Since moving to the Amazfit Helio Strap, which I wear on my bicep, I have noticed a few things that have made me question my fitness tracking over the past decade.

So much time has been spent looking at numbers, trying to complete rings and desperately trying to keep streaks going that it never occurred to me how accurate the data was and if hoping for consistency was enough all along. I have tended to view any tracker as decent if it is consistent- if it’s 10% innacurate it does not matter as long as it’s 10% innacurate all of the time. 10,000 steps today could in reality be 9,000, but 11,000 tomorrow could be 9,800 in reality. It doesn’t matter; you are improving which is the goal of any person who is trying to get fitter.

Because of this I decided that I did not need an Apple Watch any more and was more intent on wearing something that was invisible, and so the Helio Strap on my bicep became a thing. I stopped starting workouts before I went for a walk and I just looked at the steps at the end of the day. I have never been what you would call an athlete and I am not that in to sports so what exactly was I tracking?

As I got sicker it became a game of doing as few steps as possible to understand what my new limits are. As it stands it appears to be about 2,000 steps a day, normal slow paced steps, before I need to sleep for a couple of hours. Any more and I could crash for days after. This fully made up my mind that ‘fitness’ tracking was no longer for me, but in reality is it really for anyone outside of serious athletes?So many people track every bit of data and the majority is not relevant. I am talking about ‘fitness’ data here and not health data (that’s part 2), but the over-reliance on every second and every metre simply gets in the way.

The problem, however, is that it works. It builds a mindset that keeps you thinking about improvement and losing weight as you progress, and this is why it is so hard to argue against. I remain convinced though that so many of the fitness stats from Apple, Garmin, Fitbit, Amazfit and others are merely consistent estimates, and at times I wonder if there is some trickery going on to make the stats appear more consistent than they actually are.

Categories: Articles, Fitness, Fitness Trackers, Smartwatches