Fitness tracking in the digital age

Picture two men, Sam and Jim, jogging along a wooded path in the days before smartphones and wearable technology devices.

Sam is measuring his heart rate the old-fashioned way — fingers on his wrist, checking his pulse and counting beats per minute.

Jim is hooked up to a cart filled with racks of beeping medical equipment. Bells begin to ring and a cloud of confetti fires from the cart — FOOM!

Jim cheers and tells Sam, “I just hit a whole week of burning more than 300 calories at my target heart rate. This cart helps me achieve my optimal workout. You’ve got to get one!”

Thank goodness for the invention of more convenient and stylish ways to monitor diet and exercise.

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Knowledge is power. And with fitness and nutrition tracking apps and devices, users are given unbridled access to knowledge about their bodies and health.

The amount of information users would like to access is up to them. Some may be satisfied with a simple step counter, so they know how close they are to reaching the recommended daily 10,000 steps. For others, the more data on their body’s function the better.

Jeremy Prino, a personal trainer with HealthPoint Fitness in Cape Girardeau, loves to delve into the biometric data provided by his WHOOP, a heart rate monitor with corresponding smartphone app.

Prino said the WHOOP works like other fitness trackers, measuring heart beats per minute and calories burned, but what sold him on the device was the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) feature which measures the variance in time between heart beats.

The app uses Prino’s HRV data to tell him his body’s recovery rate from the previous day’s workout. He said the app combines this with his sleep performance data, which helps him avoid “overtraining.”

For Prino, using the WHOOP brought home the importance of sleep quality when it came to his fitness. When he saw the strain poor sleep was putting on his body, he adjusted his workout based on the app’s data.

“I realized getting more and better sleep was number one,” Prino said. “Now I wake up every morning, look at all those measurements, make sure I'm in the green, and I'm good to go hard on my workout.”

Sherri Welker, a registered nurse at SoutheastHEALTH, said she used My Fitness Pal to help her lose 40 pounds before her daughter’s wedding — and to be healthier, in general.

“You have to log every single thing that goes into your mouth, which was eye opening because I had never paid attention to anything like that,” Welker said. “It was educational and made me think more about my choices. I never realized how many calories are in things like ketchup and sauces.”

Welker said she also liked when the app celebrated with little tunes and a burst of digital confetti if she reached certain fitness milestones. Based on how many calories she had eaten or steps she had taken, the app would also send her encouraging updates on her progress.

“I said, ‘Wow. This is actually working.’ The app would tell me, ‘If you keep doing what you’ve done today, by this date you’ll weigh this much.’ So, that was a constant affirmation telling me to keep going,” Welker said.

Laura Vollink, a dietitian and Nutritional Services coordinator at HealthPoint, said nutrition trackers such as Weight Watchers and My Fitness Pal can be valuable tools to help people reach their goals. My Fitness Pal is an all-in-one food, exercise and calorie tracker. It also allows users to see other users’ progress and send encouraging messages.

“I’ve used My Fitness Pal, and I think it provides a layer of accountability that can be really helpful,” Vollink said. “It can be really eye opening for people to realize how many calories are coming from a specific food or maybe how many total calories they're eating in a day.”

Vollink said nutrition trackers can provide a better understanding of a person’s eating habits and can help figure out the difference between whether they’re “eating just to eat” or because they are “actually hungry.”

While nutrition trackers are not necessarily something to rely on for the long term, Vollink said they can be a good tool to help people be mindful of eating habits.

“If that weight starts to creep back up, a tracking app is one of the first tools that I suggest people start using again just for that layer of accountability,” Vollink said.

Ellen Gipson, a registered dietitian and fitness instructor, is the owner of Square One Wellness in Cape Girardeau, a center that focuses on teaching baby-led weaning and promoting healthy lifestyles for children and adults.

While she agrees that fitness and nutrition trackers can be powerful tools to help people get and stay in shape, Gipson does caution her clients not to become overdependent on the technology.

“There are pros and cons with fitness trackers,” Gipson said. “They help with accountability and setting goals, but people can get caught up in the numbers, which are not always 100% accurate.”

Gipson said it’s important for people not to get fixated on reaching a goal if their body isn’t ready for it.

“Don’t stay up late walking around your living room just to hit a certain number of steps,” Gipson said. “Listen to your body, and don’t override what it’s saying in favor of numbers from an app.”

Gipson said nutrition trackers only work if the user is being honest with the information they input. She said it can be too easy to fudge the numbers.

“If I don’t track that extra doughnut or that bite of cake I had at the office, it's never going to give me the correct answer if I don't input the correct information,” Gipson said.

Like most tools, fitness and nutrition trackers can be extremely helpful when used correctly.

So, it’s best to go with what helps the individual the most. Like Sam on his jog in the woods, some can live just fine without all the bells and whistles, while others thrive on gaining more knowledge about what their body is doing and celebrating the fitness milestones they achieve. FOOM — Confetti!