Is Your Smartwatch Helping or Hurting Your Progress?
Smartwatches are powerful tools. They track your steps, workouts, and even tell you when to stand up. But if you’re not careful, they can do more harm than good - especially if you're relying too heavily on them to guide your fat loss or fitness.
Let’s break it down:
✅ How Your Smartwatch Can Help You
1. Tracks Your Progress
It keeps you accountable to your daily movement, step targets, and workout consistency. Sometimes just seeing those rings close or a streak continue is enough to get you out the door.
2. Boosts Motivation
Getting real time feedback can feel rewarding and give you that extra push to keep showing up.
3. Monitors Recovery
Some models track sleep and stress levels, giving insight into whether your body is ready to train hard or needs to rest.
❌ Where It Starts to Hurt Your Progress
Obsessing over your “calories burned” or trying to “earn” your food by burning those calories isn’t healthy or sustainable.
Especially when your smartwatch is lying to you about calories burned. Even top brands like Apple Watch, Garmin, or Fitbit can be off by 20–80%. That’s massive. If it tells you that you burned 500 calories, the actual number could be 300. Or 700. You’ll never really know.
This is because it’s just an ESTIMATE, based on heart rate, movement, and basic stats like height and weight. It can’t account for your muscle mass, metabolism, or how efficient your body is. 2 people can do the exact same workout and burn totally different amounts of energy.
What Should You Do Instead?
Use smartwatches as a GUIDE, that’s it.
Track your food intake with tools like MyFitnessPal - not based on how much your watch says you “earned.”
Monitor real progress using photos, measurements, strength increases, and how your clothes fit, not just numbers on a screen.
Rest when your body needs it, not just when your watch tells you to.
Smartwatches are just tools. Use them to stay on track - not to control what you do.
You don’t need perfectly closed rings or calorie burn to get results. You need consistency, a plan that aligns with your goals, and an understanding that progress goes beyond what your wrist is telling you.
With love,
Coach Sandra xx