A smartwatch containing fitness tracking elements are a great way to keep tabs on your health, especially while lots of people have begun their fitness journey to get shredded for summer. But did you know there are some details you perhaps should not trust from your smartwatch?
Fitness coach Michael Ulloa shares three things your smartwatch ‘won’t be able to tell you’, because as helpful as wearable technology is, it can be inaccurate…
Fitness coach warns against smartwatch information
Many fitness fanatics own some kind of smartwatch or fitness tracker, as they can help you get more from your workout or track your step count while you’re out and about. Popular devices include the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Google Pixel Watch and more.
A personal trainer and nutrition coach on social media named Michael Ulloa shared a list of things you can and cannot trust your smartwatch to tell you.
The list starts by clarifying that smartwatches certainly can track how many steps you have done. So don’t worry, your 10k-a-day goal is still important!
Smartwatches can also display heart rate, if using an external HR strap. Heart rate monitors are devices that can detect and track your heart or pulse rate continuously. Most of these devices are wearable, and many are highly accurate.
Your exercise pace can also be accurately tracked by a smartwatch, as well as the time, of course.
However, the personal trainer claims that you can not trust your smartwatch to tell you how many calories you’ve burned.
Although you might think your smartwatch is counting all those calories you’ve burned in the gym, Michael Ulloa claims that this information can be inaccurate.
In an article about how smartwatches measure calories, VertexKnowledge reports the wearable technology can only make an estimate based on the accelerometer and heart rate data and its own algorithms.
This means the basic pieces of information are the accelerometer and heart rate sensor. If these measurements are not accurate, the calorie values will not be accurate at all. Instead, they act more as a guide.
More inaccurate smartwatch information
Ulloaalso suggests your smartwatch cannot be trusted to tell you how many calories you’ve burned and how many calories you should eat.
Be sure to consider this next time to make food decisions based on your smartwatch!
Additionally, wearable technology simply cannot measure how effective your workout was to improve your mental health.
According to AIM7, in an article explaining the accuracy of smartwatches, wearable devices have as much as 20% error when measuring heart rate, and caloric expenditure measurements can be off by as much as 100%.
In terms of information about your sleep, AIM7 states that most wearable fitness devices overestimate total sleep time and underestimate wakefulness after sleep onset.
Michael Ulloa is a personal trainer and performance nutritionist as well as a content creator, speaker, writer and podcaster. The fitness expert helps clients to take control of their health. With a background in occupational therapy, Ulloa takes a holistic approach to client care and has worked with clients in over twenty different countries.
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