How To Accomplish Your Gadget-Driven Fitness Tracking

Thanks to psychologists, we now know that the secret to achieving any goal lies in making it challenging not to accomplish the goal; this is how to make fitness tracking less anxiety-inducing. 

With this benefit of hindsight, fitness trackers and smartwatches can help you achieve your health goals. 

So, going by the recommendations of psychologists, we are interested in how to optimize fitness trackers and smartwatches without allowing them to derail our efforts when their use is tending to enhance bad habits. 

The core functionalities of smartwatches and fitness trackers lie in their utility for measuring progress. 

Fitness App and TrackerIn this context, it's debatable to think that anyone would disagree about these fitness trackers and smartwatches being helpful tools for building healthy habits. 

Notwithstanding, the contrary, where they end up becoming a major source of anxiety, if you’re not careful, can also hold true.

The snag in this is the fact that you'll likely imagine that wearable-induced anxiety is something happening to other people as it's happening to you. 

Simply put, it’s amazingly easy for anyone to fall into toxic wearable habits.

This is so terrible that even wearables reviewers who should know better still grapple with anxiety-inducing fitness-tracking habits.

Sometimes, this might be in the form of getting so caught up chasing the aerobic streaks that you ignore body signals telling you to ease up. 

For sprinters, for example, this has landed many of them with a nasty case of shin splints. 

In such cases, not only are they unable to run for weeks, but it can also mean missing several kilometer races they have been looking forward to. 

When this happens, you are then forced to re-evaluate how fit these devices are at playing those roles in your life and fitness goals.

Nevertheless, fitness trackers shouldn't have to become sources of stress, anxiety, or emotional burdens. 

Following are some easy-to-accomplish steps learned over the years which will ensure your devices work for you according to your desires instead of the other way around.

• The first thing to note is that the smaller and easier a goal is, the more likely you are able to stick with building a new exercise habit without burning out. So, set small and easily incremental goals.
• There's nothing worth changing about your life that will not require a massive amount of commitment and energy. The more demanding the change, the more energy you must be prepared to commit if you must overcome the comfy inertia fixating you to existing habits. 
• Picture multiplying that by 1,000 where your target is building an exercise routine for the first time as an adult. It's for this reason you have to always start small, really small. Begin by jotting down whatever you think is small and then go even smaller.

Imagine, for example, that your primary goal is to walk 10,000 steps every day.

Curiously, this 10,000-step goal will be so ingrained in your psyche that many fitness trackers use it as the default during setup, regardless of the absence of much scientific backing. 

However, if you are already close to target walking steps every day, say 9,000 to 9,500 steps, it is highly unlikely you’ll be able to meet that goal consistently.

For a typical 5-foot-3 not given to such scales, 10,000 steps approximate 4.5 to 5 miles.

Some people's usual walking speed falls anywhere from 70–80 minutes a day.

Also, naturally, most busy adults can’t suddenly go from walking 20 minutes a day to over an hour daily and maintain that momentum. 

When you set mighty goals that are wide apart from your current habits, you’re setting yourself up for anxiety and failure.

This is the lesson being communicated here!

You Need to Ignore any Default or Automatic Goal Settings on a Smartwatch or Fitness Tracker.

It is for you to call the shots here, not your gadget defaults.

A reasonable thing is to ignore any default or automatic goal settings on a smartwatch or fitness tracker.

Aside from some gadgets being less ambitious in their suggestions, even the smartest gadget cannot tell your life.

You should always be the one to set your goals, and you should always set initial goals that are only a little harder than what you are currently doing.