Nowadays so many people wear fitness trackers that they’ve become totally commonplace. Before tech companies starting adding health trackers into watches and phones, heart rate monitors and pedometers were the generally the reserve of researchers and medics. Most people didn’t know what they were tracking, or what they were going to do with the data anyway!
That changed when the companies who make the monitors started to provide data tracking and comparison software into their apps. You then had a visual representation of what your workout and effort looked like and could compare it to previous workouts you’d done. You could also see how the workouts you were doing were impacting your health and fitness overall.
For the first time ever the average Joe had meaningful training data, making using a heart rate monitor worthwhile. The accuracy of these devices has been assessed in the lab and as long as you are buying a good quality brand, they’re going to give you accurate and reliable data.
So with a lot of your physical data immediately available, let’s answer the question ‘What data is worth tracking'?
Heart Rate
Personally speaking, I think this one is really worth tracking. It gives you a live figure of exactly how hard you are working and can inform exercise choice going forward. This is useful for both personal trainers and general exercisers alike - by tracking data during a workout you have an accurate gauge of exactly how hard a workout is, so you can adjust your exercise programming based on facts, not opinion.
We know from research that when you are wearing a heart rate monitor, you are not only more likely to spend time exercising, but you’re also likely to spend more time exercising at higher intensities. In English, this means that wearing a heart rate monitor will subconsciously change your behaviour so you’ll work longer and harder in training.
Worth Tracking? Absolutely…
Calorie Burn
There has been a lot of debate about assessing calorie burn over the years, because gym machines are typically wildly inaccurate when it comes to assessing the calorie burn during a workout. When we assess calorie burn via a heart rate monitor though, we are given a much more accurate figure (as long as the monitor is adjusted for the user’s data). Thanks to the advances in technology we can now account precisely for calorie expenditure in a given workout, day or week.
This information is extremely valuable for anyone who is looking to lose or gain weight because it allows you to adjust your diet with far greater precision. Before accurate energy expenditure data was available to the mass market, dieting was a far more crude and much less precise endeavour.
Worth Tracking? Absolutely…
Time to Recovery
The time to recovery feature of most heart rate monitors is based on the workout intensity. It basically gives you an estimated time period during which you ‘shouldn’t’ be training, in order to allow for sufficient recovery. At best , it’s an inexact science because it doesn’t allow for individual differences in recovery time, nor does it incorporate sleep quality, sauna use, recovery clothing wear and nutritional factors. Recovery is such a variable process that it’s impossible to gauge accurately with such a limited data set.
Whilst recovery is very important to health and performance, you can mostly get a ‘feel’ for how you are doing. If you’re tired, you know you’re tired - you don’t need a watch to tell you so! At best, use it as a guide, but don’t base many training decisions on it.
Worth Tracking? Not really…
Sleep Time and Quality
There’s a lot of opinion around on sleep time and quality, but the data is pretty hard to pin down for accuracy. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but the most important one is because we have different sleep patterns depending on the stage of life we’re at. New parents for example are less likely to achieve great quality sleep on account of waking up multiple times per night with a baby! On the opposite side of that coin, people without children and limited time pressures probably sleep fantastically well!
A heart rate monitor measures sleep quality based on your heart rate and your movements during the night, but this isn’t a particularly accurate measurement. You may be a particularly active sleeper in the sense that you toss and turn, but that needn’t be because you were awake - this can happen in your sleep. I personally have had really good quality, refreshing sleep and then have seen my sleep quality monitor on my watch say I slept badly, so I’d take the info with a pinch of salt. As with the recovery tracker, you’ll know when you’re tired - you won’t need your watch to tell you that!
Worth Tracking? Not really…
Steps
The original form of activity tracker was the pedometer and that is where the 10,000 steps suggestion came from. It has been around as a baseline suggestion of daily activity for around 50 years now and serves an excellent guide for movement - even on days when you haven’t managed to get a workout in, hitting 10,000 steps shows you’s haven’t been completely sedentary. With a 5km run typically clocking in at around 4,000 steps, it shows that in order to hit 10,000 steps in a day you have spent a significant chunk of it on your feet.
The concern over tracking steps is down to how easy it is to manipulate. Washing up, playing a guitar and a whole host of other activities can trick your pedometer into counting steps you didn’t do. There’s even disadvantages in the design, which when tested under lab conditions have shown the step counters to be inaccurate. What this means is that where it can be an accurate gauge of activity, it’s not something to hang your hat on - it’s a rough guide at best.
Worth Tracking? Yes - but don’t make too many decisions based on the data!
Overall Opinion - Are Heart Rate Monitors Worth it?
The answer here is an overwhelming YES! There’s so much value in just the heart rate, calorie burn and overall activity recording alone that you can easily justify the cost. That, plus you’ve got a reliable watch for good measure!
If you’re serious about training and are interested in the quantified self movement, where you measure and monitor your own physical data, they’re excellent. When you add on top of that the app support and the fact that you’ll have a far more detailed training diary (from a physical output point of view) than you could ever record yourself, so they’re certainly worth it. They also give you detailed data that can help you programme exercise and nutrition with far more detail than ever before.
Which Heart Rate Monitor Should I Go For?
Like anything in life there are pro’s and con’s to different models - are you after aesthetics or function? How important is battery life? What’s your budget? Do you need GPS and different sports profiles?
Whilst some people like the variety and accessibility of the Apple Watch and the Samsung version, they’re not brilliant when it comes to training specific functionality and more importantly, accuracy.
If you’re more interested in the accuracy and functionality as a heart rate monitor and training tracker, the two best brands are Polar and Garmin. Of the two, Polar are trusted in labs around the world on account of their accuracy - they’re pretty much market leading in that sense and they have a world-class app called Polar Flow. They have fantastic functionality and a lot of different sports profiles, but some don’t think they look as stylish.
Garmin make stylish watches that have excellent profiles for different sports also, but they can be a little confusing because they measure activity in terms of ‘Garmin calories’ rather than overall. They’re slightly less accurate than Polar and generally more expensive, but they are probably better looking (depending on your opinion of course!)
Go with either brand and you won’t go far wrong. Here’s a couple of the mid-range watches from both…
At AdMac Fitness we’re not about fads, fashions and short term fixes. We want you to succeed properly over the long term, so with our help and advice you can get your fitness back on track! If you’d like us to help you, contact us on 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!