Does anyone else out there have a vaguely unhealthy relationship with their fitness watch? I know it’s supposed to be fun, right? For entertainment purposes only? Thus runs the disclaimer? I’ve always liked walking, which honestly is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself. Not as rough on the knees as running is, gets the heart rate up, good cardio. As a teen, whenever I got upset about something (and let’s face it, as a teen, that’s quite often), I would head out and walk. Who knows how many miles I got in between 13 and 19 years of age? Know why? Because we didn’t wear tracking devices back then. For a while pre-COVID, I was tracking my steps with an iPod nano. I would occasionally get annoyed because the nano would reset and because I’m that guy, I would have to get 10,000 steps from the time it reset. I also ran cross country and played a few seasons of baseball back in high school, but the main routine was walking.
As I explain in my recent post about nutrition, I do have a profound fear of death that led, as we entered the age of high optimization with podcasts and books recommending what I’m coming to realize are insane round the clock things you need to do to try not to die, I bought a fitness watch in 2021, a Garmin Vivoactive, and I loved it at first. It tracked not just my steps but my heart rate, my runs, swimming, my sleep. I could get round the clock data on what my health sort-of looked like. I say sort-of here because obviously a heart rate tracker on your wrist is never going to be as accurate as a chest strap monitor. A wristwatch tracking your deep and REM sleep, well, try wearing two watches of different make overnight and just see whether they’re going to tell you the same thing, they’re not, and I’ve looked up how they track stress and to me, this is probably the least accurate of all other measures. So if you pay too close attention to the measures that are educated guesses at best, you might end up getting frustrated, and at times I did. In the end, I had to disable the stress feed on the home page of the app. It was just an obsession where I was spending way too much valuable time on something I had very little control over.
And at the same time I had purchased this watch, I continued to listen to the podcasts that advised me on courses to take with my exercise routine, one of which was to start lifting weights to retain muscle mass as I age. Now, I’m not going to discount this, because this was good advice, and I’m not going to blame podcasts, at least the ones I listened to, for steering me wrong. In fact, one of the benefits of having the podcasts on my feed (I’ve since taken them off) is that listening to them encouraged me to get outside and run or head into my office space and lift. Kudos for them, but again, like nutrition, it seems like I don’t really need them anymore. But the thing about exercise is it became an obsession. The problem here wasn’t the podcasts, it was the fitness watch’s app truth be told. Or it was a combination of the fitness watch app and my psychology. You see, on the fitness watch app, you can enroll in challenges. They offer challenges for walking, for steps, for biking, for running, for weightlifting, and for yoga. Normal people, I suppose, would see this and think, I like to walk, I’ll do the steps and walking challenge, or I love yoga, let me do the yoga challenge. Me, I look at that and think, I’m going to do all of them! And most months I’m actually able to accomplish all of them. This includes 20 hours biking, 248 miles on the bike, 10 hours running and 50 miles run, 300,000 steps, sometimes there’s a 15K run challenge, and all months there’s a 5k and 10k weekend run challenge, as well as a 40K biking challenge. And because I’m how I am, I enroll in all of them, and I generally achieve all of them.
That’s not me bragging. That’s me being obsessive and turning something that’s supposed to be healthy into what is borderline mental illness. I’ll freely admit it, this is something I talk about with my therapist. What would happen if I don’t win one of the challenges? What? Absolutely nothing! That’s what! I had, in the past, had to leave one of the running challenges here and there because of my hip hurting, because I’ve pulled a hamstring, and it’s not like I turn into some kind of sloth who doesn’t leave his couch overnight. I just don’t get the “badge” and the badge is worthless. So this is my part of it, where I’m at fault: I take it too seriously. But the other half of the blame is the design of the app. Like any social media platform, the app wants you to engage with it. I’m not sure what the incentives are because there isn’t advertising on the app and when I look up the legality, they’re not supposed to be sharing your data with third parties, but increasingly, it’s designed to get you on there. And I suppose that because there aren’t adds, they’ve develop a + account, as in give us some money, you’ll get access to Garmin+ and we’ll give you more chances to enroll in badge challenges and win more (frankly useless) badges. Truth be told, the badge thing is kind of fun, so I can’t hate on it. If only I could shake the need to hit my metrics and take them less seriously. But again, is the app designed to let me do that? For example, it will give me a “fitness age,” which if I lower my BMI, keep my resting heart rate in a certain range, get 75 intensity minutes spread out over 3 or more days, is several years lower than my actual age, even though the concept of a “fitness age” is utter horseshit that no valid scientist would ever take seriously. For example, if I were heading for death at 80 but lower my fitness age by 5 years, does that mean I’m making it to 85? That’s not really how age works, right?
Then, there’s the fact that, after 3 years, I bought another Garmin watch, the Instinct Solar 3. And all that data it collects, well, I wore my Vivoactive alongside of the Instinct, and steps were basically the same, and resting heart rate was basically the same, but the Vivoactive told me that my stress ranking was at rest whereas the Instinct would indicate I was at medium. Not a big deal with the Vivoactive, I could hide stress on the app, but with the new watch, it calculated my sleep score based partially on stress. Yet, if the stress rankings were so wildly different between watches, which could I trust, if I could trust either one. If you told me the Instinct was more accurate (it was the upgrade after all), the readings varied so wildly then as to tell me all 3 years of data from the Vivoactive were essentially worthless. And if those were worthless, what about the next watch that would supposedly be “more accurate?” Would any of these be accurate? What should I believe? Well, maybe I should revert to the entertainment only disclaimer and stop taking any of this so seriously? Maybe it’s not so much an exercise problem as a watch problem? But in that, it’s an exercise problem too.
I probably don’t need to exercise nearly as much as I do. I can probably decouple from the challenges and badges treadmill and be much better off. After all, all of these challenges might help me with keeping in shape, but they also might be running my knees (which are bad in my maternal line) into the ground (and I really don’t want to have my knees replaced at any point in my life). All of these challenges get me up and out and movie, but all that time exercising might just be taking from other parts of my life. I’ve always tried to multitask with exercise. I listen to my podcasts while I walk. I listen to music when I go running. I watch movies while I ride my exercise bike. So I’m still getting a lot out of doing other things while I exercise. But all the mental effort I put into planning when to exercise, looking at when I can do it where it won’t take time away from my family, putting it front and center, I could use that energy and time back to devote to other things that are more important to me, namely writing. So whereas with nutrition, I can confirm I’m probably eating a pretty healthy balanced diet, shrug my shoulders, and stop worrying about how to optimize, cutting my exercise addiction is going to be a little hard. I’d like to be done with optimizing here, but I think it’s going to take me a little extra time to decouple. Do they have 12 step groups for exercise addiction?
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