The fitness tracker and the stress paradox..

I am going to start this article where I will finish it. When tracking your sleep, stress, recovery and HRV, look for long term trends. I will come back to this after some thoughts on the matter.

We all now have access to a huge amount of information on our bodies through fitness trackers, Zoe apps and all other manner of health tools, which I think can be a good and a bad thing in equal measure. I love the fact that health is becoming such a priority, and people are understanding the importance of sleep, the effect of stress on our health, and being able to understand what works for them individually.

But there are also a few things that I am not so sure about, and I will offer solutions to this at the end.

I hear more and more that people are trying to get away from technology and I believe it is adding huge stress to the system. We can read the news and find out about what is happening in worlds that have very little effect on our own, we are being bombarded by social media and others living their best life, and our working lives are getting busier and busier. I actually looked at my phone a while ago and saw the weather was going to be bad for a whole week, and I felt disappointed. I don't even want to know about the weather in a week, why is that making me disappointed!!!

Now we are adding in a device telling you that you are not recovered, you are stressed, and you need to go to bed at 8pm to get back on track? Is that adding more stress, or is it relieving stress?

Now to my next point, we actually need a bit of stress. In order to improve we need to stress the system. To get stronger we need to cause stress to our muscles, to learn we need to cause stress to our brain, to cope with stressful situations we need to have been in stressful situations. Have you ever been in a traumatic situation where you have literally been so stressed that nothing even touches the sides anymore? In that situation anything could happen to you but it couldn't be any worse than it already is. You learn what you can cope with in those situations and I think they are massively important for growth.

Finally, the trackers work off an ALGORITHM. If you think that one algorithm can predict every single human's score perfectly, you are mistaken. You don't need to take these scores as gospel, just use them as a guide.

I feel like we may be entering a world where we chase health perfect scores, but in doing so we remove the necessary highs and lows needed for our body to be robust to stressful situations. Is it beneficial to have your blood sugar absolutely perfect all of the time, or is that going to cause your body a problem when you do go off the rails for a day?

We also need to be careful that the recommendations are not stopping us doing things that actually help our stress.

Personally, the biggest reliever of stress is seeing people or training. As a dad of 3, weeks can go by without me having any 'child free fun', and during these periods I can feel my stress increasing and patience decreasing (I like to think I'm quite a patient guy). I had a great conversation with a client of mine about his recovery scores. He noticed that when he met his mate for a beer and got a little less sleep, whilst his recovery score reduced the next day, it spiked to new highs the day after all from being sociable. Imagine if he had said no to that beer because he was being told he was under recovered.

So how do we make fitness trackers helpful, and not stressful?

We look at long term trends.

If you have a tracker, sit down for 20 minutes and make a note of which things helped your stress, recovery or HRV. Pick one of these things and make a target of how you can implement this more often. This could be more sleep, more exercise, having a technology free walk once a week, or having the dog in bed with you when you sleep (this was another story from a client who had an 11% higher recovery when the dog was in their bed).

Then look at the long term trends. If you implement getting to bed at 10pm five nights of the week, does it improve your scores over a month?

If it does, you have achieved something and you are improving.

Although it doesn't sound like it in this article, I actually think trackers are a good thing, just don't let them cause more stress, stop you living your life, or stop you from actually being able to deal with a little stress.

If you are truly interested in Heart Rate Variability, I would highly recommend reading Marco Altini's substack (linked underneath). He has worked in this area for a long time and he uses himself as a human guinea pig so has lots of real work examples.

https://marcoaltini.substack.com

What's been happening at Razor Performance

I am excited this week about two brothers that I help. One is an elite runner whose dream is to run a sub 2.30 marathon by the end of the year, and he ran an amazing 25 mile run at the weekend at a 2.29 pace, ludicrous.

And then to his brother. This is someone who I met back in my Pure Sports Medicine days but had fallen off the wagon. We chatted 8 months ago, and he was a little overweight (by his standards), and he couldn't run because his calves and hamstrings wouldn't allow it, as well as having some hip and lower back issues. We are now at a point where he is running the London marathon and running PBs in his training runs, and he is booked for an Iron man in August. He is now at the elite end of my client base, but the story is one that runs throughout my coaching and is where my passion lies.

I like to get people from injured or detrained, to being athletic, and then for some, doing amazing things!! Most won't want to run a marathon; they may just want to look and feel strong and have the ability to enjoy a 10k every week without it hurting.

Don't stay stuck. That nagging feeling that you get every day that you should be doing better will only get worse.

I am offering all of my subscribers a 30 minute gameplay call with me. We will discuss your training and how I can improve it, and you will leave the call with a blueprint of what to do. No strings, no sales, just value. If you need help implementing it we can discuss that another time.

Link below

https://calendly.com/razorperformance/30min