The latest fitness trend is trackers. You can track your steps, you can track the calories you burn, the amount of time you exercise, the distance you run, walk, elevation, temperature, humidity, just about every variable that could affect your fitness, you can track and account for on various tracking devices. And when it comes to things like the recent Nike Breaking 2 project, every bit of the data is essential, and indeed may play an important role in helping you reach or not reach your goals.
It's important to be aware however that all this monitoring and measuring can easily be taken a little too far, having a negative rather than positive impact on your lifestyle and goals.
Here are 5 times you may be taking your tracker too far and how you can fix it:
Ignoring your body
Think about your workouts for the past couple of weeks and ask yourself how often you have forced yourself to keep going or to push harder, just so that you could reach a certain value on your watch: you are really fatigued, but you have to reach 15 km today. You are hurting and feeling the niggling of an old injury, but you haven’t burned your daily calorie requirements. What calorie requirements? Who says that’s how many you have to burn, what is going to happen if you don’t reach that, and more than that, what’s the bigger picture? Maybe that if you keep pushing you will get injured more seriously and not be able to do your workout at all. Listen to your body, not your watch when it comes to distance, time, calories etc. and do what it is asking you to do.
Taking the data out of context
You finish your run really bummed out. You were slower than what your watch reported yesterday. And the day before. But the watch only tells half of the story. The watch doesn’t account for the fact that the run was on trails, with a steep elevation gain in temperatures far hotter than what you have been running in. Don’t beat yourself up over yesterday or today when they are completely different scenarios and can’t even be properly compared. Instead, treat today’s effort as today’s: do the best that you can with this day and this work, and if you do that, that’s all you need to be worried about.
Allowing it to control you
Counting your steps, or measuring your totally active time in a day, can be a fun way to check in and make sure you aren’t spending too much time sitting, or to remind you to get up and walk around every once and a while during the work day, but it’s a bit of a bigger issue when it dictates your life. Declining to hang out with friends in the evening because it gets in the way of you being able to get in all your steps, or neglecting important relationships in your life because you need to reach a certain daily calorie burn may mean you have let things go a little too far. If you find this starting to happen, take some time to regain perspective. Remind yourself of what is most important to you - or what was most important before your FitBit – and don’t let yourself be taken over and controlled by your fitness tracker.
Forgetting the other circumstances
It’s easy to come down on ourselves hard for cutting a workout short, running slower than usual, performing badly on a training run, but what other factors were at play? What’s the rest of the contributing factors? For example, maybe you were up most of the night with the kids, or had a really long day at work the day before. Or maybe you have just come back from a holiday, where you indulged more than usual and didn’t fuel optimally for optimal performance. Our circumstances change, and so does the balance we need to strike with our exercise and ourselves. There has to be some days that are lower or slower in order for us to have the days that are faster and send us on a complete high.
Not able to do anything without it
No Garmin, no run. No Fitbit, no walk. If I don’t have it tracked, did it even really happen? Or more importantly, if I tracked it and it wasn’t quite long enough or didn’t burn quite enough calories, or account for quite enough distance, is it even worth it? Break out of the mindset of asking yourself if it is good enough, and only feeling adequate if it’s on your tracker and instead recognize that something is always better than nothing. Regardless of what the tracker says or reports, if you went out and did something, that is more important than not doing anything at all, no matter what the end result.
By: Laura Peill – (Check out her blog Viand Nutrition & Facebook)
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