To guarantee our independence, Digital Health Central is only supported by our readers. Digital Health Central is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you buy through our links, we may earn a small commission. We also participate in affiliate programs with CJ, ShareASale, and other sites. Thank you for your support.
Complete fitness is the goal we are all striving for. Nowadays, smartwatches are health powerhouses. With multiple sensors monitoring heart rate, activity levels, stress, sleep tracking, blood pressure, and even nutrition, we carry the ultimate coach at our wrist. But what fitness features are the most relevant to be and stay healthy?
Monitor your heart rate
Heart rate sensors are now standard smartwatch features. More than just recording the heart rhythm, fitness trackers now offer to analyze your electrocardiogram (ECG) and even detect atrial fibrillations. The new Apple Watch Series and Fitbit Sense are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Even if a smart device never replaces a medical ECG, early detection will allow early detection of pathologies and be life-saving.
Will it be to detect heart abnormalities or to improve your health? Monitoring your heart is critical. To achieve your fitness and weight loss goals, monitoring the heart zones is critical. In these zones, the benefits of aerobic exercise will truly occur.
Monitoring and staying in the “target heart zones” while exercising will ensure proper training.
For less than $100, the Fitbit versa 4 is a great choice. By monitoring your heart rate, you will both know your exercise is strong enough to produce results but not too hard and get into dangerous territories. The guidelines recommend 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise. Understanding your heart rate zones is the way to understand your training’s effectiveness while always staying safe.
Tracking the blood oxygen levels will also help in defining the effectiveness of your workouts. When exorcizing, the blood oxygen saturation will drop a little. Normal levels are above 95%.
The more your body will be fit, the lesser the drop. Keeping an eye on your saturation will then an excellent indication of how your body is evolving and your performances are improving.
Stay motivated and achieve your goals
One of the keys to achieving complete fitness is to stay motivated. Johns Hopkins cardiologist Seth Martin, M.D., M.H.S., said, “Being more active and changing your habits is important, but it can be difficult. Tracking likely helps a lot of people when combined with a clear goal to shoot for.”
For not very motivated people, wearing a fitness watch is great to keep track of the progress and stay motivated. Quality exercise is also better than just focusing on quantity. No need to walk 10 miles on a single day and forget the rest of the month. But, we sometimes need a little help to stick to our goals.
The Fitbit premium subscription allows you to share your progress and benefit from a real coach’s personalized advice. It is an amazing way to make new friends and to exercise rightly and, most importantly, consistently.
Control your calories burnt and diet
More than just tracking your daily number of steps, new generation fitness trackers also automatically track the calories intake. There is no need to enter them manually; the Healbe Gobe is part of a new generation of smartwatches that will keep track of how many calories you’ve consumed using a bioelectrical impedance sensor measuring the cells’ fluid flow.
Better be careful, though, as some fitness trackers such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch are known for not tracking calories burnt very accurately. New operating systems are constantly released, though, and as time goes by, the calorie count may become more and more accurate.
Monitor your sleep
Many wearables, IoT devices, or apps exist to track your sleep. Even smart pillows are getting clever and help reduce your snoring and wake up refreshed and ready for a good day.
Modern smartwatches do not track wrist movements anymore to track sleep; they focus more on the sleep stages. They are classically divided into four: REM (when we dream), light, deep or awake. The difference with early models is that the stages are defined by analyzing the heart rates and not the movements of the wrist anymore.
Defining the quality of sleep can be complex. By computing a sleep score, smartwatches aim to help at understanding the holistic nature of sleep. Collecting sleep data is not enough.
To be really useful, it is critical to find correlations between your lifestyle and your sleep quality. When wearing a fitness tracker, you will easily know about your activity patterns.
Are you exercising too much, not enough, not at the right time. Try to change your daily routine and check the influences of these small behavioral changes on your sleep quality. To achieve complete fitness, you also need to know how your diet, screen time, or environment influence your sleep.
Snoring can link to sleep apnea and have serious consequences on your general health, such as strokes or heart attacks. By measuring the blood oxygen saturation, fitness trackers can detect anaerobic episodes.
Forget about stress and relax
Most of the smartwatches on the market use their built-in heart rate monitors to assess stress levels. It may not be the most accurate way to do it, but it provides continuous analyses. Depending on the level of anxiety, they may even suggest some breathing or relaxation exercises.
The new Fitbit Sense does not rely on the Heart Rate Variability on a new Electrodermal Activity sensor (EDA). By analyzing your skin’s humidity, the conductance will change, and the level of stress will be defined.
Feeling nervous is not a bad thing as it will help the body prepare for a potential threat. Chronic stress is bad, though, and can lead to severe chronic diseases. 18% of adults suffer from chronic stress.
A fitness tracker is one of the best way to easily control your anxiety and relax when needed.
Complete fitness is a state of mind
More than a collection of physiological data, complete fitness is a state of mind. Combining different factors and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is the way to go. Motivation is often what is missing to push the boundaries and change bad habits.
A fitness tracker is not the ultimate solution, but there will be no excuse not to change, at least by providing relevant information. Being healthy is a journey that should be done one step after another. What matters is always the first step, and after that, just let your fitness watch guides you.
