I think it's fair to say we all have some sort of fitness watch of some kind. Whether you're rocking a Garmin, an Apple watch, a Whoop or another type of wearable, you should have access to interesting data regarding your health and fitness.
Let's take a look at what to focus on in order to properly track your progress and reach your goals.
Calibrating your fitness wearable
If you have a fitness watch, you'll want to input some basic information into it. The more data your watch has about you, the better it can calculate certain things. Most watches will let you enter the following:
Age
Gender
Fitness level
Weight
Depending on which brand you have, you'll be able to enter more advanced data such as
Stride length
Blood pressure
Calories. Most brands now enable you to link a nutrition app like My Fitness Pal
Bed time and wake up time
These are just preliminary settings to help your wearable produce precise data.
Now that we have that done, let's take a look at which data is worth monitoring.
Resting Heart Rate: Overall fitness
The first key data to track is your resting heart rate. The lower it is, the more efficient you are pumping blood throughout your body and the more relaxed your nervous system is. It's a simple proxy for overall health.
As with all health data, this will vary according to your age, gender and training level. For the best guess at what your resting heart rate should be, consult your doctor.
The following chart is for averages only
Your resting heart rate can totally be trained with an effective training program. The easiest way to improve it is with light and easy cardio, classic zone 2 stuff.
Zone 2, or low intensity steady state cardio, is anything that makes your sweat a bit. You should be able to maintain a conversation with someone while doing it.
Any form of cardio activity will do the trick: running, cycling, rowing, stair climber. My personal favourite: hiking.
Hight intensity workouts and group exercise classes will also improve your resting heart rate, just not as much as cardio.
Longer (30 minutes or more) of easy cardio will make your body more efficient at using oxygen, allowing your heart rate to deliver as much oxygen with less beats.
Heart rate variability: the state of your nervous system
Heart rate variability, or HRV, is the difference of time between hear beats. The picture below shows three heart beats, with different time intervals (in milliseconds) between them.
A higher variability between beats is a good sign. It's a relaxed nervous system.
A lower HRV indicates a more agitated nervous system. When you are more stresses, your heart beats faster and at steadier intervals.
Your fitness wearables will usually calculate your HRV over a 5 minute interval. The following chart shows you average recommendations.
Improving our HRV is mainly done by lowering stress. This could be a whole blog post in and out of itself but here is a quick, non exhaustive list of things that will help
Zone 2 cardio. As seen above, this will make your body more efficient at using oxygen. Overall reducing the work done by the heart
Sleep better. Focus on getting those cherished eight hours of sleep every night, get deep, good quality sleep. Avoiding screens before bed is a low hanging fruit for sleep quality. Have a bed time routine and read this article that dives deeper in the subject.
Do anything that helps you relax. Take time to do your hobbies. Unwind (avoid scrolling if possible). Spend time with friends and family. This is entirely up to you and try to do as much of this as possible.
Resting calories
If you were to lie down and do nothing for 24 hours, your body would still burn calories to carry out basic function: keeping your heart beating, digesting foods and all other bodily "maintenance" tasks. These are called your resting calories.
As you put on more muscle, your resting calories will increase. On top of that, the more active your are, the more maintenance your body will have to do.
I find resting calories a good thing to track every months or so. This will take time to increase, unlike the previous two.
Basic strength training will help you achieve this. You can read these two articles which go in much deeper details on the subject.
Total calories: how much work your doing each day
As the name implies, this is all of the calories you burn throughout the day. This includes everything, from basic maintenance body functions, to all the calories you burn just by going about your day and your training related calories.
All your non training calories, the ones you spend just going about your day, are called your NEAT calories. NEAT stands for Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis and this article will go over any questions you have about them.
Once you figure out how to maximize you NEAT calories, you will only really be able to see your training calories fluctuate. This is another data set that most fitness wearables can track.
As you get stronger and fitter, you'll be able to do more intense workouts. Either you'll be able to lift more weights in the gym, do more intense HIIT sessions, go for longer cardio routines or a combination.
This one is fun to track more often. The more calories you burn daily, the more work your body is doing. The fitter you are, the more you'll be able to handle.
Tracking fitness data is helpful to create bench marks and goals. It also helps you understand how your training is affecting your body and helps you make informed decision on what to focus on.
The important thing is to use it as a tool and not as an end goal. We don't want to get obsessed with what our wearables tell us. It's not a big deal if you didn't burn as many calories as last week's workout. What would be more problematic is if you notice a constant decline in your workout calories over time.
Have fun training!
Clem
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