Fitness

Fitness trackers and watches: The key to intentional wellness

Published

2 years ago

July 10, 2024

Fitness trackers and watches: The key to intentional wellness

By Police1 Staff

A consistent, intentional wellness strategy is crucial for first responders due to the physical and mental demands of the job.

Maintaining health and wellness helps you perform at your best, manage stress and reduce the risk of injury on or off the job.

Fitness trackers and watches can play a significant role in supporting wellness goals by providing real-time health data, tracking physical activity and promoting healthy habits.

Features to look for in fitness trackers and watches

Heart rate monitoring. Continuous heart rate tracking helps monitor cardiovascular health and workout intensity
Sleep tracking. With the prevalence of sleep disorders in first responders, the ability to analyze your sleep patterns and quality to ensure restful recovery periods is essential to any wellness plan
GPS. Helpful for planning running, biking or hiking routes and making sure you can find your way back even in unfamiliar areas, GPS tracking can also help measure your distances
Water resistance. Consider how you’ll be using your device and if water resistance (for all-weather activities) or waterproof durability (for swimming) is a must for usability in various conditions
Battery life. With your demanding schedule, a long battery life will ensure your device can keep up with you all-shift long
Compatibility. Ensuring your fitness device can sync easily with smartphones and other health apps will help with comprehensive data tracking

Top choices for fitness trackers and watches

Fitbit Charge 5

The Fitbit Charge 5 enhances workout routines with a daily readiness score, stress management through an EDA sensor and heart health tracking with ECG capabilities. It monitors vital health metrics like SpO2 and skin temperature, and has a built-in GPS for real-time pace and distance tracking. It offers up to 7 days of battery life, 24/7 heart rate monitoring and sleep quality insights.

Apple Watch Series 9

The Apple Watch Series 9 extends advanced health, safety and activity features, offering temperature sensing, ECGs on demand, irregular rhythm notifications, detailed sleep stage tracking with REM, core or deep sleep stages, and insights into both physical and emotional well being. It also delivers workout metrics and has safety features like fall detection and crash detection, connecting to emergency services when necessary.

WHOOP 4.0 with 12 Month Subscription

Professional golfer Nick Watney, the first player on the PGA Tour to be diagnosed with COVID-19, credits his WHOOP device with flagging his high respiratory rate – leading to him getting tested and despite his lack of symptoms very early in the pandemic.

WHOOP 4.0 is a comprehensive fitness and health monitoring device designed for first-time members. This package includes a 12-month WHOOP membership, 4.0 hardware, Onyx SuperKnit band and a wearable, waterproof battery pack. The WHOOP device continuously monitors various physiological data such as heart rate, respiratory rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, blood oxygen levels, daily activity and sleep.

The WHOOP system is personalized, offering insight-driven recommendations to improve overall health and optimize performance. Users can log daily behaviors in the WHOOP Journal, which helps identify habits that impact sleep and recovery. WHOOP is also FSA/HSA eligible.

Fitbit Inspire 3

The Fitbit Inspire 3 offers a suite of health and wellness features, including a daily readiness score to gauge your physical readiness, active zone minutes to monitor exercise intensity and 24/7 heart rate tracking. With over 20 exercise modes and automatic exercise recognition, it motivates you to stay active.

For stress management, it provides a daily stress management score, mindfulness and relaxation breathing sessions, along with notifications for irregular heart rhythms and SpO2 levels. It also offers automatic sleep tracking, a personalized sleep profile and a daily sleep score. It boasts up to a 10-day battery life.

Garmin Vivoactive 4

The Garmin Vivoactive 4 is designed for fitness enthusiasts who seek a comprehensive approach to monitoring their health and fitness. It offers a wide range of features including body energy monitoring, animated workouts directly on your wrist and Pulse Ox sensors. Its sensors are capable of tracking over 20 biometrics, ensuring personalized health data. The battery life? Up to 8 days in smartwatch mode and up to 6 hours in GPS and music mode.

Apple Watch SE (2nd Gen)

Need an Apple Watch on a budget? Look no further. The Apple Watch SE includes essential health and safety features like fall detection, crash detection, emergency SOS, and notifications for irregular heart rhythms and abnormal heart rates, but does not offer the more advanced features found in the Series 9, such as ECG and temperature sensing.

Fitbit Versa 3

The Fitbit Versa features sleep stage tracking, a daily readiness score for workout or recovery days, built-in GPS for phone-free activity tracking and active zone minutes for exercise effort recognition. It includes enhanced heart rate monitoring with PurePulse 2.0 and boasts over 6 days of battery life.

Oura Ring Gen3 Horizon – Smart Ring

If you’re looking for a different option, the Oura Ring is a discreet-yet-powerful tool for anyone looking to enhance their understanding of personal health and well being.

The smart ring offers a comprehensive look at your sleep, activity, stress and heart rate. It monitors over 20 biometrics and is compatible with both iOS and Android – allowing for integration with popular health apps. The ring has a battery life that can last up to 7 days on a single charge, providing a week of continuous health monitoring without the need for frequent recharging.

How fitness trackers and watches can improve wellness

Fitness trackers and watches offer several benefits:

Monitoring vital signs. Track heart rate, sleep patterns and stress levels to stay aware of overall health
Activity tracking. Keep tabs on steps, calories burned and exercise routines to ensure adequate physical activity
Health alerts. Receive notifications for irregular heart rates or reminders to move, helping prevent prolonged inactivity
Goal setting. Set and achieve fitness goals with personalized insights and progress tracking

Police1 is using generative AI to create some content that is edited and fact-checked by our editors.

Fitness

Higher fitness levels linked to lower risk of depression, dementia – Harvard Health

Published

11 hours ago

April 21, 2026

Press Room

Higher fitness levels linked to lower risk of depression, dementia – Harvard Health

research review

People with high cardiorespiratory fitness were 36% less likely to experience depression and 39% less likely to develop dementia than those with low cardiorespiratory fitness. Even small improvements in fitness were linked to a lower risk. Experts believe that exercise’s ability to boost blood flow to the brain, reduce bodywide inflammation, and improve stress regulation may explain the connection.

Fitness

These 20-Minute Burpee Workouts Replaced His Entire Gym Routine – and Transformed His Physique

Published

23 hours ago

April 21, 2026

Press Room

These 20-Minute Burpee Workouts Replaced His Entire Gym Routine – and Transformed His Physique

While many swear by them, most people see burpees as a form of punishment – usually dished out drill sergeant-style by overzealous bootcamp PTs. Often the final blow in an already brutal workout, burpees are designed to test cardiovascular fitness, muscular endurance and mental grit. Love them or loathe them, they deliver every time.

For Max Edwards – aka Busy Dad Training on YouTube – they became a simple but highly effective way to stay fit and lean during lockdown. Once a committed powerlifter, spending upwards of 80 minutes a day in the gym, he was forced to overhaul his approach due to fatherhood, lockdown and a schedule that no longer allowed for long, structured lifting sessions.

‘Even though I was putting in hours and hours into the gym and even though my physique was pretty good, I wasn’t becoming truly excellent at any physical discipline,’ he explained in a YouTube video.

‘I loved the intentionality of training,’ says Edwards. ‘The fact that every session has a point, every rep in every set is helping you get towards a training goal, and I loved that there was a clear way of gauging progression – feeling like I was developing competence and moving towards mastery.’

Why He Walked Away From Powerlifting

Despite that structure, Edwards began to question whether powerlifting was sustainable long-term.

‘My sessions were very taxing on my central nervous system. I was exhausted between sessions. It felt as if I needed at least nine hours of sleep each night just to function.’

He also noted that his appetite was consistently high.

But the biggest drawback was time.

‘I could not justify taking 80 minutes a day away from my family for what felt like a self-centred pursuit,’ he says.

A Simpler Approach That Stuck

‘Over the course of that year I fixed my relationship with alcohol and I developed, for the first time in my adult life, a relationship with physical training,’ says Edwards.

With limited time and no access to equipment, he turned to burpees. Just two variations, four times a week, with each session lasting 20 minutes.

‘My approach in each workout was very simple. On a six-count training day I would do as many six-counts as I possibly could within 20 minutes. On a Navy Seal training day I would do as many Navy Seal burpees as I could within 20 minutes – then in the next workout I would simply try to beat the number I had managed previously.’

This style of training is known as AMRAP – as many reps (or rounds) as possible.

The Results

Edwards initially saw the routine as nothing more than a six-month stopgap to stay in shape. But that quickly changed.

‘I remember catching sight of myself in the mirror one morning and I was utterly baffled by the man I saw looking back at me.’

He found himself in the best shape of his life. His energy levels improved, his resting heart rate dropped and his physique changed in ways that powerlifting hadn’t quite delivered.

‘It has been five years since I have set foot in a gym,’ he says. ‘That six-month training practice has become the defining training practice of my life – and for five years I have trained for no more than 80 minutes per week.’

The Burpee Workouts

1/ 6-Count Burpees

20-minute AMRAP, twice a week

How to do them:

Start standing, feet shoulder-width apart
Crouch down and place your hands on the floor (count 1)
Jump your feet back into a high plank (count 2)
Lower into the bottom of a push-up (count 3)
Push back up to plank (count 4)
Jump your feet forward to your hands (count 5)
Stand up straight (count 6)

20-minute AMRAP, twice a week

How to do them:

Start standing, feet shoulder-width apart
Crouch down and place your hands on the floor
Jump your feet back into a high plank
Perform a push-up (chest to floor)
At the top, bring your right knee to your right elbow, then return
Perform another push-up
Bring your left knee to your left elbow, then return
Perform a third push-up
Jump your feet forward
Stand or jump to finish

Kate is a fitness writer for Men’s Health UK where she contributes regular workouts, training tips and nutrition guides. She has a post graduate diploma in Sports Performance Nutrition and before joining Men’s Health she was a nutritionist, fitness writer and personal trainer with over 5k hours coaching on the gym floor. Kate has a keen interest in volunteering for animal shelters and when she isn’t lifting weights in her garden, she can be found walking her rescue dog.

Fitness

Six ways your smartwatch is lying to you, according to science

Published

1 day ago

April 20, 2026

Press Room

Six ways your smartwatch is lying to you, according to science

You check your smartwatch after a run. Your fitness score has dropped. You’ve burnt hardly any calories. Your recovery score is really low. It’s telling you to take the next 72 hours off exercise.

The worst bit? The whole run felt amazing.

So why is your watch telling you the opposite?

Ultimately, it’s because smartwatches and other fitness trackers aren’t always accurate.

Smartwatches can shape how you exercise

Using wearable fitness technology, such as smartwatches, has been one of the top fitness trends for close to a decade. Millions of people around the world use them daily.

These devices shape how people think about health and exercise. For example, they provide data about how many calories you’ve burnt, how fit you are, how recovered you are after exercise, and whether you’re ready to exercise again.

But your smartwatch doesn’t measure most of these metrics directly. Instead, many common metrics are estimates. In other words, they’re not as accurate as you might think.

1. Calories burned

Calorie tracking is one of the most popular features on smartwatches. However, the accuracy leaves a lot to be desired.

Wearable devices can under- or overestimate energy expenditure (often expressed as calories burned) by more than 20 per cent. These errors also vary between activities. For example, strength training, cycling and high-intensity interval training can lead to even larger errors.

This matters because people often use these numbers to guide how much they eat.

For example, if your watch overestimates calories burned, you might think you need to eat more food than you really need, which could result in weight gain. Conversely, if your watch underestimates calories burned, it could lead you to under-eat, negatively impacting your exercise performance.

2. Step counts

Step counts are a great way to measure general physical activity, but wearables don’t capture them perfectly.

Smartwatches can under-count steps by about 10 per cent under normal exercise conditions. Activities such as pushing a pram, carrying weights, or walking with limited arm swing likely make step counts less accurate, as smartwatches rely on arm movement to register steps.

For most people, this isn’t a major problem, and step counts are still useful for tracking general activity levels. But view them as a guide, rather than a precise measure.

3. Heart rate

Smartwatches estimate your heart rate using sensors that measure changes in blood flow through the veins in your wrist.

This method is accurate at rest or low intensities, but gets less accurate as you increase exercise intensity.

Arm movement, sweat, skin tone and how tightly you wear the watch can also impact the heart rate measure it spits out. This means the accuracy can vary between people.

This can be problematic for people who use heart rate zones to guide their training, as small errors can lead to training at the wrong intensity.

4. Sleep tracking

Almost every smartwatch on the market gives you a “sleep score” and breaks your night into stages of light, deep and REM sleep.

The gold standard for measuring sleep is polysomnography. This is a lab-based test that records brain activity. But smartwatches estimate sleep using movement and heart rate.

This means they can detect when you’re asleep or awake reasonably well. But they are much less accurate at identifying sleep stages.

So even if your watch says you had “poor deep sleep”, this may not be the case.

5. Recovery scores

Most smartwatches track heart rate variability and use this, with your sleep score, to create a “readiness” or “recovery” score.

Heart rate variability reflects how your body responds to stress. In the lab it is measured using an electrocardiogram. But smartwatches estimate it using wrist-based sensors, which are much more prone to measurement errors.

This means most recovery metrics are based on two inaccurate measures (heart rate variability and sleep quality). This results in a metric that may not meaningfully reflect your recovery.

As a result, if your watch says you’re not recovered, you might skip training — even if you feel good (and are actually good to go).

6. VO₂max

Most devices estimate your VO₂max — which indicates your maximal fitness. It’s the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise.

The best way to measure VO₂max involves wearing a mask to analyse the amount of oxygen you breathe in and out, to determine how much oxygen you’re using to create energy.

But your watch cannot measure oxygen use. It estimates it based on your heart rate and movement.

But smartwatches tend to overestimate VO₂max in less active people and underestimate VO₂max in fitter ones.

This means the number on your watch may not reflect your true fitness.

What should you do?

While the data from your smartwatch is prone to errors, that doesn’t mean it is completely worthless.

These devices still offer a way to help you track general trends over time, but you should not pay attention to daily fluctuations or specific numbers.

It’s also important you pay attention to how you feel, how you perform and how you recover. This is likely to give you even more insight than what your smartwatch says.

Hunter Bennett is a lecturer in exercise science at Adelaide University. This piece first appeared on The Conversation.