Is your fitness data making you happy, citizen?
Our personal devices are capturing, analysing and reporting on more fitness metrics than ever before. What's making you happy? Endorphins or data?
I am feeling pretty self-satisfied at the moment. Why? One of the many graphs from my Garmin smartwatch has been pointing up and to the right for about four weeks now.
My VO2 Max score, indicating the maximum rate of oxygen consumption available during exertion, has been creeping up. I’ve been training consistently (various forms of running). My weight, and therefore my BMI, is creeping downwards. This follows several months of not doing very well at fitness at all, and both of those graphs were curving in the other direction.
Exercise makes me happy with the triple threat of endorphins, discipline and DATA.
The amount of fitness data available to us nowadays is staggering. Long gone are the days of tracking weight, and perhaps heart rate and estimated calories. GPS on devices track distances and speed throughout any activity. Other sensors capture not just heart rate, but how much you ‘bounce’ when you run (vertical oscillation), cadence, left / right foot favouring, stride length, your stamina and potential stamina… the list goes on.
The data onslaught continues even when we are NOT exercising. Garmin have a ‘Body Battery’ concept so you can get validation of whether you really should be feeling tired or not. How fast it drains during the day depends on how stressed you are. Which is also tracked. Rushing around getting the kids ready for school always results in a flurry of yellow spikey graphs rather than the reassuring ‘Everything is going to be fine’ blue.
I’ve found the Body Battery genuinely interesting. When I last came down with Proper Flu, my watch pristinely showed how my body was not in a happy place as I ended up under a blanket on the sofa.
“Well, at least I can depend on my heart rate being steady when I’m not doing anything”. No, it turns out you can’t. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) relies on the concept that your heart is NOT a perfect metronome at rest, and there will always be microsecond differences in your rhythm. These timings vary depending on how fit you are. Wait, so what is a ‘fit’ score to get, exactly? Surprise, there isn’t one! Worrying about it will most likely have a negative impact on your score though.
I’ve mentioned my current happy state due to progress going in the right direction. It isn’t always this way. My watch is quite keen sometimes to tell me that I am being UNPRODUCTIVE (the horror), and that all those endorphins are not actually resulting in me getting any fitter. In addition, when I first kickstarted my fitness it was easy to get an absurdly high Training Load as my body didn’t know what had hit it. Now that my body doesn’t go into a panic mode when anticipating running up a local hill, the Training Load has dropped. Help, I’m confused!
On top of all of this, many smart devices are not actually approved by medical bodies such as the FDA. This is slowly changing, however: Garmin expands ECG App to additional smartwatches (This article is from late 2023 so only the latest devices are impacted).
Also, just how accurate is the science behind a lot of the data being presented to us? My watch is happily predicting a Marathon time for me of 4:13. That’s nice, except that the longest training distance I am doing at the moment is 10k. Attempting to run a marathon right now would result in me going to the Bad Place mentally and physically.
I’ve mostly detailed what Garmin offer in this space, as this is my fitness ecosystem of choice. Equivalents exist with Apple, Polar, Fitbit and many more. Right now, you can’t swing a cat without hitting an Influencer touting the wonders of ZOE (Davina McCall is ‘living her best life’) - “Easy, at-home tests give us an inside look at your blood fat, blood sugar, and gut microbiome health”. Scores ranging from 0 to 100 keep you honest, or perhaps fearful. Got to improve your microbiomes! Instagram videos show celebs of varying levels slapping on the ZOE device, proclaiming “It doesn’t hurt!” — well, your bank balance might as the initial test costs £259.99. Fun challenge for you: See how long it takes you to find the pricing model when you visit the ZOE web site. Let me know how you do.
Is it any wonder that some have just about had enough of all this, and are going back to basics? Fancy a bit of naked running? Fiona Russell has written an interesting article, ‘Naked running – what happened when I ditched the sports watch’ - “I didn’t think I normally felt much pressure to perform but it occurred to me that I must in some way because without the watch on, I felt a lot more relaxed.”. Impressive that she knew she was more relaxed despite not wearing a device that could actually tell her this. This has been a feature at parkrun on occasion as well, with their US blog opining in 2018, “Would You Run Naked?”. This is perhaps slightly ironic as parkrun have removed various records from their website recently which has now also led to a petition for them to be reinstated.
As for me, the data is helping me be honest at the moment. I know if I was to skip a training day, my Training Load will drop to the “YOU’RE LAZY” part of the graph. If I go into a carb frenzy and over-eat (Pizza is my guilty pleasure), my HRV will plummet the next morning as my body beats me up for it overnight. I treat all of this as a guideline, of course, as how you actually feel is the prime indicator — and I know that by being honest, I feel good. Really good.
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” is the timeless quote. But “Nothing tastes as good as endorphins being in perfect harmony with the data” just doesn’t scan as well.
Links ‘n’ things
The watch that has enslaved me to its data tracking is the Garmin epix Gen 2. Here’s a link to pick one up via Amazon. It’s an Affiliate link, allowing us both to benefit from the data and purchasing overload. There’s now a ‘Pro’ model available with a few extra bits like an enhanced torch.
Regarding that watch, if you want to see a full review of it by someone who goes into an incredible amount of EXCEPTIONALY INTERESTING detail, check out Garmin Epix In-Depth Review by DC Rainmaker.
I recently covered the parkrun data removal incident: The first casualty of parkrun is Data.
Video: Davina McCall being an Ambassador (i.e. BEING PAID A LOT OF MONEY) for Zoe.
Video: Garbage - Only Happy When It Rains - I am duty bound to include this after the TERRIBLE pun earlier in this article. Great track.
Video: Running Up That Hill (Stranger Things). I got this ear-worm purely because I wrote about running up a hill in this post. I must therefore share it with you.
The ‘citizen’ line that is in the title of this blog is inspired by the Paranoia RPG (Role Playing Game). Trust the computer! The computer is your friend!