Ditching the fitness trackers

Finding intrinsic motivation & a more enjoyable relationship to exercise

Most people like data and I am no exception. Tracking has been a part of my exercise journey from the beginning. I didn't start exercising regularly until adulthood, I wasn't a student athlete. I was an uncoordinated, unsporty, unfit kid who avoided exercise as much as possible to avoid the embarrassment.

But when I started to exercise regularly for my mental and physical well-being as an adult, I started with yoga, alone and at home. This took away any potential embarrassment and allowed me to focus on the process and how it made me feel (thanks Yoga with Adriene).

As a way to motivate myself I started circling the dates on the calendar that I did yoga and it helped me to aim for 4-5 times per week. It was also very motivating to see the pattern start to build up and spurred me to continue.

After yoga came other activities and eventually weight training, cycling and swimming. Along with these came the smart watches and the fitness tracking apps (hello Strava).

At this point, roughly six years down the line, the tracking has been niggling at me. Tracking is a complicated thing, it provides a reward outside of the actual activity itself; the reward of a calendar full of circles is not the reward inherent to a regular yoga practice.

There are some things in life I have not had much luck trying to track. I would never dare try to track calories or kJ because I, on the one hand, have been privileged to not need to, and on the other, have feared the effect that would have, the hold it could have over me and my relationship to food.

Then there are things like reading. I have always read, as long as I can remember and probably from the time I learned to read and I believe I always will, as long as I can. The act is enjoyable in itself and the wisdom and knowledge gained is another reward. I have, over the years tried tracking my reads on Goodreads or The StoryGraph or by writing them down but have eventually given up on all tracking habits.

Partly, I think because tracking them is a whole other activity in itself and partly, because I think it distorts my relationship to the act of reading. Am I rushing through the end of this book so it counts for my October count instead of my November count? Am I finishing this book because I really want to or just because I set a goal of 100 books this year? It becomes hard to tease out the tracking of the thing from the thing itself, and updating the tracking spreadsheet, notebook or platform is an annoying extra inconvenience that to me, ultimately, did not feel worth the reward of seeing all I had read.

Six years into my fitness journey, I have felt for a couple of years now, that the practice of regular exercise is so ingrained in me that I will never stop or want to stop for any length of time. I have had holidays where I have fallen out of the practice and found the result of that to be an uncomfortable sensation of a body that craves movement and a wish to get back into routine as soon as possible.

I love exercise now, I love how I feel during and after and I love the process of becoming incrementally better at something practical and physical - stronger, faster, more mobile. I think I have gained the intrinsic motivation to continue exercising even if I no longer see the reward of Strava progress graphs.

I am curious too, about how tracking has impacted my relationship to exercise. I don't have a full idea of what exercise without tracking would be like as tracking has been there from the start. Yet, I don't think tracking is necessary.

Fitness wearables are a relatively new invention, of dubious reliability. I have always seen their measurements as more of a meaningless relative score anyway (e.g. if it says I burned 500 kJ one day and 600 kJ the next I view it as meaning I worked slightly harder in the second workout, but not as an accurate reading in itself. Who really knows and how can the wearable possibly know the exact kJ burnt? It doesn't).

As I try to use my smartphone less and move away from social media and technology in general, I find one thing tying me to my smartwatch and phone is tracking my workouts. Leaving me wondering, why am I tracking? If it's not for motivation and they don't provide accurate data?

There are other ways to be motivated, like the swim club I have just joined, we have regular training sessions. A committed time, place and activity with other people, that gets me moving.

There are other ways of tracking: time spent doing an activity, weight used in weigh training, how the workout feels.

I'm curious to see if moving away from tracking with technology and wearables will result in a relationship with exercise that is more focused on the inherent rewards of the activity, how it feels, the mood improvement and the progress made. Shifting the reward away from the graphs/data and back to the activity itself.

I'm also curious if it will help me be more in tune with my body, more focused on what feels right, including more rest if needed and remove the distraction of feeling like a certain amount or certain activity has to be done to have the resulting graph/data look a certain way.

Do you use fitness trackers? What has your experience been like with and without them? Do you think using them affects your relationship to exercise?