Comparing The Best Fitness Trackers
Which Wearable Is Right For You?
What Is The Best Fitness Tracker?
Last week we covered the importance of measuring HRV for understanding your recovery.
This week we continue discussing which fitness tracker best measures what matters most to you.
All of the wearable fitness trackers on the market have flaws, so the decision you should make is which is best for you rather than which is the best one in general.
Today’s showdown will be between three of the heaviest hitters: Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and Whoop.
Since Black Friday and the holidays are just around the corner, this post might also help you decide which to look for during the upcoming sales.
The Most Important Factor Regardless of Wearable
As we talked about last week, the most important factor in measuring recovery is to develop an awareness of your trends over time. As you consistently gather data across different scenarios simply by wearing the device, the more useful it becomes by gaining insights into what changes impact your HRV and other recovery metrics.
These devices also calibrate recovery scores or training loads based on other factors from just HRV alone, so as you wear them over time they’ll incorporate other data points like heart rate, breathing rate, body temperature, and blood oxygen levels.
Can you have a party with just one person? Maybe.
Can you have a clear understanding of your recovery with just one score? No. Over time the data points collect to give you a bigger picture of your recovery and where you need to be to perform your best.
Inconsistency is inevitable
All of the devices are very good but not perfect. It’s inconceivable that any home-use wearable device will ever become as accurate or precise as lab testing is because they’re not nearly as invasive or encompassing. But that’s also one of the beauty things about having a device that fits on your wrist or a ring around your finger that can give you all this data.
That’s why it goes back to looking at the trends. Trends over time lie less than individual scores may.
How Do You Want To Wear It?
So any of the devices will do the job. Which one do you choose?
With every update, the heavy hitters in the wearable market become closer together in what they track and what data they present to you, so it’s no longer a matter of which gives you the best data.
The most important question to ask yourself is how do you want to wear it that will allow you to be consistent?
Oura Ring - If you want a wearable just for at night or at-home use that’s the least intrusive for sleep, Oura does this best. The newer generations of Oura provide all-day data but I don’t always want to wear a ring just for gathering health data even though it does look nice. It’s also a no-go for fitness tracking because I’d never wear a ring in the gym at the risk of losing a finger. Maybe your workouts don’t involve as much weightlifting and this won’t be as much of an issue for you.
Apple Watch - Having a watch on your wrist seems like the most natural approach for wearing a fitness and health tracking device which is quickly available at a glance. Highly functional yet non-invasive in most settings, although if you’re doing any powerlifting or weightlifting and need to wear wrist wraps, the watch placement won’t work. Same goes for martial arts.
Whoop - Again with the same wrist placement. The Whoop has the advantage of being removed from the wristband and inserted into different pieces of clothing to continue tracking data when it can’t be worn on the wrist. This makes it popular in the world of Jiu-Jitsu where it can’t be worn on the wrist during training and I found it useful in playing ultimate frisbee when I don’t want to have an Apple Watch on.
Morpheus - One device we won’t touch on extensively because I haven’t used it myself but I’ve heard it’s the most accurate for measuring HRV is Morpheus. It’s a chest strap so you only put it on for your once-daily recovery test upon waking although you can also use it during workouts for heart rate data. Even though it’s only worn for 2-3 minutes per day you’d still want to make sure you can stick to testing consistently. Morpheus is also the lowest-cost option by far and doesn’t require any monthly subscriptions to use.
The Pros and Cons of Each Device
Apple Watch
I have come to depend on the Apple Watch for a lot of things in my life.
Like setting timers. I set timers for everything. Approximately 49 times a day.
So considering that the Apple Watch is a staple of my EDC, I upgraded to the Ultra a few years ago and couldn’t be happier. The adventure appeal spoke to me on a deep level and the battery life boost sold me. It was also a big upgrade from the previous Apple Watch I had. These devices don’t have as much planned obsolescence in them as some people might think.
A more natural wakeup
after using the Apple Watch during sleep for well over a year now, I never want to go back to an auditory alarm to wake me up again. Blaring alarm clocks going off instantly throws you into a stressed out state upon waking. Just watch one of the many comedy skits on YouTube about iPhone alarm tones and notice the PTSD it triggers in you. The gentle tapping on the wrist to wake up doesn’t disturb anyone else and is more than enough to signal wake-up time.
Training Load - Apple enters the battle
With the latest software updates, Apple has entered into the fray of providing its own version of readiness to train scores with the Vitals and Training Load features. Vitals provides insights like the Health Monitor on Whoop that can flag when something is off with your overnight scores of heart rate, breathing rate, body temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. Together these can indicate when more rest is needed or when you might be getting sick.
Combined with Vitals is the Training Load which is sort of like Strain on Whoop. Trainig Load will suggest a score on cardio activities for you but one key difference I like a lot is that with Trainig Load you can input your own perceived effort. This is an excellent feature for increasing your subjective awareness of the effort you put into training. It also means it’s more practical for strength training workouts and noticing when your training is diminishing and you may need to deload.
People complain a lot that the Vitals app doesn’t include HRV but this doesn’t bother me because HRV has been a measurement you can track in the Health app for a long time. Just star it as a favorite and put it near the top of your Health app summary screen so you can see it with your other health data.
The downside of the Apple Watch - can also be seen as an upside - is that has a screen and does so much more than just health and fitness tracking. This means the battery life is about a day versus days with the other devices. It also means it can be more distracting depending on how you use it.
Oura Ring
Oura Ring is said to have the most accurate sleep-tracking data. If this matters to you, it might be worth considering.
I feel lucky that I have a 2.0 Oura ring because it came before they started to require monthly subscriptions for the device. That sullied my impression of Oura, although I think you can still get some of your data even without the subscription.
Even though Oura now also requires a subscription for the full data functionalities, I think you can still use it to get your basic sleep, readiness, and activity scores. But if you want all the insights it requires their membership.
If I only wanted a device for overnight tracking I’d choose Oura. It’s less invasive and can go into airplane mode if you care about EMFs. But I don’t like it as a fitness tracker because I don’t want a ring on when I’m working out. Depending on what types of workouts you’re doing this might not be as much of a problem to wear a ring.
Whoop Band
I wore the Whoop for over a year and recently gave it another go in preparing this guide to fitness trackers. I tried to love it again but it really didn’t provide anything useful for me on top of the data I get from the Apple Watch.
I know lots of people who swear by Whoop and the data that they get from it. Sometimes it was the seeming magic of an early prediction of a cold coming on that convinced them it was valuable.
Whoop also has the Journal feature that can help you to understand how different behaviours affect your recovery and ability to perform. If it detects a significant positive or negative trend it can tell you. This is a nice feature to have as someone early in the health journey who doesn’t know what impact certain things will have. While it’s built into the Whoop software already, there are some apps in the App Store for Apple Watch that can do this as well.
I never found it told me anything I didn’t already know.
First off, it’s important to know that without an active subscription to Whoop, it is completely unusable. You can see past data but it won’t provide you with anything once your membership ends. I also find that canceling the membership is not very clear and takes a fair amount of digging to actually find, which isn’t cool.
Finally, the cost of the membership is alright if you are in the first year of using the device and you get them bundled together but otherwise, I find it to be too expensive paying month to month just for fitness data.
As far as the experience goes, there are some buggy things about Whoop that I still don’t like that also make it less enticing to want to keep the membership. Sometimes on walks, I would have weird heart rate data where it says my heart rate was up to 168 and my strain score would be around a 10. This is very weird when my Apple Watch would say my max heart rate was maybe 120 when walking up a hill but nowhere near an almost max effort.
Even in training, I find the max heart rate and heart rate data to be glitchy. I’ve had all-out training efforts on the spin bike that recorded my max heart rate as 165. Could it be the other way around and it’s Apple Watch that has the problem? Maybe but I know what a red zone effort feels like for me and it’s definitely not at a heart rate of 165. So there’s something off with Whoop.
The strength trainer features are not very useful. You have to manually input the sets and reps and it takes too much work for what I’d want if I was going to use it consistently.
The wake-up vibration alarm is nice but I’ve been using the haptics of the Apple Watch to wake up for so long that I feel spoiled by it. I think it’s a much nicer sensation than the audible buzzing of the Whoop as it vibrates to wake you up. It also is next to impossible to get the double tap right to shut it off early and stop it from vibrating. But if you don’t have to wake up at a set time each day and you want to max out your performance by sleeping more, setting your wake-up time to Peak with Whoop is pretty cool because it’ll automatically adjust your wake-up until you hit 100% of your sleep goal.
What about Fitbit?
I haven’t actually used a Fitbit in many years but I’ve seen the data from friends and clients on some of the more recent models.
Fitbit can provide you with the metrics most useful for tracking. I don’t know how accurate the HRV tracking is. It seems to provide more inconsistent results than the other devices but as long as you focus on the long-term trends it should help you to understand when it’s time to push more and when you need to back off and recover.
The other good thing with Fitbit is they’re one of the least expensive options so they can be a great starting point. Some of the models have a very small profile so are less obtrusive than a bulkier Apple Watch Ultra.
Those are my thoughts, what about you?
Don’t complicate things. From my experience, these are the factors that matter most when considering fitness trackers for your health.
The accuracy or depth of data doesn’t matter as much as the adherence and how it can help you to understand your own body better.
It’s also important to not obsess over the data. Fitness trackers can be used for a time to develop greater awareness of your intuition on how your training and recovery is going and then you can take a step back to listen more to your body.
Don’t get caught closing rings and pushing strain scores just for the sake of it.
What matters in a fitness tracker for you? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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