Part 1: Ditching wearables & gearing down
Last month, I put my Apple Watch in a drawer and went back to wearing a mechanical timepiece. Immediate relief and satisfaction. Relief from the bad habit of constantly measuring my every moment in motion, and satisfaction at terminating the no-longer-useful health-data stream I’d become habituated to.
Or maybe just comfortably numb to. (As a grammar curmudgeon, I nonetheless believe ending sentences with a preposition is just fine.)
The fact was, after years of recording most of my non-household movements by category and duration, I knew what I needed to know about how many calories a 2-mile walk or a 50-minute strength-training session burned, and whether or not I’d done enough to hit my daily burn goal. That information was no longer serving my needs.
I’m being purposely provocative about wearable devices, aware of the counterarguments. My provocation is, however, well founded. We’ve over-rotated, as tech folks are fond of saying, toward tracking our data instead of understanding ourselves.
An Apple Watch, Oura ring or Garmin device measures only what it can measure: heart rate, distance, sleep hours, pace, a “readiness score.” (Sleep stages, VO2 max and readiness scores are estimated by algorithms, not measured.) Yes, they can reveal long-term trends. But if you’re adequately tuned into yourself, your trends become intuitive knowledge. Devices can't tell us if our balance is slipping, our hips are stiff, we’re stuck in a workout rut or if one leg is weaker than the other.
Wearables are gear. Gear helps us perform a specific function. When gear becomes a proxy for how we’re feeling about ourselves, it’s time to unplug and get back to basics.
Related read: Your body is not you
I’ve come to view wearables as potential portals to imbalance by wedding us to an unhealthy either/or: either achieve fixed daily data points or trigger an all-too-human failure response—which tends to only increase our dependence on the device and its manufacturer.
One important bit of housekeeping
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The obsession with personal-fitness data reminds me of a previous reckoning, in the early 2000s, when several marathoners tragically died from over-hydrating themselves during races following years of trendy but wrong arguments that athletes weren’t drinking enough Gatorade. It’s hard to read the first two paragraphs of the study in the above link and not feel outrage at how easily our culture (and the sports drink companies that sponsored studies that drew false conclusions) can deceive us.
The runners who died had been told to drink beyond their thirst. Essentially, to override their internal thirst signals because…data! In 2015, an international panel of experts on the condition concluded—are you ready?—that athletes should drink when they’re thirsty. Yes.
The deaths were preventable, the panel’s lead author, Tamara Hew-Butler, said, “if we just listen to our bodies.”1 That was more than a decade ago.
A modern-day fitness tracker invites the same trade: an outside instruction that can, if we allow it to, take the place of our own human signals. It’s become easy to chase the numbers the device tracks and ignore the weaknesses it can’t.
Part 2: Tune into your weaknesses, for healthy longevity
Long-term strength requires paying attention to what’s not being electronically measured, what’s not being regularly trained. It’s relatively easy to become strong in one area: your gym routine, your roadwork, the treadmill program. But developing strength across many of the most important physical domains is much harder. No one likes to train their weaknesses, even though weak spots predict earlier death.
In one well-known balance study, 1,702 people aged 51 to 75 took a one-leg test. After accounting for age, sex and underlying conditions, being unable to stand unsupported on one leg for 10 seconds was linked to an 84% higher risk of death from any cause over the following decade.2
That’s a strong argument for why training weakness will probably add healthy years to your life. But let me give you two current examples from just this past week: Gym bros failing at Pilates, and hardcore runners with weak legs.
Gym bros failing at Pilates, and distance runners with no muscles
This recent Wall Street Journal piece (gift link) highlights how men with gym-built muscles fall apart in a Pilates class because they’re strong only in the one, narrow way they train. Showy muscles don’t get you to a healthy 80, 85, 90 years; core strength, unilateral strength, balance and flexibility can. And this week in The New York Times, an article titled “6 Things Experts Wish Every Runner Did to Avoid Injury” quoted two experts lamenting how poorly muscled many distance runners are.
“You’d be surprised how many runners are weak,” the article quoted Stuart Warden, an Indiana University professor of physical therapy, as saying. “They can run fast, they can run long distances, but when you actually test their strength, they’re relatively weak.”
Instead of only running, runners should engage in strength training focused on lower-body exercises like squats, lunges, Romanian deadlifts and glute bridges, the experts noted.
Both articles expose the danger of training only what you’re already good at. Dr. Warden went on to say in the NYT article that many running injuries come from muscle weaknesses and imbalances, with other muscles and tendons overworking to compensate. At age 35, 40, and in my case even 50, your body can still compensate without too many breakdowns.
At 55, 60 and older, not training your weak areas is playing with fire: long-term injuries that become much more difficult to recover from, and exceedingly frustrating to manage the consequences of, in older adulthood.
Part 3: How to start training your weaknesses—10 steps
Lifters skip Pilates because it looks soft. Runners skip the weight room because they identify only as runners. These are fit, motivated people. If they have blind spots, we probably all do.
Being a beginner is uncomfortable. Older adults face a version of this too, avoiding what we’re bad at; for example: balance work, flexibility training and—what I notice most conspicuously at the gym—unilateral lower-body strength.
Related read: The case for quitting bar squats
To start training your weakness, thereby rounding yourself into a durable candidate for extreme healthy longevity, thereby not leaving healthy years on the table:
Take that 10-second, one-legged balance test. If you can’t pass it, you know where to start.
Identify your strengths. They often point to your weaknesses. Gym folks often lack cardio fitness, core strength or joint mobility. Runners often lack strength. Cyclists often don’t train upper body or lateral strength. Swimmers may lack lower-body power that matters most in life’s latter third.
Take off your wearable device. Maybe just one day a week. To practice listening to what your body and brain are telling you, first and foremost.
Watch how you cheat in daily life. Pulling yourself up the stairs by the banister, sitting down to put on your socks, grabbing the door frame to get out of the car. Those small workarounds are weaknesses you’ve already found and quietly accommodated.
Test one side at a time. Stand, lunge, press and carry with each side alone. Most people have a weaker side, and two-legged, two-handed exercises let the stronger one cover for it. Many of my #WorkoutWednesday videos focus on developing unilateral strength and balance.
In case you missed it….
Ask someone who knows you what you avoid. A spouse, partner or training buddy knows your tendencies to avoid potential weaknesses, e.g., never getting down on the floor, avoiding single-leg workouts that feel awkward (because they’re showing where/how you’re weaker), or remaining in a rigidly defined workout pattern.
Take one class you expect to be bad at. Pilates or yoga if you lift; a weight room session if you only run or cycle; a dance class if you do neither. Navy SEAL and Army Delta trainers have put guys into comedy improv teams, on stage. Talk about being out of your comfort zone. Where you struggle in front of strangers is very useful information.
Fold the weak thing into your day. Stand on one leg while making coffee (I use a thick foam pad while making my latte every morning, and do hip-openers while brushing teeth before bed). Do five slow squats before you sit down to work. A few minutes daily beats a dedicated session you’ll talk yourself out of.
Look hardest at the habit you defend most. With sleep, food or drink, the one you’re quickest to justify is usually the one to work on. If you can find an argument for why “I can’t…” actually means “I’d really rather not…”, congratulations! You’ve identified a weak area, and you’re about to get stronger for it.
Expect slow progress. You’ve avoided this weakness, or these weaknesses, for years, maybe decades. Retest every month with the same tests, write down the results, and judge yourself by those rather than by a readiness score.
What did you think of this article? Let me know in a comment.
Hew-Butler et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2015, doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-095004.
Araujo et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2022, doi:10.1136/bjsports-2021-105360.
This is something I’ve thought about more as I’ve gotten older. It’s easy to keep training the things you enjoy and are already good at.
The stuff you avoid is probably where you need the most work. Doesn’t have to be complicated either. Just start giving those weak areas a little attention instead of ignoring them.
While I pretty much agree on most of what you say about wearables, I'll continue to wear mine. Had my first AFib event about 8 years ago. Had an ablation about a year ago and no events since but still find it important to know how hard I'm pushing myself.