← The Dr. Shannon Show
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If you are loving what you're learning in the podcast and you want to start applying it to your fitness routine, you can try one of our free classes. No credit card required. Just drop your email to get access. This is a Upper Body Build class taught by myself. To take the class, visit portal.evlofitness.com I'm Dr. Shannon Richie. I'm a doctor of Physical therapy, fitness trainer and founder of Evil Fitness. In the Dr. Shannon show, you'll learn applicable tools to improve your health based on science. Welcome to the show. Hello everyone. Welcome back. If you are interested in buying a fitness wearable, this is what I want to talk about today. There are some features that may be helpful with wearables, but some that should be interpreted with caution. First, I do not think you need a fitness wearable to improve your health. I have an OURA ring. This is not sponsored and I got it for the fertility tracking before I got pregnant and have just kept it ever since. I will say I do like it. I look at my overall steps which if you want to learn more about steps, check out the episode that I just did about how walking affects body composition. I also use it for temperature tracking for tracking fertility. My aura ring also tracks sleep and HRV relatively reliably. But I kind of know when I get a good night's sleep so I don't need to question if I'm recovered or not or not. So I think sometimes fitness wearables can be good for beginners to gain some understanding about their activity level and their recovery, but I also think that it can rob you from really understanding the cues of your own body. For example, I was really sick recently like on my deathbed and my aura ring said that my recovery was quote unquote good. And obviously my recovery was not good, but I could tell from my own body. This is an extreme example, but if I'd simply gone by what my ordering was telling me, then I would have done my workout for that day when clearly my body needed rest. So although I'll break down what to look for and what metrics to ignore, I don't think that fitness wearables are necessary. Only if you're really enjoying kind of looking at the trends and or if it motivates you to stay active. So when you are considering a fitness wearable, what should you pay attention to and what should you ignore? Let's first talk about steps. So I'm a big fan of getting steps in again. I did a podcast all about how walking affects your body composition, but in General, you want to shoot for at least 7,500 steps per day. This is an estimate, and it can be kind of hard to estimate if you don't have a tracker. I often don't know how many steps I'm taking in a day unless I look at my aura ring. Most fitness trackers can pretty reliably track steps, which is again kind of a good metric to pay attention to in my mind, especially if you're trying to get more active. Although step count can be relative relatively accurate, overall calorie expenditure from these trackers is not, so I do not recommend looking at how many calories you're burning overall. Studies show that fitness watches or fitness wearables overestimate expenditure, with some popular watches overestimating by over 211%. This is likely because calorie expenditure is constrained, not additive. Check out episode number 174 where I break this down more. The bottom line is that a fitness wearable simply cannot capture the complexities of your metabolism and therefore I don't recommend putting too much weight into the calorie expenditure number. In fact, I don't recommend tracking calories from your workouts at all. What you can look for in a tracker is trends over time. So although you aren't putting much weight into the calorie number itself, you're looking at how your activity changes over time, especially if you have the goal of being more overall active. If you have the goal of improving your cardiovascular health beyond just looking at steps and some fitness wearables actually give you VO2max predictions. VO2max is a strong predictor of your overall cardiovascular health and is associated with longevity. The best way to improve VO2 max is regular high intensity interval training or sprint training. If you want to learn more, check out I did an episode about REHIT or reduced exertion High intensity interval training. I did a podcast about that and we also have re hit classes on the EVL membership. With the Oura ring you can do a six minute walk test and it predicts your VO2 max. So this is something you can kind of track over time if you are interested in improving your cardiovascular health. One pitfall of wearables at this time is that they don't really do a very good job at giving you any metrics about your muscle mass or your strength. Hopefully this will be improved soon because it really is a huge part of overall fitness and a gap that I think is missing in the wearables industry. So next let's talk about recovery. When you are looking for a Good fitness tracker. I recommend picking one that measures both activity and recovery because we want them to be in balance. Although we want to be active overall, endless activity at the cost of our recovery is not the goal. The earlier generations of fitness wearables encouraged endless activity and like quote unquote closing all your rings, which often caused people to overdo the exercise. And as a physical therapist I saw this resulting in overuse, injuries and burnout and just overall lacking recovery, which we don't want in the long term. So choose a wearable that measures both activity and recovery. For a better picture of your overall health and fitness, look for trackers with a long battery life, potentially days. Again, the Aura will last days because the best way to measure your recovery is done during sleep. So HRV heart rate variability, which is a good indication of your overall recovery status, is a metric that is most reliably measured while you sleep. So if you are investing in a wearable that needs to charge overnight, you might not get as good of a picture of your overall recovery status. Some trackers like Aura use information like temperature, sleep and HRV to give you kind of a readiness score, which I absolutely love. Even better, many trackers adjust your activity goals for the day based on your readiness, so if your readiness is low, your activity goal will drop to encourage more rest. However, just like activity recovery tracking is not perfect in general, you likely know if you feel recovered or not even if you're not using a fitness tracker. So don't you don't necessarily need to rely on it. Next, let's talk about fertility tracking using a fitness wearable. Many of the rings on the market use temperature and heart rate to estimate fertility status, which can be helpful tool when family planning. These rings have a decently reliable way to track fertility, with studies showing the Aura ring coming in at around 83% accuracy for ovulation detection. To be honest, the temperature tracking hasn't been super useful for me. I use natural cycles, I pair it with natural cycles and I just don't think I've been kind of regular enough since breastfeeding to really get an accurate picture of my fertility status. But I know that for a lot of people it works really well. So those are my overall thoughts on wearables. Just to summarize, don't pay too close attention to the active calorie burn because it's likely inaccurate. Look for steps recovery fertility if that applies to you, and potentially VO2 max if that's a goal of yours. I do have to say that my behavior changed zero when I got a fitness tracker. My steps have stayed the same, my sleep hasn't improved, and I haven't seen overall better results. But some people are motivated by those metrics to change their behavior. I just personally think if you're doing all the right things somewhat consistently, you really don't need to invest in one of these trackers unless you're interested in, like, tracking fertility a little bit closer. Hope that was helpful. We will see you all next week, same time, same place. Bye for now.