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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.
Few things are more frustrating than injuring yourself during a workout — a time that is intended to be a benefit for your physical and mental health. But, sadly, it happens. And some exercises lead to injury more than others.
When it comes to safety concerns, personal trainers have workout moves they avoid or don’t do with clients for this exact reason — along with the fact that some movements are ineffective.
Below, fitness professionals share the exercise they don’t do in their workouts, along with some alternatives to try instead:
American Kettlebell Swing
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Smith Machine Squat
Enes Evren / Getty Images
Barbell Glute Bridge
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“I definitely believe that the barbell glute bridge is an overhyped exercise when it comes down to glute hypertrophy,” aka muscle building in the glutes, said Andrew Gonzalez, a trainer at Chelsea Piers in Brooklyn.
“While staying in the realm of hip hinging, I believe barbell Romanian deadlifts and Good Mornings … using the safety squat bar are better alternatives for glute hypertrophy because they provide a better stretch-to-shorten stimulus,” Gonzalez said.
Beyond this, he said the Bulgarian split squat with a little bit of front-foot elevation is his go-to movement for glute work. “These exercises provide a better environment to give fuller ranges of motion on the eccentric part of the movement rather than the concentric, which is known to be a better driver for hypertrophy all around,” he said.
When it comes to staying on top of your health, there’s a wealth of technology out there that can give you a boost. The best fitness trackers can help you keep on top of your step count and exercise, while the best smart scales can help you monitor metrics like body composition.
But can you use AI to stay fit and healthy, lose weight, or build muscle? As an experienced health and fitness writer with over a decade using fitness tech like the Apple Watch, I’ve been putting ChatGPT to use as part of my health and fitness regime.
Through his childhood, 48-year-old Rich Bracken labeled himself as the “husky kid.” He found football in high school, and the sport allowed him to tie his weight to his identity—”I was supposed to be big,” he says. Once he quit, he was sick of not feeling good about himself, and underwent a transformation. In over a year and a half, he dropped 110 pounds—and has kept it off for over 26 years. Now, he’s a public speaker who focuses on inspiring his audiences to accomplish whatever it is they set out to do, using his journey as example. Here, he explains the small changes he made to do it.
MY JOURNEY WITH my weight really started in 3rd grade. I was a busy, active kid up until that point. Then, my doctor diagnosed me with exercise induced asthma. Being an only child, my parents were protective, and I spent a lot more time inside.
I went from being very active to being very sedentary. It wasn’t just the lack of activity. My parents were feeding me whatever food I wanted to eat, too. I love my parents so much, but they didn’t know a thing about nutrition. So, I ballooned in the 4th grade. I became the husky kid. I got bullied relentlessly, and like most things, it became worse in middle school.
The only thing that really saved me was the fact that one of my friends pulled me into football. So, I tied my weight to my identity as a football player. I was supposed to be big. I played all through high school and went on to play one year of college. After stopping, I didn’t change my eating habits. I didn’t know how to be healthy. I wanted to lose weight, but I don’t even know where to start.
What I did know was that I wanted this to be a lifestyle thing. I wanted to really learn, and apply good habits to my life. I wanted to gradually lose the weight so it would last. I was raised with very little education on proper nutrition habits. I knew how to exercise, for the most part, from my days playing football. With nutrition, I had to ask a lot of questions.
I was taking a health class at the time, and decided to have my health professor look at my diet. He immediately said, “we really need to make some changes.” He taught me a few things about nutrition to get started. I started subscribing to Men’s Health and it really taught me how to how to work out differently, how to think about food differently, how to think about my body differently.
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Over the following year and a half, I dropped over a hundred pounds. At my heaviest, I was 260, and I slimmed to 151. I’ve kept it off for over 26 years. Here’s what I learned on my journey that helped me get to the weight I wanted and keep it there:
Keep It Interesting
THERE’S NOT ONE right way to do things. A lot of people think they need to run, or do some other kind of miserable exercise to lose weight.
I’m not ashamed to admit this: I started losing weight by doing two things. One, the MTV Grind videos. And two, the Billy Blanks Tae Bo videos. Once I felt healthier, and I could get through an entire Tae Bo workout, I thought, I can probably run a mile. From there I got into running, biking, and even mountain biking. I’ve had stints with the elliptical machine, rowing, and yoga. I’ve done Jazzercise without shame. Now I’m a big Peloton fan. I use the app and the bike all the time. I just took my 700th ride the other day.
COURTESY BRACKEN
It was so important for me to change things up and doing things differently. It helped me from my routine feeling stagnant or stale. It’s really about evolving what feels good as you progress in your fitness, and as you age.
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Watch Portions
PORTION CONTROL WAS not a concept I was aware of when I started my journey. At one point, my health coach said, “we probably shouldn’t eat an entire pizza by ourselves. It’s not a good idea for weight loss.” That was a real wake up call for me.
I learned that I can still eat very flavorful, and sometimes indulgent foods, as long as I’m not eating all of it or multiple servings at a time. To learn that, it took visualization. I needed a physical picture of a serving size to really instill that in me.
I also found that staying present to enjoy food, and stopping when it’s no longer satisfying, was very helpful. The first few scoops of peanut butter are always the best right? The faster you eat it, and the more of it you get, the less present you become to enjoy it. I learned to pace my eating to really enjoy food. I’m still not perfect at that, and eat faster then I probably should still, but it helps when I take a second to stop and enjoy when starting a meal.
Phase Out the Fad Diets
THERE ARE SO many ways out there to get healthy—Atkins, Keto, you name it. And for a while, I tried all those things. Every time, there was something about it I didn’t like. The regimen of it all didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t want to feel guilty about eating the wrong thing, or buying the wrong thing at the grocery store.
I learned that there are so many different ways to be healthy—you don’t have to commit to a certain concept. For me, I combined my research on what foods are good for you, how I like to eat, how my body reacts to different foods, and understanding portion control to put myself on the right track. Everyone’s journey is very specialized to them, so it’s important to ask for help, from a dietitian or even a doctor, to figure out what that track looks like for you.
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The stark line that I have grown to consider over the last decade or so, is: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Stay Stocked
I TRAVEL A lot for work. When I’m on the road for extended periods of time, I can feel a difference. Yes, there are some healthy options in airports and gas stations and such, but having the unhealthy options in front of you can make those choices difficult.
I find I’m at my best on the road when I keep healthy foods stocked on me. I carry around a handful of protein bars for when I need something quick. I know it keeps me on my regimen, and if I make those healthier choices, I’m more likely to make healthy choices throughout the day, like at restaurants. I always know to watch my portions when I eat out, because they always give you more then you need.
COURTESY BRACKEN
I also try to prepare options for myself by planning ahead. Sometimes I’ll look at restaurants around the hotel before I go so I have a short list of my safe places to go. Or I’ll go to a grocery store and grab food for the room. That way I’m not going overboard on unhealthy food if given the opportunity.
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Focus on Feeling
WHEN IT GETS hard to stay on track, I remember that I wanted to do this to become healthier for myself. I wanted to be comfortable. I didn’t want to be out of breath. I didn’t want to be out of energy. I reminded myself of how I felt versus how you want to feel.
There’s this saying: Nothing tastes as good as feeling healthy feels. I take that with a grain of salt, of course (no pun intended). But, reminding myself that it was more important for me consistently to feel healthier, to feel comfortable in my own skin, was important to keep me on track.
When you’re heavy, you really take on that identity. You think, I’m just the fat guy. That was the description that I had of myself. I had to unlearn that, and remember I’m the healthy guy, and that I love the way that feels.
Allow What You Love
THE MOST IMPORTANT thing to me was giving myself grace in the moment. A lot of people think they either have to be perfect, or they have to start all over. You have one day you didn’t eat well and didn’t exercise, and you think you’ve lost all your progress. You think you have to start back over again. Or, that it’s just not in your future to be healthy.
I love bread, wine, and cheese. And without those things, I would live a much less full life. So I allow myself to have them, in moderation, without guilt. Once you take that guilt away, it feels way easier to stay on a healthy trajectory more regularly.
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COURTESY BRACKEN
I spent so long making my old body my identity. I had to get out of my own way, and remember that I am able, and worthy, of getting healthy. I struggled with body dysmorphia for a long time. Understanding that I earned this and that I should feel proud of myself took me a while.
I spent way too much of my life thinking negatively about myself. I was reminding myself of how bad I felt, how little energy I had. I was reminding myself of how low I felt mentally, and how terrible my view of myself was.
Once I got over those negative thoughts by remembering that I am worthy of health, the self motivation became so much easier. If I enjoyed myself maybe a little bit too much on a Friday night, I no longer beat myself up over it. And I was able to get back on the wagon quicker.
I’m getting closer to 50 now, and I have a much broader view of my health. I have two sons that I want to be able to be as active as possible with for as long as I can. I want to be a good example to them as much as I possibly can.
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I do what I do as a speaker now to encourage people that they can do hard things. They can get out of their own head, they can change the the internal dynamic and narrative that they’re telling themselves. They can be the best version of themselves they can possibly be. I thought for a long time that I was one of the least likely people to be able to pull this off. I love to eat. I’m not a huge fan of cardio, to be honest. But I did it.
It is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, physically, mentally, and emotionally. But it is also, without hesitation, the most valuable and worthwhile journey I’ve ever been on. So if you’re thinking about making some kind of change to your diet, physical activity, whatever—you deserve to live in the body you want, and it is absolutely possible to do so.
Cori Ritchey, C.S.C.S., is an Associate Health & Fitness Editor at Men’s Health, a certified strength and condition coach, and group fitness instructor. She reports on topics regarding health, nutrition, mental health, fitness, sex, and relationships. You can find more of her work in HealthCentral, Livestrong, Self, and others.
