Categories: HEALTH AND WELLNESSTechnology

How to Make the Most of Your Smart Watch

Spread the love

Smart watches are becoming more and more popular as a means of self-tracking.

While the watches provide characteristics that can have an impact on your health, it is the interpretation and implementation of the data that

results in health outcomes.

Doctors, dietitians, and health coaches are now willing to examine data in order to spot patterns in exercise, sleep, heart health, and other

vitals.

Many smart watches began to include medical-grade sensors such as ECG and SPO2, allowing

for continuous health monitoring.

Depending on your primary smartphone,

pricing, performance, and parameters to track, you can pick between these popular

smartwatch ecosystems:

Apple
Android
Garmin
Fitbit
Pebble
Boat

We will cover top three wellness outcomes which can be achieved using your smart watch

1. Better Sleep
2. Improved Physical Fitness
3. Heart Health Monitoring

Better Sleep:

Sleep quality is as important as the sleep quantity. Most smart watches can help in tracking parameters related to both. Try to achieve daily goals for quantity as well as quality before getting into optimising advanced sleep metrics like deep sleep time etc. Maintain a dairy of activities and correlate it along with better sleep quality.

Some general recommendations for better sleep include:

Having same sleep and wake times everyday
Optimising sleep environment like dark room, ideal room temperature and low noise
Avoiding digital screen time just before sleep
Avoiding Caffeine post 5PM

Improved Physical Fitness:

Physical fitness has variety of dimensions including cardio-respiratory, endurance, strength, mobility etc. but the smart watch tracks only few of them. While counting steps is a good parameter to start with but it is very basic measurement of your activity levels. This is because of the importance of intensity of an activity, matters most for improved physical fitness outcomes. So, it is important to hit your daily and weekly activity goals along with intensity zone achieved.

Some general recommendations for improved physical fitness include:

Perform all types of exercise modalities including strength, cardio, mobility etc.
Assess your fitness levels including VO2 max if your watch supports it and work towards improving it.
Track intensity metrics including heart rate zones while performing exercises.
Recovery is as important as activity and track your recovery if your watch supports.

Heart Health Monitoring:

There are variety of internal and external markers of heart health. There is no smart watch which can measure all dimensions of heart health. Resting heart rate is a proxy indicator for your cardio- respiratory fitness and lower is better. Advanced metrics like ECG, HRV needs to be interpreted by medical experts and practitioners.

Some general recommendations for heart health monitoring includes:

Nutrition, Stress Management and Exercise are important pillars for heart health.
Use heart rate zones for your exercise tacking for better fitness outcomes.
Use your heart rate variability for better stress management and recovery.
Contact your healthcare provider if you see any anomaly in your heart rate.

Smart watch helps users to understand their body through numbers. Slowly but steadily smart watches track important markers for health and well-being.

Resolute members can use their wearable data during their health, sleep and performance coaching sessions for personalised recommendations.