The Case for Wearable Bio Trackers
Over the past few years working in preventative health, I’ve experimented with various wearable bio trackers. From sleep improvements, performance development, and habit creation I’ve found them to be incredibly helpful. As a personal trainer, I encourage my clients to utilize some form of bio tracking to help reach their goals. With so many options available it can be overwhelming trying to determine the best product for your goals. I’ve identified three options I have personally tested and found to be beneficial and supportive in reaching health goals.
Below are three bio trackers and the goals they are most supportive in reaching. Depending on where you are in your life or fitness adventure, you can identify what option suits you best.
Why Use a Bio Tracker?
There are a few reasons to consider utilizing a wearable bio tracker…
Improve sleep. Understanding your sleep habits can play a huge role in improving your overall sleep quality. Sleep is one of the biggest factors we look at to improve the overall quality of your life.
Balance recovery with exertion. Having metrics to inform your training program allows you to maximize your effort, while minimizing the risk of overtraining or burning out.
Track behaviors. Sometimes we do things without even realizing the impact it has on our body, we move on autopilot. Having bio feedback on how things impact your body is a great way to understand where we need to bring more attention, intention, or adaptation.
Monitor cardiovascular health. Understanding your cardiovascular health is a great way to maintain it, or identify where it needs to improve. With things like heart rate and heart rate variability you can get a better picture of your cardio health.
Fitness trackers are like having a health coach. Whether you choose to use their hot tips is totally up to you. Preventative healthcare is one of the best ways to avoid chronic or acute health issues. Obviously life happens, there’s no way to completely remove health risks from our life. However, we have more control and points of intervention than we realize. Giving our body the best sleep, nutrition, physical activity and overall support allows us to be in a better state to recover should we find ourselves in a state of disease or injury. Utilizing wearable bio trackers is one piece of the preventative health puzzle that allows us to understand our body better.
Oura v. Whoop v. Apple Watch
Oura
🔑 Best for tracking & improving sleep
🔑 Best for forgetful tech users
If you’re looking to improve or understand your sleep, Oura is the way to go. By utilizing heart rate, body temperature, and respiratory rate data Oura provides insight into your sleep quality. This information is then used to provide activity goals for the next day, offering a guideline for how much or how little movement is optimal for your body. You have the option to track lifestyle factors with tags, which becomes helpful when you’re looking to understand what impacts your sleep quality.
Oura can go days without needing to be charged which is great if (like me) you frequently forget to charge things. I’m not a huge fan of wearing things on my wrist, so it’s been my favorite wearable I’ve tried so far. If Oura was looking for a new slogan they could totally use “work smarter, not harder”. Literally all you do is wear it and charge it occasionally. There’s no bio haptic feedback from the ring, and no notifications from the device (some app notifications if you choose). For me this is a huge benefit, there’s little distraction from this wearable which makes it easy to transition into your life. It will also track your movement through the day, and syncs with Apple Health if you use other fitness apps or trackers while you’re working out. Even if you don’t use the tags to track your behavior or lifestyle factors, Oura offers you in-depth insight to your sleep. All you have to do is wear it to get sleep data. You might end up learning a lot about how your nighttime and morning routines influence your sleep, and over time create more optimal sleep habits leading you to better overall sleep quality. Which lets be honest, leads to a better quality of life.
Whoop
🔑 Best for improving performance
🔑 Best for making lifestyle modifications & behavior tracking
If you’re hoping to improve some aspect of physical performance, Whoop is a great option. The extensive journal feature gives you insight into what behaviors are helping or hurting your performance. The strain/rest balance gives insight into when you’re ready to go for a new PR, and when you need a rest day.
Utilizing the journal feature is one of the best ways to get the most out of Whoop. At the end of the month you get a report with metrics on how behaviors impact your recovery. This is a really helpful tool for making lifestyle changes, and seeing tangible results as you modify behaviors. I used Whoop while I was transitioning to a plant-based diet, and the data was incredibly helpful and motivating for me. It was impossible to ignore the benefits my body was experiencing from plant-based nutrition. I knew I was feeling better, but the data confirmed it in a really significant way. I also utilized the recovery feature while I was getting back into fitness after a long period of inactivity. The recovery information was invaluable to me, and helped me keep my training schedule consistent without over training. I had insight into what days were ideal for lower impact activities like a yoga practice, and what days were ideal for high impact workouts like a Peloton HIIT ride. I fall into the category of people who train at 100% effort max capacity at all times until my body forces me to stop (usually due to some type of overtraining strain or injury, oops), so Whoop was really helpful in teaching me the value of lower impact 50% effort days. Engaging with the Whoop app and journal data is the best way to utilize all the awesome features of this device.
Apple Watch
🔑 Best for maintaining fitness
🔑 Best for cardiovascular health monitoring
If you’re someone who needs reminders to move throughout the day, Apple Watch is a great option. This can be a great way to maintain fitness, and keep you in the habit of moving your body and keep circulation going through the day. Movement rings give you information about how often you stand up through the day, calories you’ve burned and how many minutes of activity you’ve done. If you’re someone who does a lot of cardio, the breakdown of what zone you’re working in can be really helpful. This is my favorite part of using an Apple Watch, the ability to set target HR zones to work in is a great way to train cardio and Apple Watch makes it super accessible to do that.
Unlike Oura and Whoop there isn’t a journal or tag feature to track lifestyle factors or behaviors. If you’re looking to change an aspect of your fitness or sleep, Oura or Whoop would be a better choice. If you’re solely interested in tracking your heart rate and fitness activity, Apple Watch is a great choice and offers a fairly detailed picture of your body’s response to fitness. If you’re looking for a more hands-off approach to fitness tracking, this is a great choice.
Own Your Health
At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own health. Nobody else will make you eat healthy, workout or get enough sleep. It is up to you to develop good habits and make positive lifestyle choices to feel your best and live in a state of optimal health. Bio trackers are a great tool to have in your toolbox, and as technology continues to evolve we will discover more ways to optimize our health with these devices. I like to think of it as responsible use of technology. If you use technology daily (which most of us do), the way you use it informs the type of life you live. Are you mindlessly scrolling instead of getting up and taking a walk around the block? Are you watching hours of Netflix instead of spending an hour at the gym or moving your body? It’s a lot easier to maintain health than it is to get it back. Utilizing a bio tracker is a great way to keep you engaged in your fitness. Knowledge is power, so get to know yourself! Step into your power and own your health so you can live optimally.
