of behaviours that you know run counter to your desired outcome, but that you can more easily dismiss by pointing to your daily step count.
All of which confirms, not surprisingly, that we humans will do what we’re going to do and our tech will underwrite the story one way or the other.
Case in point, last year I wore a tracker for just over 6 months and learned that any alcohol had a devastating impact and slashed my readings —specifically sleep and recovery scores— in half. It didn’t matter if it was half a glass or a bottle.
Positive behaviour: curb drinking.
Negative behaviour: might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
The experience wasn’t without insight— the one above is valuable enough alone — but ultimately it left me cold. Towards the end, I realised I was taking my cues from the tracker. I’d wake each morning and review a recovery score before getting out of bed and noticed this was then informing how I felt.
The tail was wagging the dog, so that was it for me.
My immediate experience was that removing the tracker put me back in relationship with my body in ways I had overlooked when I had the data, but I now recognise only that it was different. I can’t say whether one is better or more aligned than the other. After all, whatever a tracker is telling you is coming from your body only via an interlocutor who can translate, in many respects, far better than we can.
In the higher echelons of sports performance where trackers are commonplace, the information is used by the coach—not the athlete. This is because they want the athlete to be attuned to what is happening, not just on the track or field, but within.
If you have a tracker I’m not suggesting you bin it, only that you are aware of the pitfalls. That you ensure it is working for you and not the other way around. Note also it’s probably worth setting a reminder for quarterly or even monthly audits in this regard because, as with most tech, you can often be neck-deep in these pitfalls without knowing it.
If you want something to track your fitness, give it some fitness to track.
If you don’t have a tracker, or if you do but don’t yet have a well-established fitness practice you can hang your hat on, my advice is to put it aside until then. Anything between you and that is a distraction.
Many will argue a tracker encourages physical activity and if it gets you up and going where’s the harm?
That is the harm. That is the shiny object syndrome that has you ricocheting from one cashpoint to the next, all while never getting fit. It’s the lustre of novelty that will wear off well before you get anywhere close to getting and staying fit.
Again, while fitness trackers have become big business with the market projected to be worth around 60B USD by the end of the decade, these numbers and the number of fit people are inversely correlated meaning either:
Only fit people are buying them. Or that they won’t help you get there.
Train daily and make a point of noticing how that makes you feel, during, as well as 12 and 24 (hours) after. And do that for as long as it takes to know, that it has become your default. That you could go a day or two without, but only if you had to.
Then, sure, try a tracker as a complement to what you have come to learn about yourself. Things you will never learn if you skip that step and go straight to the screen.
Technology is only a tool. And if we look to the order of operations observed at Leftfield to ensure you’re on point, while it is a consideration, it is the least of them.
Health>Fitness>Performace via Principles>Strategies>Tactics>Tools
If you're not doing the basics, a tracker won’t change that. Instead of obsessing over arbitrary targets, focus on what truly matters: investing the necessary time and building consistent, balanced habits first and here a mere two sources of information will tell you everything you need to know.
Your body is the ultimate fitness tracker: it reflects what you do exactly. Other metrics can be useful but the real value will always lie in what can’t be measured: the effort, engagement and intention you bring to the table. In the words of The Greatest:
Don't count the days, make the days count.
Muhammad Ali
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI