3 Reasons Why You Need a Fitness Tracker

Fitness trackers are an interesting tool. To the extreme or professional athlete, they are vital to their success. Getting that extra edge is what is needed to win. But why would you or any of the average joes out there need it? Well, we will discuss the 3 reasons why you need a fitness tracker in this article. Fitness trackers for all the non-professional athletes out there are still very important. Especially for the busy young professional.

Your physical health matters, and understanding what a fitness tracker does for you will help out tremendously. This is why I will break down this article into 3 different sections on why tracking your fitness is important. Firstly, we will talk about how it tracks your sleep. Secondly, understanding your vitals and why it’s important to track those vitals. Finally, understanding when to take a break when you are working out.

Keep Track of your Sleep

Keeping track of your sleep is super important. I know for me I get addicted to assuring I get enough sleep. Because of my fitness tracker, I’m being more deliberate about getting more sleep. Sleep is important for so many reasons. I won’t get into them here, but just knowing that you get the sleep that you need will help you prevent a numerous amount of diseases. It really is that powerful of a cure. Understanding your sleep patterns is important to know how to improve your sleep.

Understanding Your Vitals

Most people that get these trackers usually get them because their CrossFit box or all their friends got them. But they don’t know what their vitals mean. Understanding the vitals that you get from a fitness tracker is important to get the most out of your fitness tracker. Again, I won’t get into the weeds about each piece of vital is but I will give you an overview. Tracking your HRV, Respiratory Rate, Blood Oxygen, RHR, and skin temp will help you understand how healthy you actually are. For instance understanding, those will give you a look at what is really going on under the hood of your body. That is more important than how you look or how much your way.

Knowing When to Take a Break

This is a huge one. Most people overlook this and overtrain. Which can be more detrimental to your body than not working out at all. What these fitness trackers will do for you, is let you know when you have exhausted your body. Like the Whoop strap, it tells you what your recovery is on a daily basis. If you are being inconsistent with it or you have been in the red for 5 days in a row, you can gauge whether you should keep working out or take a break.

Scheduling a break twice a week or four times a month is a good idea and necessary for good health. These trackers can help you understand when those breaks should be. Whoop does this by offering you monthly and weekly reports. If you are deliberate about it you can find trends with the data on a monthly cycle. That should give you a good idea of when you can schedule those breaks in the next month.

Recommended Fitness Trackers

If you are looking for some good fitness trackers. I have a few I would recommend. The first one I would recommend is the all classic apple watch. This is a simple basic watch that does everything you’d need it to do. Especially if you’re not one of those amateur athletes (yes those people exist).

Now, if you are one of those amateur athletes or wanna be amateur athletes I would recommend any of these Garmins. Each one of those Garmins is good for whatever sport your take the most seriously. Whether that be running, cycling, swimming, or all 3. All vary in pricing, so choose the one that fits your needs.

The third tracker that I would recommend and it is one that I use (though I have all 3 that I have recommended) is the Whoop strap. It gives me everything I need (also I use it because my apple watch is 5 years old). I also like matching up my watches with my whoop strap just to give myself another data source to pull from. That way I can be a little more accurate with readings.

Takeaway

There you have those are the 3 reasons why you need a fitness tracker. This is a topic that has been important to my growth as a professional. I was once told by one of my mentors Ryan Blair that “the way you do one this, is how you do everything”. Learning about my health and being deliberate about it helped me in my professional career.

If you enjoyed this article check out our other health articles!