Wearable Tech in Fitness: Helpful Tool or Hard Work Avoidance?

Wearable fitness tech is everywhere.

Apple Watches. Whoop bands. Heart rate straps. Sleep trackers. Rings that tell you how “ready” you are to train today.

For some people, they’re useful tools. For others, they’re becoming a crutch.

And that’s the real conversation we need to have.

The Good: Data Can Motivate

Let’s start with the positives, because they do exist.

For a lot of people, wearables help with consistency. Closing rings. Hitting step counts. Seeing weekly mileage go up. Tracking runs, heart rate trends, or general activity levels over time.

That data can be motivating. It gives people small targets to aim for throughout the day and helps them feel like they’re “doing something”. For beginners especially, that sense of momentum can be useful.

I’ve seen plenty of clients use wearables as a nudge to move more, train a bit harder, or simply stay accountable.

And that’s fine.

The Problem: When the Watch Becomes the Coach

Where things start to fall apart is when the tech begins to dictate everything.

Every session has to be better than the last.

Every run has to be faster.

Every heart rate reading has to be “optimal”.

Every calorie burned has to be logged, counted, and trusted.

That’s not how training works in the real world.

Yes, progressive overload matters. But progress is not linear, and wearables don’t seem to understand that. People end up frustrated when numbers stall or dip, even though that’s a completely normal part of training.

Worse still, many people use wearables to estimate calorie expenditure while trying to lose weight. In my experience, these devices massively overestimate how much energy is actually being burned. The result? People eat more than they should, progress stalls, and they end up stuck in what I call paralysis by analysis.

Too much data. Not enough results.

Losing Touch With Your Own Body Due To Wearable Tech in Fitness

One of the biggest downsides of wearable tech is how it disconnects people from their own instincts.

I’ll use running as an example.

I wasn’t a runner. When I decided to start, I did it by feel. No heart rate zones. No recovery scores. No readiness metrics. I just went out and ran.

And very quickly, I learned the most important lesson most people miss: the hardest part is starting.

Not your recovery score.

Not your sleep data.

Not whether your watch says you’re “ready”.

Just getting out of the door.

When your watch tells you that you need 28 hours of recovery but you’ve got a run planned later, what then? You skip it? You doubt yourself? You talk yourself out of training?

For everyday people trying to fit fitness into busy lives, that level of specificity isn’t helpful. It becomes another barrier.

Beginners don’t need to know if they’re in zone two. They need to learn how to enjoy moving their body, build the habit, and stop overthinking every session.

Log your runs if you want. Use Strava. Track distance over time.

But obsessing over heart rate for every single run? I’m not convinced that’s helping most people.

Where Wearables Do Make Sense

This isn’t an anti-tech rant.

For higher-level endurance athletes, wearables can be genuinely useful. Training in specific zones. Managing volume. Monitoring long-term trends. At that end of the spectrum, data has a clear place.

Wearables have also done a good job of highlighting things people used to ignore, like sleep quality and sleep duration. That awareness is a good thing.

But once the lesson is learned, I question the need to obsess over it every single day.

The Future: More Tech, Same Reality

Wearable tech isn’t going anywhere.

People love technology. Just look at how common Apple Watches are now, or how quickly devices like Whoop have spread. That growth will continue.

But here’s the truth that no piece of tech can escape:

Hard work still matters.

People ran marathons, lifted absurd weights, and completed extreme endurance events long before heart rate monitors, sleep scores, or recovery algorithms existed.

No wearable ever replaced effort.

No app ever did the work for you.

No ring, strap, or watch will train on your behalf.

You still have to turn up.

You still have to train.

You still have to work bloody hard.

Wear a Whoop if you want. Track your sleep. Log your runs.

Just don’t kid yourself into thinking that any piece of wearable tech in fitness removes the need for graft.

Because it doesn’t

J.