Put your hand up if you have ever found yourself marching on the spot to hit your step goal whilst cleaning your teeth before bed.

Has your tracker left you in a bad mood because it had a glitch halfway around your run and didn’t record your distance?

Or

You feel sure there must be something wrong with it as there is no way your heart rate can be that high!

Maybe you laid awake beating yourself up about not hitting your target for the day. 

I’ve been guilty of all the above.

Which made me think.  The gadget that is actually meant to be improving my health is at times not doing much for my mental health. If the pressure of making those little rings close is ruining my sleep then it’s negatively affecting my training.

First let’s address the fact that even the best trackers have a margin of error, so berating yourself for not getting those last 10 steps is a waste of your energy. It could be that you have done a lot more or hate to break it you, a lot less! 

If the activity you are doing is to get some headspace and “Me” time do you really need to know your heart rate, average cadence or blood oxygen levels. Yes, there is a gadget for everything, but do you know how to use it? You can use a power drill to put a hole in the wall but if all you want to do is put up a picture hook you probably don’t need it? There is a high possibility it will damage more than your wall! Fitness gadgets can stress you out with the amount of feedback, especially if you have no idea what half of it means.

Now before I get emails from those saying how do you know if you are hitting your goals? If your goal for the activity was to get out of the house and get some fresh air, that’s pretty easy to track without a gadget.

Dr Mike T Nelson did a great podcast on the difference of “Exercise vs Recreation” in it he says “Exercise has a goal; recreation looks like exercise but is not tracked it’s just fun” I love this thinking, we shouldn’t over complicated being active if we do it’s another barrier to actually doing it. 

If, however, you are going to the gym looking to improve body composition or you are training for a marathon you need to track what you are doing. Performance goals need to be measurable; you need to know how far you have to go and if you are heading in the right direction. As much as I see people being drowned in data when they shouldn’t be, I also see lots of people with big goals but no idea what they are doing with their training.

Even if you are exercising for performance, I would recommend that you have days where you move for recreation. Have fun, play a new sport, learn a new skill. Intense training can be all consuming mentally as well as physically, do something where you just move for the joy of it. It will work your body in a different way than normal and allow you to reconnect to how your body feels when it’s active instead of letting a watch tell you.

There is also a thing called a notebook. It may not give you flashy graphs or bright colours but it will stop you looking at your social media post in the gym after logging your sets and reps. Writing stuff down “Old School” helps things to process better, you might actually connect your bad day in the gym to the poor night’s sleep you had.

If you are just looking to get movement do you need to track? You just need to ask yourself; did I get out; did I have fun, and did I put it in my diary for tomorrow.

Still not sure what direction you should be taking, you could always hire a coach? I might know someone who could help…….