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As Fitbit’s premium flagship, the Sense 2 wants to be both the best fitness tracker and the best smartwatch, all in one. And while it excels at offering holistic health data, some may be disappointed about how “smart” it can be when compared to other brands.
For its second iteration of the Sense, Fitbit made some excellent improvements to its design. The company also put a lot of effort into enhanced health and wellness features, including meaningful improvements to stress tracking.
In terms of smarts, there are some questionable downgrades. Fitbit got rid of Google Assistant, as well as third-party app support, two big features one could argue are more or less standard for smartwatches nowadays.
But the Sense 2 is still a quality choice — it’s not only one of the best Fitbits but also one of the best Android smartwatches. After spending a month with it, it is a premium wearable that utilizes Fitbit’s excellent ecosystem of tracking capabilities, wellness insights, and app integration to offer some of the best health and wellness tracking available.
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Fitbit Sense 2
Fitbit’s Sense 2 combines the brand’s advanced health and fitness features with decent smartwatch capability, unique sleep tracking, and a clean design reminiscent of the Apple Watch.
The Sense 2 has a sleek design and is lightweight and comfortable on-wrist
The Sense 2 features a sleek, lightweight design and it’s able to stay comfortable on your wrist all day long.
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The Fitbit Sense 2 is built to be forgotten about, and that’s one of the best things about it. With a low profile and rounded corners, it’s comfortable to wear all day and night. And even though it’s lighter and thinner than its predecessor, it sports the same 1.58-inch AMOLED touchscreen display that does an excellent job with visibility in bright environments.
In addition to touchscreen navigation, Fitbit added a physical button, which allows you to access quick settings, apps, and shortcuts. The original Sense had a touch-sensitive panel, which was easy to press at even the slightest bend of the wrist unintentionally. So the tactile button is a welcomed practical improvement, especially during workouts.
It’s best feature is its robust offering of health tools including real-time stress tracking
The Sense 2 does more than just track your heart rate or steps taken as it also offers stress tracking, menstrual cycle logging, and blood oxygen tracking.
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If what you’re after is a wearable that tracks activities accurately and offers a wide range of health features, the Sense 2 won’t disappoint. In addition to mainstays seen on other Fitbit watches like blood oxygen tracking, menstrual cycle logging, and heart rate variability, the Sense 2 goes further with built-in skin temperature sensors, ECG readings, and real-time stress tracking.
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What’s especially impressive is that the sum of these features makes the Sense 2 a powerful wellness tool that’s intended for far more than just counting your steps or logging a bike ride.
Take stress-tracking, for instance. Using its built-in cEDA sensor, the Sense 2 takes real-time readings of your body’s stress levels and can notify you of certain readings to help lower them. This can be done via breathing exercises or a call to exercise. It’s a unique (and useful) feature that can help paint a picture of how well your body handles daily stressors.
This feature is expanded via the Fitbit app, too, where you can input specifically how you feel when your watch detects a stress event. The app’s Weekly Summary function then charts each of those feelings throughout the week which provides an interesting snapshot of how your mood might ebb and flow.
The Fitbit Sense 2 has a built-in skin temperature sensor in addition to its heart rate monitor.
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It’s one thing to know you’re stressed at the moment, but to see exactly how much and for how long you’re stressed is a great feature.
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And it’s this emphasis on more than fitness statistics that makes the Sense 2 one of Fitbit’s most well-rounded watches. Both the watch and the app experience deliver everything from sleep habits and analysis to heart rate variability readings, skin temperature, resting heart rate, and blood oxygen level. This gives you a truly holistic view of your well-being.
Here’s everything the Sense 2 tracks:
Steps
Sleep
Stress levels
Blood oxygen
Irregular heart rhythm
Heart rate
Menstrual cycle logging and tracking
Skin temperature
GPS and distance covered
More than 40 compatible exercises to track
That’s an abundance of tracking capability and fully entrenches the Sense 2 as Fitbit’s namesake flagship. While Fitbit-owner Google has the Google Pixel Watch, the Sense 2 still does things, like skin temperature readings and stress-tracking, that the Pixel Watch doesn’t.
The watch offers solid activity tracking capability with mostly reliable GPS
The Sense 2 offers a wide range of trackable activities from running and biking to snowboarding, weight lifting, and yoga.
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Although the Sense 2 is a powerful health and wellness tool, it also excels at being a quality activity tracker. It has built-in GPS, the capability to track more than 40 different exercises, and it’s even waterproof up to 50 meters for the swimming crowd.
I’ll admit I was at first skeptical of how well the GPS would manage on the Sense 2 as I’d been disappointed in how it fared in one of Fitbit’s other wearables, the Versa 4. We took a look at the Fitbit Sense 2 vs. the Versa 4 side-by-side. While the Versa 4 had a slew of issues with its GPS syncing and tracking, my experience with the Sense 2 was quite different.
I found everything about the watch’s tracking to be intuitive and easy to use and never felt like I had to wait much longer than a few seconds for the GPS to sync. It may not seem like much, but knowing that your watch is accurately tracking you while you run, bike, or swim is a comforting feeling, especially for those who might be training for a specific race or pace time.
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Each tracked activity also automatically uploads to the Fitbit app, so whenever I was done with a workout, be it a run or a bike ride, I could see all the tracked workout data right there. This included my total time spent active, a detailed map of where I was during the activity, my average and fastest speeds, and my elevation gain and heart rate zones.
All your collected activity data is easily accessible either via the watch itself or the companion Fitbit app.
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All this info is great to have at your fingertips, so long as you know how to use it. It can seem overwhelming at first to navigate some of the data but I considered this a good problem to have as I grew to enjoy combing through the in-depth data to compare each of my workouts at a more granular level.
One nitpick I did have with the Sense 2’s tracking capability was its automatic exercise tracking feature. This is where it’s supposed to auto-detect when you’ve started an activity, but I often found that it hardly ever worked and when it did, it wasn’t accurate.
When I manually started tracking activities, I found that the distance, pace, and heart rate information were consistent while any auto-tracked exercises seemed quite a bit off. This isn’t a total dealbreaker but something to keep in mind for the accuracy-obsessed wearers.
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The Sense 2 is technically a smartwatch but it lacks several key smart features
One of the odd choices Fitbit made in developing the Sense 2 was to remove some of the features that contributed to it being a legit “smart” watch. This includes removing all third-party app support as well as Google Assistant (a truly puzzling decision considering Google is the parent company now and makes the Google Pixel Watch).
The watch does still have Amazon Alexa integration (albeit another puzzling decision), so it’s not devoid of a voice assistant altogether, though you do need to have your phone tethered to the watch to use it. And app-wise, outside of its native health and fitness features, the Sense 2 also offers Google Wallet and Google Maps (Android only) support.
Fitbit Pay remains ostensibly available on the Sense 2. Of course, it also gets text, call, and email notifications, as well as a Find My Phone function, but these are the bare minimum standard features even non-smart wearables have.
So, while the Sense 2 slots into the smartwatch category, you can’t help but be a little disappointed it’s not at least a little smarter. For those looking for a powerful, everyday smartwatch that also has robust fitness and wellness tracking, this might not be the best choice.
Battery life is one of the Sense 2’s highlights as it consistently goes five days before needing a charge
The Sense 2 features excellent battery life that can last upwards of five or six days before needing to be recharged.
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The Fitbit Sense 2’s battery is one of its best features, lasting days before needing to be plugged in again. During my tests, I found the battery life to run for roughly five days, though I did use the GPS function often, which tends to drain the battery.
The fact it lasts for multiple days on end, kept me coming back to using the watch instead of being bogged down with needing to tediously charge it every night. To top it off, when I did need to charge it, the Sense 2 required roughly 12 minutes to get a full day’s charge, so there wasn’t a lot of waiting around for it to have enough juice.
Should you buy it?
The Fitbit Sense 2 is an effective and useful fitness- and health-focused wearable that comes up a bit short as a genuine smartwatch.
Rick Stella/Insider
If you’re in the market for a fitness-focused tracker that’s somewhat smart savvy, then you’d have a hard time finding a better watch at the Sense 2’s great price point of $250. With new features like skin temperature sensing and in-depth stress-tracking, it’s a solid showing for Fitbit’s flagship.
But despite the fact it’s a premium smartwatch that excels with health and fitness tracking, it comes up short in terms of smarts. And if the “smart” is important to you, you may want to opt for something else. While the Sense 2 is still one of the best Android smartwatches, other models offer far more smart capability.
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This isn’t to say there isn’t a market for the Sense 2, but rather it’s best used by those focused more on fitness and health metrics. If, for instance, you’re upgrading from a Versa 3 (or returning a Versa 4), then the Sense 2 is a solid choice. It just isn’t as “smart” as it lets on.
Mattie Schuler is a freelance writer specializing in the outdoors, adventure gear, and travel, as well as education and parenting. When she isn’t writing, she is actively looking for dogs to pet, wrangling children in the wilderness (Mattie is a forest school teacher in Boulder, Colorado), and either tracking snow reports or international flights, depending on the season. Her work has appeared in publications for REI, Outside, Backpacker, NatuRX, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness, Gore-Tex, Reebok, Elevation Outdoors, Gear Patrol, Yoga Journal, We Are Teachers, Parentology, Openfit, and Beachbody. Her work can be found at mattieschuler.com.
‘Exercise snacks’ have been studied for years, and new research adds to the growing evidence of their benefits for overall health, muscle strength and size, cardiovascular fitness, and glycemic control. Often called ‘resistance exercise snacks’, this approach involves short, sharp training sessions, each lasting less than 10 minutes, that can lead to meaningful muscle gains.
Less time and more gains? We’re listening. We break down the new research, and include three 5-minute workouts for your desk breaks.
The Review
The research, published in Sports Medicine and Health Research, set out to evaluate the effectiveness of “exercise snacks” — regular, short bouts of physical activity — in improving physical fitness and metabolic health among sedentary populations. The researchers aimed to determine whether brief periods of exercise could help mitigate the negative health impacts of prolonged sedentary behaviour, such as sitting, which is linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.
The Methods
The study reviewed existing research on exercise snacks, focusing on interventions that involved short bursts of physical activity repeated multiple times throughout the day. These were conducted in different settings (home, office or school). The review analysed the impact on muscle strength and hypertrophy, aerobic fitness, energy metabolism and the metabolic impacts on markers such as insulin sensitivity, fat oxidation and muscle adaptations.
The Results
The researchers found that:
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Exercise snacks were effective in reducing postprandial blood glucose (blood sugar levels after eating), insulin levels, and triglyceride levels. They increased fat oxidation and improved overall metabolic health.
Exercise snacks led to improvements in cardiovascular respiratory fitness, an important factor in reducing the risk of cardiovascular illnesses.
Vigorous intermittent exercises, such as stair climbing and sprints, were beneficial for muscle strength.
Moderate intermittent exercises, like 10-minute resistance training sessions, were particularly beneficial for older adults.
Exercise snacks could be an effective alternative to longer more infrequent training sessions, maximising the cumulative effect of training volume across the week to increase muscle mass.
Resistance exercise snacks, performed once or twice daily may help maintain and increase muscle protein synthesis, which is necessary for muscle growth.
Exercise snacks can increase leg muscle strength and size in older adults without the high intensity of traditional resistance exercises. This could be a safe and effective alternative for older exercisers.
The Conclusion
The researchers concluded that exercise snacks are an easy and effective method in reducing the health risks associated with sedentary lifestyles. These exercise snacks can provide a practical, time efficient way of integrating physical activity into daily routines, promoting better health, fitness, muscle strength and size.
What Does This Mean for Us?
Another large-scale review, published in Sports Medicine, has already investigated the effects of exercise snacks, highlighting the health benefits of incorporating them into our daily routine. This more recent study also noted additional benefits for muscle mass and strength. In light of this promising evidence, we can include hypertrophy snacks once or twice a day — after a quick warm-up — using the following examples:
Hypertrophy Snack for Chest and Triceps
1a) Press-ups x AMRAP (as many reps as possible) and 3 sets / 20 seconds rest
1b) Bench dips x 15 reps and 3 sets / 20 seconds rest
Hypertrophy Snack for Legs
1a) Air squats x 20 reps and 3 sets / 20 seconds rest
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1b) Stair sprints x 1 minute / Walking lunges x 20 reps and 3 sets / 20 seconds rest
If you’re training for a Hyrox, then you’ll know you there are a lot of elements you need to brush up on, from strength to endurance, and power, in order to prepare you for the race’s eight workout stations. One of which is the burpee broad jumps.
In a survey carried out by Trio Fitness Training with 410 participants, burpee board jumps were voted the hardest Hyrox station (followed by wall balls and lunges). It doesn’t come as a massive shock, as having to jump as far as possible on already tired legs is pretty torturous and can lead to a lactic overload.
If you’re hammering away at your hammer curls to no avail, sports scientist Dr Mike Israetel delivers a sharp dose of reality, highlighting the top arm training mistakes we’re making.
In a recent YouTube video, he outlines five of the most common mistakes people make when training arms, from range of motion to outdated programming habits and forgetting to train our forearms. Whether you’re training your arms for aesthetics or performance, these are the principles you’ll want to revisit.
5 Arm Training Mistakes You Need to Avoid
1/ You Don’t Need a Dedicated ‘Arm Day’
The myth that biceps and triceps must be trained together, on the same day, is both outdated and unnecessary. ‘There is no distinct benefit of this,’ Dr Israetel explains. ‘In fact, if your biceps are sufficiently pumped, it actually limits the range of motion on your triceps.’
He continues to explain that the problem lies within recovery strategies: ‘Triceps get sore for like two or three days. Biceps recover in a day or two. So if you’re always trying to train them together, you’ll have to needlessly constrict the amount of effort or volume you do for triceps.’
Sure, an arm day can be fun, but ‘if you have to screw up the rest of your programme to keep an arm day in the mix, consider not doing that,’ advises Dr Israetel.
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2/ Getting Stuck in Fixed Rep Ranges
‘Sets of 5 to 8 can 100% grow your biceps and triceps really well… so can sets of 12 all the way up to even 30,’ says Dr Israetel. ‘Any rep range that works best for a while will eventually get stale, and variation will promote more growth.’ In other words, don’t be afraid to explore varied rep ranges when your current ones get easy.
3/ Not Maximising the Stretch
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‘People do cable extensions halfway down… bicep curls when they don’t ever get a deep stretch.’ And while standing curls might feel tough, Dr Israetel warns they’re often ineffective due to gravity’s unhelpful angle.
The fix for this? Lying dumbbell curls. Which Israetel says is ‘probably one of the most brutal and effective ways to train your bicep’. Why? Because ‘It stretches your bicep under its most maximum load… at that very deep part of the stretch.’
He says this is the same for exercises such as skull crushers: ‘going all the way down… you’re going to get more pumps, more soreness, more growth.’
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4/ Not Training Arms Enough
If you’re hitting your arms once a week, and are serious about increasing size, you may want to up the ante says Dr Israetel, ‘Your triceps, you can train in most cases, hard, two to three times a week. Your biceps you can train in most cases hard three to four times a week.
‘These are small muscles, they do not take one week to recover’. If your split allows for it, slot in two to four dedicated arm sessions per week – assuming recovery is on point.
5/ Forgetting the Forearms
‘Your forearms can contribute massively to how big your overall arms look,’ says Dr Israetel. If you want to really maximise how big our arms look, he advises: ‘Three to six sets of some kind of forearm curls… multiple times per week will get you notably bigger forearms.’
