The best fitness trackers are supposed to enhance your fitness journey, not make it harder. But tracking and interpreting your health data can be overwhelming. As a certified personal trainer, I’ve experienced my fair share of fitness tracker frustrations over the years. Most recently, I tested 13 of the best fitness trackers over four months, which gave me valuable insight on the best way to use a fitness tracker. To help you make the most of your wearable, I’m sharing step-by-step guidance on how to use a fitness tracker to reach your goals and improve your overall health.

For additional tips, I spoke with NASM-certified personal trainer and Row House coach Josh Honore and Laura Rooney, PhD, an associate professor at Marquette University and behavioral psychologist. They provided insight on the psychology behind fitness trackers, our motivations for using them and how to leverage this knowledge not only to improve our experience with trackers, but also to ensure we set healthy boundaries with these devices. Here’s what to keep in mind when using a fitness tracker.

Determine Your Purpose

Maybe you’ve already purchased a fitness tracker, or maybe you’re still looking for the best fitness tracker for your needs. Either way, the first thing you need to do before using your device is determine your goals. “In order to get the most [benefit] from a fitness tracker, it has to be a tool used for a specific purpose,” says Rooney. Because fitness trackers offer a multitude of capabilities, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers and data without finding a real use for any of it. If you’re clear on why you’re using a fitness tracker in the first place, you can cut through the noise and focus on the meaning it provides for your specific goal. For example, if your goal is to lose weight, metrics like step count and estimated calorie burn provide more meaning since they are key measurements for weight loss. A fitness tracker can help you be more intentional about increasing your step count, and by seeing the amount of calories you burn each day, you have better insight into how much you should be eating to be in a true caloric deficit.

If your goal is to improve your general fitness level, look for a tracker that keeps tabs on basic stats like heart rate, step count, activity level and sleep. If your goals are tied to a specific race, consider more in-depth tracking that offers recovery advice and provides personalized planning like a countdown to the event, your goal time and predicted finish time based on training patterns. You may also benefit from more advanced tracking and customizations if you have a detailed training plan or workout split to balance exercise with recovery.

Customize Settings To Reach Your Goals

Once you’ve determined your purpose, you’ll also want to explore the goal setting options that come with your tracker. Most wearables allow you to input daily and weekly goals for steps, physical activity (i.e., number of dedicated workouts or exercise sessions) and sleep. More advanced trackers offer additional personalization options that allow you to set goals for target heart rate during training, specific races or distance events and more. You can add your personal information to ensure accurate data collection.

Work It Into Your Routine For Consistency

You’ll want to customize your tracker so you can seamlessly integrate it into your routine. According to Rooney, consistency and convenience are key for getting the most use out of a fitness tracker and for reaping the greatest benefits. If you’re a runner, that may look like syncing your device with a running app like Zwift that you’re already using. If you’re using your fitness tracker to build healthier habits overall, you may want to sync it with a healthy eating tool like MyFitnessPal. Most fitness trackers also give you the option to set your bedtime and wake-up time, so you can be reminded when it’s time to unwind.

It’s also crucial that you wear your fitness tracker consistently, though that may look a little different for each person based on their goals. Although this may seem obvious, it’s an important counterpart to Rooney’s two-step approach: convenience and consistency. You might choose a fitness tracker based on how easy it will be to use and wear regularly. “The reason we see more benefit to Apple watches and Fitbits is because they’re broad-use and [increase] the convenience factor. Apple watch clients don’t need to remember to put it on, they just need to remember to turn it on,” says Rooney. Make sure you wear your tracker on your non-dominant wrist for the most accurate readings, and take note of the battery life so you can build charging time into your routine.

Create A Community

You may find that joining a fitness community can help you stay accountable and motivated to achieve your goals. Or, maybe you enjoy a little healthy competition. Some fitness trackers, like the Garmin Venu 3, allow you to invite friends to weekly challenges even if they aren’t a Garmin user. Other trackers make it easy to add friends and compare progress.

During testing, the Apple Watch Series 9 was my favorite to use for connecting with friends and comparing progress on step goals, activity levels and more since I could connect with other Apple users even if they didn’t have an Apple Watch. I also liked how the Garmin Connect app let me search for groups with similar interests, including ones in my local area.

At the minimum, most fitness trackers come with some sort of community forum that functions similarly to a social media feed. You can connect with different users who have similar interests and goals, and scroll through posts for encouragement and helpful tips.

Evaluate And Adjust Your Approach As Needed

Personal trainers conduct regular check-ins with clients to evaluate their progress and discuss what’s working and what’s not; you can do the same with your fitness tracker. Make sure to set aside time during your first month or two of use to reflect on your experience. Ask yourself whether you’ve used the tracker consistently, if it’s helped keep you on track and if there are any roadblocks (like forgetting to charge it regularly) that are preventing you from incorporating it into your routine. Then, you can make changes as needed to ensure you’re using your device in a way that works for you.

Set Boundaries With Your Fitness Tracker

Like with any piece of tech, it’s crucial to set healthy boundaries with your fitness tracker: you’ll want to find a balance between consistent use and neuroticism. “Similar to the scale, you can get obsessed with numbers and it creates anxiety, which is the opposite of why we’re doing what we’re doing,” says Honore. Here are a handful of tips on how to set healthy boundaries with your tracker:

• Turn off move notifications: While notifications can be a good reminder to take a break or go for a walk, they can become overbearing. Turn them off if they aren’t useful or you find them annoying. Pay attention to how they make you feel and listen to your body, which is ultimately the better indicator of your physical health.
• Turn off smartphone notifications: If you have a fitness tracker that gets distracting smartphone notifications, you can turn them off. “They [clients] don’t realize how often they’re going to get interrupted with those alerts by having all of those go through your wrist. That thing is buzzing every time you get a text, every time the phone rings,” says Rooney. After using and testing over a dozen different trackers, I found my favorite way to use one is exclusively for tracking my workouts and daily movement.
• Don’t let your tracker rule you: Be careful about equating untracked activity with no activity. “From what I hear from clients, [they tell me] ‘I forgot to put this tracker on so this session won’t count,’” shares Rooney. “This can create a negative relationship between health and fitness, and the person’s experience of it as a sense of identity.” Obsessing over tracking can create feelings of resentment towards your tracker, and in some cases towards exercise itself. If you find yourself falling into this behavior, take a break from wearing your device until you can feel good about exercising without the physical record of tracking.
• Consult a professional as needed: Don’t be shy about reaching out to the pros, like personal trainers or exercise coaches, for help integrating a fitness tracker into your exercise routine or interpreting your health data.

Key Metrics Explained

Fitness trackers can monitor a whole host of biometrics, oftentimes more than we know what to do with. Below, find what the most commonly tracked metrics mean, why they’re important and the insights you can gather from them.

Steps

A tracker’s step-counting feature refers to the number of steps you’ve taken in a given day, including during exercise and every other movement in between. According to the CDC, people 65 and under should get in 8,000 to 10,000 steps every day. As a trainer, I often recommend increasing step count to clients looking to improve their overall physical fitness, and a fitness tracker is arguably the best and most accurate tool for tracking steps. A tracker is attached to your body, unlike your phone which doesn’t always come with you.

Calories Burned

Most fitness trackers show the amount of calories, or units of energy, burned during exercise as well as during passive periods. It’s helpful to know both, so you can get an estimate of your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), which differs greatly from person to person depending on your activity level and personal makeup. If your goal is to lose weight, knowing your TDEE can help you determine how many calories you should be consuming or burning to reach a caloric deficit. As long as you input accurate personal information, most basic trackers should do a decent job at estimating the amount of energy you expend.

Heart Rate

A fitness tracker’s heart-rate function can help you determine how hard you’re actually exerting yourself during exercise and how different levels of intensity correlate to the different heart rate zones. A fitness tracker can help you develop more intuition around this by helping you understand what zone you’re in and the physiological responses that come as a result. “All trackers do a great job of telling you what zone you’re in,” says Honore. “If you can feel your way through and know, ‘This is the zone I’m making gains,’ then the tracking supplements that versus relying on the data to tell you.” For most people, it’s recommended to spend at least 150 minutes per week exercising in zones 1 to 3.

Sleep Quality

Sleep is crucial to health whether you have lofty training goals or not. Most fitness trackers can measure the amount of time you spend asleep and other metrics like your resting heart rate during sleep and time spent awake. More advanced trackers can analyze how long you spent in each sleep stage and the quality of your rest overall. If you have serious recovery goals or just want to improve your sleep, you may be interested in a tracker that offers personalized sleep coaching, which gives advice on how to improve your rest based on your personal sleep habits.

Strain And Recovery

Similar to sleep quality, recovery is an essential part of training because your muscles rebuild during rest and recovery. Some fitness trackers now have a feature designed to track how ready you are for training based on your body’s level of strain and recovery. The exact name of this score differs depending on the tracker. Whoop has a “strain score” and Garmin has a “training readiness score,” which are essentially the same thing. While this is a more advanced feature, it can be helpful for athletes, those training for a specific event or anyone looking to optimize their training.

My Expertise

I’ve been an ACE-certified personal trainer for nearly two years and active for almost my entire life. I started out as a competitive swimmer, logging countless hours at the pool over an almost 15-year period. Weightlifting has been my chosen form of activity for the past eight years.

Throughout my training, I’ve tested and tried a wide variety of fitness trackers. It wasn’t until recently that I learned the best way to use a fitness tracker for my goals. I relied on my experience testing and reviewing the best fitness trackers to create this guide.

To get the best advice possible on how to use a fitness tracker, I spoke with NASM-certified personal trainer and California-based Row House coach Josh Honore about his experience using fitness trackers for his own training and for sessions with clients. I also consulted Laura Rooney, PhD, associate professor at Marquette University and behavioral psychologist on the motivational behaviors behind fitness trackers and the psychological effects these devices can have on our relationship with exercise and perception of our performance.

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