How To Build A Healthier Relationship With Your Fitness Watch
Whether you’re a beginner lifter or the gym is your second home, we’ve all fallen victim to using our fitness watches in an obsessive or judgmental way.
Maybe you judge a “good” workout on how many calories you burned.
Maybe adding your friends on your watch has turned friendly competition into hostile rivalry.
Maybe you find yourself feeling like a failure on days that you struggle to close your rings.
Or maybe you find yourself hopping in jogging in one spot at 11:46 pm because you haven’t hit your step goal yet.
And if I’m putting you on blast right now, I assure you there’s no shame in admitting you’ve done/thought any of the above. It’s actually quite a common experience that many of my clients (and even myself) have lived through at one point or another.
There would be times when I’d feel “naked” at the gym on mornings I’d forget my Apple Watch on the charger. I immediately thought I’d have a shitty workout because I wasn’t able to tell how many calories I’d burn that session.
There would be days when I’d hop out of bed, even if I was extremely tired, to get in an extra workout to close my rings.
And looking back, those days sucked.
Fitness should be enjoyable and empowering; and honestly, back then, it wasn’t and it truly disconnected me from my body and all the signals it would give me to indicate whether I had a great workout or not.
In this article, I’ll be sharing with you a few habits that have helped me and my clients build a healthier relationship with fitness watch gadgets.
Get Comfortable With Time Away From Your Watch
For a long time, my watch felt like a part of me. I never left the house without it and I’d feel absolutely distraught if I had charged it the night before and forgot to grab it before leaving home.
Because of this, I began to take days off from wearing my watch.
It started off as one day a week and on those days I was very intentional about listening to my body and taking note of how much activity I did during the day.
How often was I standing from my desk?
How am I feeling physically & mentally during and after this workout?
Am I generally active outside of my workouts?
This skill encouraged me to find other identifiers of how active I truly was.
Then, over time, I gradually just found myself wearing my watch less and less. Sometimes I’d go weeks without wearing it without any concern because I had other factors that could help me measure my movement.
Unfriend anyone who doesn’t inspire you.
On Apple Watch, you can add your friends and get notifications for their movement. You can even challenge them to a competition which is based on your overall calories burned + exercise minutes + hours standing.
For a while, I found myself in a one-sided hostile rivalry with many of my friends.
Instead of their successes being a motivation to me, I found myself comparing and trying to work harder.
The problem with this is that everyone is different. You have different lifestyles, preferred movement, availability in the day, careers, and hobbies.
While you and your BFF may go to the same gym, share the same workout program you bought online, and work desk jobs with about the same hours a week; other factors will affect your activity outcome.
You may show up and kill your workout, but then drive to your desk job, take the elevator to your office on the 12th floor, and after a long day of driving in traffic, want nothing more than to cuddle on the couch with your cat and watch The Bachelor.
On the other hand, your BFF who also showed up for the same killer workout may commute to their desk job via the subway (making them stand and walk more) and their office may only be on the 3rd floor so they choose to take the stairs. And once they’re home from work, they do a quick walk around the block to give their dog a potty break before settling in for the evening.
If you’re finding yourself comparing your stats instead of drawing inspiration from your friend, unfriend them.
It doesn’t mean you have to cut them off as a friend entirely. This just means that you need to remove the factors that encourage competition so that your friendship isn’t ruined further down the line because of a silly fitness watch competition.
Remember That You’re Collecting Data; Not Judging Your Worth
Sometimes you may find yourself judging how “good” you were that day based on your fitness watch stats.
It’s important to remember that this is just data. And collecting data over time will help you see progress.
It’s not an indicator of how “fit” or “healthy” you are on a day-to-day basis.
Set Realistic Goals
If you’re finding that it takes a lot of energy and time to reach the goals set on your fitness watch, it may be time to reevaluate the goals you set for yourself.
Closing your rings should feel manageable on a day-to-day basis. It should feel slightly challenging (where it encourages growth) while also not pushing you too far out of your regular life.
Many years ago, I joined a StepBet that set my daily step goal to 12,000. Prior to this, because I work from home and work a desk job, I was reaching 7,000 steps a day roughly. This challenge really drew too much energy and time out of me. I found myself using the StepBet to procrastinate from other tasks and I’d be hopping around right before midnight really trying to get my steps in.
Not only did it make me feel exhausted; but I kept doing it, even though it sucked because I was scared of failure. I thought “well other people are reaching over 20,000 steps a day. Why can’t I get 12,000?”. And the reason was that it wasn’t realistic for me.
Remember, your watch’s job is to track your activity. Your job is NOT to fulfill the predetermined goals it has created for you.
