Fitness

The Case for Ditching Your Fitness Trackers

Published

3 months ago

December 12, 2025

The Case for Ditching Your Fitness Trackers

Credit: René Ramos/Lifehacker/ZaZa studio/Adobe Stock/Andriy Onufriyenko/Moment/Vadym Kalitnyk/iStock/Getty Images

I have a love-hate relationship with the smartwatch on my wrist. This relationship is no doubt shaped by the fact that I write about fitness tech for a living, but I know I’m not alone in succumbing to an obsession with numbers from my wearables. Did I hit 10,000 steps? What’s my resting heart rate today? Is my sleep score better than yesterday’s? When did progressive overload turn into screen time overload, too?

The fitness tech boom is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon—and with it, we consume a constant stream of promises that this data will make us healthier, stronger, and faster. With the sheer amount of health insights potentially available to us at any time, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. I’ve watched my least health-anxious friends become consumed by metrics they’d never heard of two years ago. They’re tracking bone density trends, obsessing over cortisol levels, panicking about stress scores that fluctuate for reasons no algorithm can fully explain. I can feel my fitness trackers pull me away from genuine wellness and into a mental health disaster. The good news: When I look up from my screens and start talking to real people, I see I’m not alone in wanting to unplug and push back against the overly quantified self.

A growing anti-tech fitness movement

When I put out a call on Instagram asking people about their relationship with posting workout data and fitness content, I received hundreds of responses from people exhausted by the performance of fitness. Even if your only audience is your own reflection, simply owning a wearable can create a real barrier between feeling good about your body and your fitness journey. Did I work out enough today? Will my friends see that I skipped a workout? Should I push through injury to maintain my streak?

For these reasons, celebrity trainer Lauren Kleban says she doesn’t like to rely on wearables at all. “Counting steps or calories can quickly spiral into a bit of an obsession,” says Kleban, and that “takes the joy out of movement and away from learning what’s truly best for us.” She says her clients want to focus on their mind and body connection, now more than ever. There’s a real, growing desire to rebuild a sense of intuition that doesn’t depend on feedback from a watch.

Similarly, Marshall Weber, a certified personal trainer and owner of Jack City Fitness, says that he’s “definitely been surprised by the growing push towards unplugged fitness,” but that he “totally gets it.” Weber says he’s had clients express feeling “overwhelmed with their Fitbit or Apple Watch micromanaging their training.” When every workout becomes about numbers and keeping up with an average, it’s all too easy to lose touch with your body. “The anti-tech movement is about taking back that personal connection,” Weber says. After all, when was the last time you finished a workout and didn’t immediately look at your stats, but instead just noticed how you felt?

This is the paradox at the heart of fitness technology. Tools designed to help us understand our bodies have created a new kind of illiteracy. Maybe you can tell me why you’re aiming for Zone 2 workouts, but can’t actually recognize what that effort feels like without a screen telling you. In a sense, you might be outsourcing your own intuition to algorithms.

If nothing else, the data risks are real. (Because if you think you own all your health data, think again.) Every heart rate spike, every missed workout, every late-night stress indicator gets recorded, stored, and potentially shared. Still, for me, the more insidious risk is psychological: the erosion of our ability to know ourselves without consulting a device first.

What do you think so far?

How to unplug and exercise intuitively

So what does unplugged fitness actually look like in practice? It’s not about rejecting all technology or pretending GPS watches and heart rate monitors don’t have value—I promise. Look, I crave data and answers as much as—and maybe more than—the average gym-goer. I’m simply not woo-woo enough to ditch my Garmin altogether.

Instead, I argue for re-establishing a hierarchy in which technology serves your training, not the other way around. “Sometimes, the best performance boost is just learning to listen to what your body is saying and feeling,” says Weber. But what does “listening to your body” actually look like?

If you’re like me, and need to rebuild a connection with your body from the ground-up, try these approaches:

Start with tech-free workouts. Designate certain runs, yoga sessions, or strength workouts as completely unplugged. No watch, no phone, no tracking. Notice what changes when there’s no device to check.
Relearn your body’s signals. Can you gauge your effort level without looking at a heart rate monitor? Do you actually know what “recovery pace” feels like for you, or are you just matching a number? Practice assessing fatigue, energy, soreness, and readiness without checking your watch.
Replace metrics with sensory awareness. Instead of tracking pace, notice your breathing pattern. Instead of counting calories burned, pay attention to how your muscles feel. Instead of obsessing over sleep scores, ask yourself a simple question in the morning: how do I actually feel?
Set goals that can’t be gamified. Rather than chasing step counts or streak days, aim for qualitative improvements. Can you hold a plank with better form? Does that hill feel easier than last month? Are you enjoying your workouts more? These are the markers of real progress.
Create tech boundaries. Maybe you use your GPS watch for long runs but leave it home for everything else. Perhaps you track workouts but delete the social features. Find the minimum effective dose of technology that serves your goals without dominating your headspace.
Reconnect with in-person community. The loss of shared gym culture—people actually talking to each other instead of staying plugged into individual screens—represents more than just nostalgia. There’s real value in working out alongside others, in having conversations about training instead of just comparing data, in building knowledge through shared experience rather than algorithm-driven insights.

The bottom line

Unplugging is easier said than done, but you don’t need to go cold turkey. Maybe in the new year, you can set “body literacy” as a worthwhile resolution. At the end of the day, exercise should add to your life, not become another source of performance anxiety. It should be energizing, not exhausting—and I don’t just mean physically. The never-ending irony of modern fitness culture is that in our pursuit of optimal health, we keep inventing new forms of stress and anxiety. When all forms of wellness come with trackable metrics and social pressure, I think we’ve fundamentally missed the point.

Fitness

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Published

3 hours ago

March 11, 2026

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A new study suggests that high blood sugar may block some key benefits of exercise. However, researchers discovered that a high-fat ketogenic diet helped restore those benefits in mice by normalising blood sugar and improving how muscles use oxygen. Here’s what the study reveals

Fitness

Exercise Boosts Brain ‘Ripples’ Tied to Learning and Memory

Published

15 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Exercise Boosts Brain ‘Ripples’ Tied to Learning and Memory

Each time you go for a jog, ride your bike, or get active in other ways, you’re giving your brain a boost. A small new study has for the first time directly documented this phenomenon, which the researchers call “ripples” — brief bursts of electrical activity in a part of the brain called the hippocampus.

While exercise is known to improve memory, scientists have mostly studied this effect by using behavioral tests or brain imaging methods like MRIs, says Michelle Voss, PhD, one of the study’s authors, a professor, and the director of the Health, Brain, and Cognitive Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

But she says these approaches can’t precisely identify where “ripples” originate, particularly in the deep brain structures like the hippocampus, a part of the brain strongly connected to memory and learning, she says.

The current study, published in Brain Communications, recorded electrical activity directly, using surgically implanted (intracranial) electrodes. “This allowed us to observe how exercise changes the brain’s memory circuits in real time,” Dr. Voss says.

20-Minute Bursts of Exercise Increase Brain Ripples

To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 14 participants between ages 17 and 50 with drug-resistant epilepsy. The subjects had already been fitted with intracranial electrodes as part of their preparation for surgical epilepsy treatment.

The participants performed a 5-minute warm-up and then rode a stationary bike for 20 minutes at a pace they could maintain. Researchers recorded their brain activity before and after the biking session.

The electrodes showed an increased rate of so-called sharp-wave ripples from the hippocampus and connections with cortical regions of the brain, which are involved in learning and memory.

“Sharp-wave ripples have long been known from animal studies to play a central role in memory,” Voss says, adding that recent studies using intracranial recordings in humans also support the importance of ripples for human memory.

“Our findings are the first to show that exercise can modulate these ripple signals in the human brain,” she says.

Researchers also observed that larger increases in heart rate during exercise were associated with larger changes in ripple activity in cortical networks, Voss adds.

What’s Already Known About Exercise, Memory, and Learning

“We know that exercise is the number-one thing we can do to enhance our memory and learning,” says Catherine Franssen, PhD, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “Exercise will enhance both our ability to learn new things and our ability to remember previously learned things.”

Movement helps pump oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood to the brain, says Dr. Franssen, who was not involved with the new study: “We’re able to activate those brain cells more effectively and energize them.”

The increased blood flow stimulates the growth of new neurons and enhances the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a molecule that strengthens connections between brain cells and supports learning, says the neurologist David Perlmutter, MD, who was not involved with the latest study.

Exercise helps build connections between neurons, which deepens and strengthens brain networks, Franssen says.

Physical activity also improves metabolism, which improves insulin sensitivity, helping blood sugar regulation and giving the brain a “more stable and reliable supply of fuel,” Dr. Perlmutter says.

“This is critically important because the brain is an energy-intensive organ, consuming roughly 20 percent of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of body weight,” he adds.

The Research Has Limitations

Voss says researchers were careful to “exclude signals that contained epileptic activity. However, of course, we can’t statistically control for the accumulated effects of having epilepsy on the brain.”

The exercise-brain ripple patterns observed in the current study also closely match those observed in healthy adults using noninvasive brain imaging, such as MRI, she added.

“That convergence across very different methods is one of the strongest indicators that the effects are not specific to epilepsy, but reflect a more general human brain response to exercise,” Voss said.

Researchers also didn’t directly test memory performance, Voss notes. “While hippocampal ripples are strongly linked to memory processing in decades of neuroscience research, the next step will be to measure how exercise-related changes in ripples relate to memory performance in the same individuals.”

Future studies should also compare exercise with other everyday activities, such as sitting quietly or light movement, to determine how specific these effects are to aerobic exercise at the intensity that was studied, she says.

Satisfy Your Brain’s Exercise Craving

It’s never too early or too late to start exercising for brain health, Franssen says.

People of any age, from grade-school children to people in their nineties, can benefit from increased physical activity, Perlmutter says. “My recommendation is to consider taking advantage of the connection between physical activity and brain health across the entire range of human aging.”

Any type of exercise is great, Franssen says, but especially “repetitive behaviors,” like swimming, jogging, and walking.

“Sometimes we let the hugeness of putting in a huge fitness routine get in our way,” she says. “Having a little exercise snack every so often is also very important to improving cognition.”

Fitness

Higher Fitness Levels Amplify Brain Benefits After Exercise, Study Finds

Published

1 day ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Higher Fitness Levels Amplify Brain Benefits After Exercise, Study Finds

Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found.

The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made them fitter. Researchers found as their fitness increased, so did the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) released following exercise, resulting in improved brain function.

Just 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a brain protein which is known to support the formation of new neurons and new synapses (connections between brain cells), and maintains the health of existing neurons. This is the first study to show that for unfit people, just 12 weeks of consistent training can boost the brain’s response to a single 15-minute workout.

The study, led by Dr Flaminia Ronca (UCL Surgery & Interventional Science, and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health), involved 30 participants – 23 male and seven female – taking part in the 12-week programme. To assess fitness levels throughout the programme, participants completed VO2max tests every six weeks, which measures the maximum rate of oxygen your body can consume and use during intense exercise.

BDNF levels were measured pre- and post-VO2max testing, alongside a series of cognitive and memory tests, while also measuring changes in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex – where executive functions such as decision-making, emotion regulation, attention and impulsivity are controlled.

By the final week of the trial, results showed that baseline levels of BDNF did not change, but participants did show a larger spike of BDNF following intense exercise, compared to how their brains responded to intense exercise before the 12-week programme. This was linked to improvements in VO2max (aerobic fitness).

Higher overall BDNF levels and stronger exercise-induced increases were also associated with changes in activity across key areas of the prefrontal cortex during attention and inhibition tasks, though not during memory tasks.

Overall, the results showed that increasing physical fitness can enhance the brain’s ability to produce BDNF in response to acute bouts of exercise, which can have a strong positive influence on neural activity.

Lead author Dr Flaminia Ronca said: “We’ve known for a while that exercise is good for our brain, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are still being disentangled. The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks.”

Notes to editors:

For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact: Tom Cramp, UCL Media Relations , T: +447586 711698, E: [email protected]

The research paper: ‘BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise’, Flaminia Ronca, Cian Xu, Ellen Kong, Dennis Chan, Antonia Hamilton, Giampietro Schiavo, Ilias Tachtsidis, Paola Pinti, Benjamin Tari, Tom Gurney, Paul W. Burgess, is published in Brain Research, March 2026,

About UCL (University College London)

UCL is a diverse global community of world-class academics, students, industry links, external partners, and alumni. Our powerful collective of individuals and institutions work together to explore new possibilities.

Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 50,000 students from 150 countries and over 16,000 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.

We are consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and are one of only a handful of institutions rated as having the strongest academic reputation and the broadest research impact.

We have a progressive and integrated approach to our teaching and research – championing innovation, creativity and cross-disciplinary working. We teach our students how to think, not what to think, and see them as partners, collaborators and contributors.

For 200 years, we are proud to have opened higher education to students from a wide range of backgrounds and to change the way we create and share knowledge.

We were the first in England to welcome women to university education and that courageous attitude and disruptive spirit is still alive today. We are UCL.

www.ucl.ac.uk | Read news at www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ | Follow UCL News on Bluesky and LinkedIn

Journal

Brain Research

DOI

10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise

Article Publication Date

4-Mar-2026

Media Contact

Tom Cramp

University College London

[email protected]

Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253

Journal

Brain Research

DOI

10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise

Article Publication Date

4-Mar-2026

Tags
/Health and medicine/Human health/Physical exercise

bu içeriği en az 2000 kelime olacak şekilde ve alt başlıklar ve madde içermiyecek şekilde ünlü bir science magazine için İngilizce olarak yeniden yaz. Teknik açıklamalar içersin ve viral olacak şekilde İngilizce yaz. Haber dışında başka bir şey içermesin. Haber içerisinde en az 12 paragraf ve her bir paragrafta da en az 50 kelime olsun. Cevapta sadece haber olsun. Ayrıca haberi yazdıktan sonra içerikten yararlanarak aşağıdaki başlıkların bilgisi var ise haberin altında doldur. Eğer yoksa bilgisi ilgili kısmı yazma.:
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Keywords

Tags: 12-week cycling training program benefitsbrain plasticity and physical fitnessbrain-derived neurotrophic factor after exerciseeffects of aerobic exercise on BDNFexercise and neuron healthexercise-induced neurogenesisfitness level impact on brain proteinsfitness training for cognitive improvementimproving brain function through fitnessmoderate to vigorous aerobic exercise effectsphysical fitness and brain healthVO2max and brain function correlation