A little monster lives on my wrist and I wake up every day ready to fight it. Most days I lose.
That gremlin is the Apple Watch, which, like other fitness trackers, is designed to guide users toward healthy behaviors. Apple uses his three digital rings to measure a person’s daily activities in different ways. Each one has a bright color and a simple name. The blue “stand” ring encourages you to stand more. (Reasonable!) The green “Exercise” ring encourages you to spend more time exercising. (Of course!) Then there’s the red ring, the “move” ring. This is the biggest and most visible of Apple’s designs, and it tracks the calories you burn through movement. It’s my nemesis.
When you put an Apple Watch (or any other fitness tracker) on your wrist, you’re choosing to change the direction of your daily life. Your goal now is to fill these rings, “close” them by completing specified tasks, or accomplish a certain number of steps. When I received an Apple Watch for Christmas, I entered my personal statistics (height, weight, age) and thought the recommended goal of a “moderate” level of physical activity was achievable. Because I consider myself to be quite active. At least it was for me. It took him three weeks to fill his days with enough activity to close that red ring.
None of my regular exercise habits are satisfactory. I went for a 3 mile walk. On the same day, I took a 20-minute Pilates session and a high-intensity interval training class. We spent about 40 minutes rock climbing indoors. It wasn’t until I took a 45-minute Turbo Cardio Kickboxing class on YouTube (half frustrated, half confused) that I was finally happy with the machine. I watched with quiet joy as Watch’s little animation etched my finally completed red ring into fitness history.
This experience temporarily distorted my perception of my own physical fitness. I started worrying that I wasn’t exercising enough and felt pressured to exercise more intensely. My preferred form of exercise is gentler and more intensity-oriented. But in the end they exercise. I also meet the World Health Organization and American Heart Association recommendations that, at least most of the time, he does 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise a week. Why did this device make me feel weak and lazy?
At a basic level, wearable health devices use sensors to measure people and their movements. Some measurements, such as heart rate, are reported directly to the user. Other data points are fed into the algorithm, which spits out good judgments about some categories of a user’s health, such as sleep or stress scores. “Active calories,” the metric associated with that dreaded red ring, is actually an estimate, and the algorithm behind it is kept secret. Apple declined to comment on the record when contacted for this article, but said all of its health and fitness features are “subject to a rigorous scientific validation process in collaboration with experts in the medical community.” Ta.
However, some studies suggest that calorie measurements on fitness trackers are often inaccurate. “If you look at a systematic review of all the studies that have tested the effectiveness of these wearable devices, the ultimate conclusion they always make is that these devices are useless for estimating energy consumption.” , says Keith Diaz, an exercise physiologist and professor at Columbia University. University Medical Center told me. These trackers can’t directly measure calories burned, and their approximations can vary widely because different people burn calories at different rates.
Of course, calories have a deep cultural history and a special, albeit complex, association with weight loss. The charity’s article highlights how wearable companies are trying to give users a more sophisticated way of thinking about exercise than just the number of steps they take. In addition to walking and running, there are many other things you can do to get your heart rate up. “Everything Matters,” says marketing copy on Apple’s website, with examples such as dancing at a concert and gardening. The experts I spoke to aren’t completely against calorie counter labels for this reason. The problem is simply that users should not believe that the measurements are completely accurate. In my case, I should have had confidence in my physical strength rather than worrying about why the red ring wouldn’t close.
But that obsession short-circuits a larger issue. Fitness trackers tend to emphasize specific goals to keep users focused in the short term, making health more like a marathon than a sprint. “This device focuses your attention on what you want your attention to focus on,” Ida Sim, a physician and professor of medicine and computational precision health at the University of California, San Francisco, told me. This is obviously a good thing if it helps you develop healthier habits and feel better about yourself. Apple’s green ring that tracks overall exercise time looks very useful for people who want to meet WHO and AHA fitness goals. However, these goals can also be quite random. His 10,000 step goal, which Fitbit uses so famously, wasn’t born out of clinical science. Instead, the idea of encouraging people to take their 10,000 steps a day stems from his 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that sold pedometers. (Fitbit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
As a result, users can end up performing for the wearable rather than themselves, as I did when I was kickboxing enthusiastically in my living room. One researcher I interviewed for this article admitted that when he was sick, he lowered his daily Apple Watch goal to avoid breaking his “streak” of closing his ring every day. (There are a lot of people on Reddit Cop who do the same thing.) Apple allows you to customize your goals, although the people I spoke to suggested lowering my Red Ring goals. , it felt like an uncomfortable concession that I was unwell, even if I knew better.
Marco Artini, founder of a personal training app called HRV4Training, said he feels the entire device is focused a little too much on engagement at the moment. “You shouldn’t be making adjustments all the time,” explains Altini, who also serves as an advisor to Oura, a wearable company that makes fitness tracking rings. Rather than constantly tinkering with our actions, we need to plan for the long term and accept natural fluctuations in outcomes. “In reality, it should be a little more boring,” he says.
Diaz, an exercise physiologist, said that when he was wearing a Fitbit, he would start moving by walking around his apartment in the evenings. My device and my life are together,” he said. I’m not saying that no one should use them, but the problem with these devices is that they use external motivation, whereas “what the science tells us is that long-term “Internal motivation is far better at changing behavior,” he clarified. You should find ways to exercise that you enjoy, rather than having a computer on your wrist do it for you. That way, you are more likely to continue doing so in the future.
To prove his point, Diaz asked me how I felt after rock climbing or surfing. I exhaled with elation. Closing your Apple Ring or reaching 10,000 steps might make you feel better. However, nothing beats the joy you get from moving your body just because you want to.