Fitness trackers have become quite popular over the last decade as they’re an easy way for people to track certain fitness goals like steps taken, miles run and even more detailed data like calories burned and, yes, your heart rate.
And over the years, Travers notes, technology with fitness trackers has evolved greatly, to the point where accuracy issues of the past have largely been ironed out. And as that tech has gotten better, prices of these devices have come way down, helping their popularity skyrocket.
“If you think about 8-to-10 years ago, the only people who were wearing anything like this were serious runners and they were large, somewhat unwieldy devices,” Travers says. “Now, if you look around, everyone’s wearing a fitness tracker, whether it’s an Apple Watch, a Garmin, a Fitbit or something else.”
Each fitness tracker is different and each offers a wide variety of features that may or may not be of use to you. But most now include real-time heart rate tracking which can be incredibly useful, Travers notes. Besides being able to know where your heart rate is while exercising, it can also give you information about your resting heart rate.
“It’s letting you know where you’re cardiovascular system is at, health-wise,” he adds. “The lower your resting heart rate is, the less work you heart was to do its normal daily function, which is key. The less stress on our heart to do that, the better off we are.”
“While chest strap models utilize electrodes in the padding that contacts the skin to measure the heart’s electrical activity, fitness trackers use optical sensors that measure the blood flow in your veins located below the sensor,” he says. If a fitness tracker gets out of position, it’s possible that could affect the accuracy of the data.
But the improvement in this technology still means your readings are going to be much more accurate than they were a few years ago.