Alpinist Leif Whitaker, escaping the noise.
The Quantified Self. Gamification. #stravafail. The intersection of Silicon Valley and the fitness community has spawned terms that a few years ago meant nothing and pushed them into popular usage. It has also put an astounding amount of fitness trackers on our wrists, digital coaches in our ears and smartphone monitoring apps in our pockets. In the first quarter of last year alone, Americans purchased 19.7 million fitness wearables, up 67 percent from the previous year.
Around the same time the “wearables” cottage industry expanded into so-called “hearables” – either standalone earbuds or those fused with sunglasses to tell you when to go faster and farther and when to back off or stop. Now we’ve also got clothes with sensors embedded in them to measure heartrate, movement and heaven knows what else, while mattresses measure our sleep and HRV monitoring apps to tell us if we’re recovering adequately or not. If you think Dave Eggers went too far out into a dystopian future in The Circle, you need to buckle up. Because that high-paced, always-on, hyper-connected future is now. And like it or not, we’re all along for the ride.
That said, there are many people who swear by their smartwatches, go gaga over the latest gizmos and won’t leave home without their wearables. Not to mention those who are committed to staying the course in the high-tech gear arms race that keeps us desiring shoes to make us more efficient, bikes to make us faster and snowboards and surfboards to make going bigger, easier. While there are lots of ways to think about the fitness technology revolution that’s unfolding before our eyes, let’s start with a simple question: are our fitness trackers and smart watches friends or foes?
That’s the central question Brian Mackenzie, Dr. Andy Galpin and I sought to answer in our new book Unplugged. Rather than just penning a diatribe against technology and going off to hoard grain in a bombproof underground shelter, we set out to consider which scenarios we should apply fitness tech to, how to do this more purposefully and when it’s time to disconnect from our devices and reconnect to our instincts, nature and other people.
On the positive side of the ledger, let’s consider someone who has been sedentary for a few years. If buying a smartphone/watch, fitness tracker or some other gadget encourages them to become more active and this improves their health, then great. Similarly, if a mid-level or elite athlete it using a certain technology intentionally to boost their performance, then two thumbs up. Keep doing what you’re doing. In the book we also advocate for using fitness tech to calibrate, inform and connect what you’re feeling to what’s happening with your physiology and the resulting performance.
Yet for some people, it’s all too easy to go too far and begin abdicating all their decision-making to a device. One time I was out running on a trail and a guy coming the other way almost ran me over. He didn’t hear me approaching because of the headphones jammed in his ear canals or see me because he kept glancing down at his tracker to check his heart rate every few seconds. Can you recall a similar situation? This is just a simple, personal example of someone who chose to cut themselves off from their environment and their natural observational instincts in favor of a playlist and heart rate monitoring.
Now perhaps this guy would need the music to drown out a busy street if we lived in downtown Denver, but we were in a small mountain town where the only soundtrack is a burbling stream below the trail and birdsong above. Perhaps the HR monitoring was helping his training, but it sure dampened his awareness of self and how he was moving through his surroundings. And don’t even get me started on those devices that tap into our fear of missing out by promising in ads that we’ll “never miss a call or text again” if we permanently affix them to our wrists. As if we desperately need another area of our life in which we can be interrupted, or another opportunity to avoid being fully present in the moment.
I guess what it comes down to is simply whether fitness technology is adding to or subtracting from your performance, overall wellness and quality of life. One simple way to find out is to take the Unplugged challenge: spend 30 minutes being active in nature with no tech every day. See how you feel after a month. Then use the #unpluggedbook hashtag (yeah, I get the irony), to let Andy, Brian and I know what changes you see, good or bad. YOU be the judge of whether your fitness tech is friend or foe.
Editor’s Note: You can purchase Unplugged, here.
