7 ms·

Wearable Fitness Devices Don’t Seem to Make You More Fit

54 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
I bought my FitBit Surge for the GPS and heartrate monitor. That data means I can pace myself accurately when I'm running, allowing me to run further and more consistently (and at a faster overall average pace than stopping / starting all the time). It also means I can keep track of my heartrate (and recovery) during other intense workouts like CrossFit and Insanity. My father has a FitBit too and likes to gloat about smashing my step count pretty much every single day. He's retired and out and about all day, while I sit at a desk. Guess who's obese and gets out of breath walking up the stairs? Step count as a measure of overall daily "exercise" is worse than useless.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  > Step count as a measure of overall daily "exercise" is worse than useless. On the one hand, yes I've been saying this since the step counters first came out with high levels of disdain. On the other hand relative step count (ie "I now go on more walks so I beat my own original levels of activity") is not entirely useless and probably has some non-zero value? But, like, rewarding someone more for slowly strolling for 2000 steps vs running 1500 (which probably covers a similar distance and is waaaaaay better for cardio vascular fitness) seems like a terrible plan
  - ClassyJacket 10y ago
    This is exactly the point I brought up the other day when my friend sent me a "FitBit Weekend Warrior Challenge". It counted steps only, so where I would've normally jogged, I was being encouraged to walk, having a directly negative effect on my weight loss and fitness.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > On the other hand relative step count (ie "I now go on more walks so I beat my own original levels of activity") is not entirely useless and probably has some non-zero value? Relative step count is good if your only exercise is walking (or walking-like.) OTOH, I've observed that my step count tends to go down as actual heavy exercise (weightlifting, etc.) goes up, so even relative step count isn't a good measure of overall activity. > But, like, rewarding someone more for slowly strolling for 2000 steps vs running 1500 (which probably covers a similar distance and is waaaaaay better for cardio vascular fitness) Its probably better for leg strength, but fitness walking (not casual walking), I suspect, is better for cardiovascular fitness, step-for-step, than running, since you get into a reasonably good exercising heart range for a longer time. But, again, step counting alone doesn't distinguish fitness walking from casual walking any more than walking from running.
faitswulff 10y ago
"More fit" in this article seems to exclusively mean "weigh less." I would argue that that is a very superficial definition of fitness.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- djs070 10y ago
  > "...the primary reason to wear the devices isn’t to lose weight — it’s to be more active. But even in this respect, it didn’t work nearly as well as we might hope. In the IDEA trial, those who employed the technology were no more physically active than those who didn’t. They also weren’t more fit."
horsecaptin 10y ago
Let's face it, if wearable fitness devices told you the complete truth, you'll stop wearing them.
- gojomo 10y ago
  I don't understand. What truth could they report that would cause them to be taken off?
  - the-dude 10y ago
    " You are fat and unhealthy. If you don't change your ways, you will die soon. "
    - GrinningFool 10y ago
      The real problem is that the honest message, "if you don't change your ways, you will have more aches, pains and health issues and are statistically likely to die a few years sooner" wouldn't be nearly as impactful.
dkinventor 10y ago
The author, perhaps inadvertently, describes a confounding issue in the study that validates his claims. Namely, the issue stems from the author's description of how fitness trackers are useful in the initial stages of a diet/exercise plan in order to help establish a routine. However, the study that the author cites gave the fitness trackers to participants 6 months into the study, when hopefully some plan has been established. This would seem to negate one of the key benefits of fitness trackers espoused by the author. Is it explained why the fitness trackers are given later on as opposed to at the beginning?
- lolc 10y ago
  Assuming that trackers have this habit-building effect: While we then would expect the effect to have have been larger if they'd handed out the trackers at the beginning of the study, some participants should have benefited from this effect even mid-study. One hypothesis here is that the trackers provided a frame of reference that anchored participants to some goal like 10'000 steps daily while the participants who had less direct feedback were free to expand their goals as their fitness improved. Some things seem much more arduous to me when I track progress while doing them.
cbanek 10y ago
Like how having a clock doesn't necessarily make you better at time management, having a fitbit doesn't make you healthy. But it does allow you to measure things, and if you have the willpower to improve them, you'll improve them. But the device won't do it for you, at best it enables you. At worst, it gives you a false sense of accomplishment that should be checked once you get on the scale. (Disclaimer: I love my fitbit, and it's helped me lose weight, but I find the step counter to be second to the heart rate monitor)
- melling 10y ago
  Yep, like anything else, it still requires effort. I've lost weight using my Apple Watch. https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple-watch-8-weeks-and-9-pounds/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple-watch-8-weeks-... I'm currently using it to run 5k, a few days a week. Six months ago, I was using it to train for my first 10k.
  - KON_Air 10y ago
    It is almost as if tools themselves don't do the work on their own.
    - vinceguidry 10y ago
      I started to make a point, then went to go read the article, and found that the article is not making this point at all. It's adding evidence to the position that exercise doesn't cause people to lose weight. They did the work, they didn't lose the weight. A case of a bad headline, it seems.
      - melling 10y ago
        I lost weight. I included my blog where I illustrated that. The problem with exercise is that you may burn 300-500 calories then eat that much extra food because you are now hungrier. Diet is still more important. You also need to consider that when you lose 5 lbs of fat, for example, and gain 5 lbs of muscle, you weigh the same but you're definitely more fit.
gojomo 10y ago
While it's not worth it for me to pay $30 for the full paper of the main trial ('IDEA') cited, from the abstract I wonder about the conclusions drawn. * What if the specific content of the full bundle of interventions – including a certain kind counseling & low-calorie diet – actually serves to make the tracker seem relatively less-important? (It might be the case that someone given just a tracker would focus on it, while those with the other interventions – all participants – would be more likely to view it as superfluous.) * What if those losing less weight are nonetheless more satisfied with their progress, perhaps because they've gained in other ways? (What if they've lost less weight because they've gained muscle weight? There's no hint whether this was measured.) * It's not clear how the "…those who employed the technology were no more physically active than those who didn’t… {t]hey also weren’t more fit" conclusion was drawn. Self reports? (How do you know someone's true activity without a dedicated tracker?) * What specific tracker & software was used? Results could be very sensitive to UX issues – something minimal & academic might be hard-to-use and easy-to-ignore compared to (say) popular commercial smartphone apps. They only mention a 'website', not an 'app', in their abstract. (I would not often visit a website to check my activity or check my diet, but I view my wrist-worn Fitbit device, and its app interface, a dozen or more times a day.) I suspect that to get a clearer reading of what just-a-tracker might do, I'd prefer a minimal focused study, along the lines of: * every participant is asked their weight-loss goal, then sent a questionnaire once each week to self-report progress * some participants are also given a commercial tracker, and their weekly questionnaire also asks if they're using it * at the end, total progress is evaluated (and automated activity-tracker usage stats collected) That could disentangle the other-interventions and maybe-not-state-of-the-art academic interface from the results.
collyw 10y ago
Just another case of "all the gear, no idea".
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It's like dashboard cargo-culting. People love putting shit ton of graphs and looking at curves going up and down, but that's the wrong focus. Graphs are meant to help you answer questions. If you don't know the questions, they become only works of computational art.
emdowling 10y ago
The biggest issue facing the wearable market is that, despite having all the data, I still don't know what to do with it. We need to correlate cause and effect. It differs dramatically between individuals, so what's true for me is probably not true for you. We have a battle between privacy and usefulness, in that we'd ideally feed data from millions of people into a machine learning algorithm to start helping people actually use and benefit from the data. However, most people don't want to share their intimate health data to the cloud. Another huge issue is that we haven't nailed the input problem: wearables can measure our energy expenditure, but not our energy intake. Until we can measure that as accurately as heart rate (and not just calories, but the nutrient breakdown too) then we only have one side of the equation. We still have a long way to go before wearables are truly indispensable, and that's before we start considering the emerging research on gut bacteria and the role it plays.
- revelation 10y ago
  Wearables can't measure energy expenditure, at most they give you an overblown estimate that is only weakly correlated with actual expenditure. The closest thing to measuring expenditure is a power meter on a bike or ergo, and then you still technically have to do a lab test measuring expired gases from your breathing to estimate efficiency.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Even a weak correlation is better than nothing, especially when increasing accuracy seems to require a very well equipped gym and a sports medicine lab.
- bsder 10y ago
  > Another huge issue is that we haven't nailed the input problem: wearables can measure our energy expenditure, but not our energy intake. Until we can measure that as accurately as heart rate (and not just calories, but the nutrient breakdown too) then we only have one side of the equation. It's worse than you think. Humans expend almost exactly the same amount of calories until they get to extreme amounts of activity. The body simply shunts the available calories to different systems. So, it's almost all about caloric intake. See the latest Scientific American (dead tree edition) for a nice article about it.
dragonsky 10y ago
Funny, I was sure carrying around alll that extra weight on my wrist was sure to make me fitter.
SNBasti 10y ago
Oh. What a surprise.
keiferski 10y ago
Paraphrasing Nietzsche here: "There are horrible [products] which, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all." Being thin and reasonably healthy isn't difficult...the rest of the developed world does it without much thought. Only in America do we think the solution to an overengineered food and fitness system is more engineering.
- dukeluke 10y ago
  To be pair, our corporations have had free reign to run massive propaganda campaigns to teach them the wrong ways to stay healthy. They even manipulated the USDA food guidelines to get people to buy more corn and bread.
- leereeves 10y ago
  Fitness isn't complicated, but in America we want more: "fitness while eating whatever we want and filling every free moment with entertainment".
- nradov 10y ago
  Most other developed countries are getting fatter and less fit. The UK isn't far behind America and others are catching up.
desireco42 10y ago
Speak for yourself :) It helped me a lot. Like the someone said, it is like a watch, allows you to track. Next step is manage.
kelvin0 10y ago
I wear Crossfit socks inside my Karate Kimono, and this won't turn me into a Strength/Fighting machine? Want my money back! Seriously though, some of these article titles lately ...
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Perhaps the devices led folks to set achievable goals. A good idea, unless its "10% more exercise this week". It could make you less ambitious. Without the device, you might drive yourself to more activity because you don't really know if you're doing more or less than last week. So you go over to make sure.

54 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

I bought my FitBit Surge for the GPS and heartrate monitor. That data means I can pace myself accurately when I'm running, allowing me to run further and more consistently (and at a faster overall average pace than stopping / starting all the time). It also means I can keep track of my heartrate (and recovery) during other intense workouts like CrossFit and Insanity. My father has a FitBit too and likes to gloat about smashing my step count pretty much every single day. He's retired and out and about all day, while I sit at a desk. Guess who's obese and gets out of breath walking up the stairs? Step count as a measure of overall daily "exercise" is worse than useless.

Ntrails 10y ago
> Step count as a measure of overall daily "exercise" is worse than useless. On the one hand, yes I've been saying this since the step counters first came out with high levels of disdain. On the other hand relative step count (ie "I now go on more walks so I beat my own original levels of activity") is not entirely useless and probably has some non-zero value? But, like, rewarding someone more for slowly strolling for 2000 steps vs running 1500 (which probably covers a similar distance and is waaaaaay better for cardio vascular fitness) seems like a terrible plan
- ClassyJacket 10y ago
  This is exactly the point I brought up the other day when my friend sent me a "FitBit Weekend Warrior Challenge". It counted steps only, so where I would've normally jogged, I was being encouraged to walk, having a directly negative effect on my weight loss and fitness.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > On the other hand relative step count (ie "I now go on more walks so I beat my own original levels of activity") is not entirely useless and probably has some non-zero value? Relative step count is good if your only exercise is walking (or walking-like.) OTOH, I've observed that my step count tends to go down as actual heavy exercise (weightlifting, etc.) goes up, so even relative step count isn't a good measure of overall activity. > But, like, rewarding someone more for slowly strolling for 2000 steps vs running 1500 (which probably covers a similar distance and is waaaaaay better for cardio vascular fitness) Its probably better for leg strength, but fitness walking (not casual walking), I suspect, is better for cardiovascular fitness, step-for-step, than running, since you get into a reasonably good exercising heart range for a longer time. But, again, step counting alone doesn't distinguish fitness walking from casual walking any more than walking from running.

faitswulff 10y ago

"More fit" in this article seems to exclusively mean "weigh less." I would argue that that is a very superficial definition of fitness.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
djs070 10y ago
> "...the primary reason to wear the devices isn’t to lose weight — it’s to be more active. But even in this respect, it didn’t work nearly as well as we might hope. In the IDEA trial, those who employed the technology were no more physically active than those who didn’t. They also weren’t more fit."

horsecaptin 10y ago

Let's face it, if wearable fitness devices told you the complete truth, you'll stop wearing them.

gojomo 10y ago
I don't understand. What truth could they report that would cause them to be taken off?
- the-dude 10y ago
  " You are fat and unhealthy. If you don't change your ways, you will die soon. "
  - GrinningFool 10y ago
    The real problem is that the honest message, "if you don't change your ways, you will have more aches, pains and health issues and are statistically likely to die a few years sooner" wouldn't be nearly as impactful.

dkinventor 10y ago

The author, perhaps inadvertently, describes a confounding issue in the study that validates his claims. Namely, the issue stems from the author's description of how fitness trackers are useful in the initial stages of a diet/exercise plan in order to help establish a routine. However, the study that the author cites gave the fitness trackers to participants 6 months into the study, when hopefully some plan has been established. This would seem to negate one of the key benefits of fitness trackers espoused by the author. Is it explained why the fitness trackers are given later on as opposed to at the beginning?

lolc 10y ago
Assuming that trackers have this habit-building effect: While we then would expect the effect to have have been larger if they'd handed out the trackers at the beginning of the study, some participants should have benefited from this effect even mid-study. One hypothesis here is that the trackers provided a frame of reference that anchored participants to some goal like 10'000 steps daily while the participants who had less direct feedback were free to expand their goals as their fitness improved. Some things seem much more arduous to me when I track progress while doing them.

cbanek 10y ago

Like how having a clock doesn't necessarily make you better at time management, having a fitbit doesn't make you healthy. But it does allow you to measure things, and if you have the willpower to improve them, you'll improve them. But the device won't do it for you, at best it enables you. At worst, it gives you a false sense of accomplishment that should be checked once you get on the scale. (Disclaimer: I love my fitbit, and it's helped me lose weight, but I find the step counter to be second to the heart rate monitor)

melling 10y ago
Yep, like anything else, it still requires effort. I've lost weight using my Apple Watch. https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple-watch-8-weeks-and-9-pounds/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple-watch-8-weeks-... I'm currently using it to run 5k, a few days a week. Six months ago, I was using it to train for my first 10k.
- KON_Air 10y ago
  It is almost as if tools themselves don't do the work on their own.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    I started to make a point, then went to go read the article, and found that the article is not making this point at all. It's adding evidence to the position that exercise doesn't cause people to lose weight. They did the work, they didn't lose the weight. A case of a bad headline, it seems.
    - melling 10y ago
      I lost weight. I included my blog where I illustrated that. The problem with exercise is that you may burn 300-500 calories then eat that much extra food because you are now hungrier. Diet is still more important. You also need to consider that when you lose 5 lbs of fat, for example, and gain 5 lbs of muscle, you weigh the same but you're definitely more fit.

gojomo 10y ago

While it's not worth it for me to pay $30 for the full paper of the main trial ('IDEA') cited, from the abstract I wonder about the conclusions drawn. * What if the specific content of the full bundle of interventions – including a certain kind counseling & low-calorie diet – actually serves to make the tracker seem relatively less-important? (It might be the case that someone given just a tracker would focus on it, while those with the other interventions – all participants – would be more likely to view it as superfluous.) * What if those losing less weight are nonetheless more satisfied with their progress, perhaps because they've gained in other ways? (What if they've lost less weight because they've gained muscle weight? There's no hint whether this was measured.) * It's not clear how the "…those who employed the technology were no more physically active than those who didn’t… {t]hey also weren’t more fit" conclusion was drawn. Self reports? (How do you know someone's true activity without a dedicated tracker?) * What specific tracker & software was used? Results could be very sensitive to UX issues – something minimal & academic might be hard-to-use and easy-to-ignore compared to (say) popular commercial smartphone apps. They only mention a 'website', not an 'app', in their abstract. (I would not often visit a website to check my activity or check my diet, but I view my wrist-worn Fitbit device, and its app interface, a dozen or more times a day.) I suspect that to get a clearer reading of what just-a-tracker might do, I'd prefer a minimal focused study, along the lines of: * every participant is asked their weight-loss goal, then sent a questionnaire once each week to self-report progress * some participants are also given a commercial tracker, and their weekly questionnaire also asks if they're using it * at the end, total progress is evaluated (and automated activity-tracker usage stats collected) That could disentangle the other-interventions and maybe-not-state-of-the-art academic interface from the results.

collyw 10y ago

Just another case of "all the gear, no idea".

TeMPOraL 10y ago
It's like dashboard cargo-culting. People love putting shit ton of graphs and looking at curves going up and down, but that's the wrong focus. Graphs are meant to help you answer questions. If you don't know the questions, they become only works of computational art.

emdowling 10y ago

The biggest issue facing the wearable market is that, despite having all the data, I still don't know what to do with it. We need to correlate cause and effect. It differs dramatically between individuals, so what's true for me is probably not true for you. We have a battle between privacy and usefulness, in that we'd ideally feed data from millions of people into a machine learning algorithm to start helping people actually use and benefit from the data. However, most people don't want to share their intimate health data to the cloud. Another huge issue is that we haven't nailed the input problem: wearables can measure our energy expenditure, but not our energy intake. Until we can measure that as accurately as heart rate (and not just calories, but the nutrient breakdown too) then we only have one side of the equation. We still have a long way to go before wearables are truly indispensable, and that's before we start considering the emerging research on gut bacteria and the role it plays.

revelation 10y ago
Wearables can't measure energy expenditure, at most they give you an overblown estimate that is only weakly correlated with actual expenditure. The closest thing to measuring expenditure is a power meter on a bike or ergo, and then you still technically have to do a lab test measuring expired gases from your breathing to estimate efficiency.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Even a weak correlation is better than nothing, especially when increasing accuracy seems to require a very well equipped gym and a sports medicine lab.
bsder 10y ago
> Another huge issue is that we haven't nailed the input problem: wearables can measure our energy expenditure, but not our energy intake. Until we can measure that as accurately as heart rate (and not just calories, but the nutrient breakdown too) then we only have one side of the equation. It's worse than you think. Humans expend almost exactly the same amount of calories until they get to extreme amounts of activity. The body simply shunts the available calories to different systems. So, it's almost all about caloric intake. See the latest Scientific American (dead tree edition) for a nice article about it.

dragonsky 10y ago

Funny, I was sure carrying around alll that extra weight on my wrist was sure to make me fitter.

SNBasti 10y ago

Oh. What a surprise.

keiferski 10y ago

Paraphrasing Nietzsche here: "There are horrible [products] which, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all." Being thin and reasonably healthy isn't difficult...the rest of the developed world does it without much thought. Only in America do we think the solution to an overengineered food and fitness system is more engineering.

dukeluke 10y ago
To be pair, our corporations have had free reign to run massive propaganda campaigns to teach them the wrong ways to stay healthy. They even manipulated the USDA food guidelines to get people to buy more corn and bread.
leereeves 10y ago
Fitness isn't complicated, but in America we want more: "fitness while eating whatever we want and filling every free moment with entertainment".
nradov 10y ago
Most other developed countries are getting fatter and less fit. The UK isn't far behind America and others are catching up.

desireco42 10y ago

Speak for yourself :) It helped me a lot. Like the someone said, it is like a watch, allows you to track. Next step is manage.

kelvin0 10y ago

I wear Crossfit socks inside my Karate Kimono, and this won't turn me into a Strength/Fighting machine? Want my money back! Seriously though, some of these article titles lately ...

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Perhaps the devices led folks to set achievable goals. A good idea, unless its "10% more exercise this week". It could make you less ambitious. Without the device, you might drive yourself to more activity because you don't really know if you're doing more or less than last week. So you go over to make sure.