Are Fitness Trackers Actually Accurate?

what I want to talk about, and that's the accuracy of fitness trackers, because this is one where I I I got into a huge uh argument on the internet. So, I actually got into a pretty large argument about the accuracy. So, right now I have the Garmin on, which is not normally on while lifting, but I have the Garmin and the Whoop on. And they were trying to claim that all of these fitness trackers are worthless because they're not perfect. And my favorite thing is they clearly use Chat GPT to get the references. It said, "What are references that show that fitness trackers are inaccurate, right?" And they put these references, and and I'm one of those, you know, jerks who actually read your references. You know what I mean? And read not just the abstract where because, by the way, what Chat GPT did is it read the abstract and then applied that and then gave them those links. Well, what Chat GPT didn't do, by the way, because it's lazy and and like unless you prompt it specifically to do a deep dive into this article, it won't read the whole article. And it didn't read the conclusion of the article, which is even more hilarious. Like, it didn't read the most important part because the conclusion in both of these articles is these things are wildly accurate. And even the aggregate So, the argument of one of the papers is that the aggregate content is not similar. And that is accurate. If I take the Garmin and I take the Whoop and I compare the body battery on my Garmin, so right now my body battery is at 19%. What does that mean? I'm sick, by the way. I've done no working out today. That was my only workout, and I'm at 19% body battery. Yeah, I'm sick, right? I've I've got a flu. I I'm coughing up phlegm. I'm uh my nose is, you know, completely clogged most of the day. Yes, I I'm sick, right? So, the body battery is at 19. And that's without training, right? Which is atypical. That thing should go back up to 100% very quickly if I'm not training. The Whoop doesn't have a body battery. It has a So, a Whoop score, right? And I wish I The phone Unfortunately, the phone that's recording is the one that has my Whoop score, and I don't remember what it was for today, but I can tell you it's going to be low, right? Because, again, I'm sick, right? But, these measurements can be wildly different. So, you can get a body battery that's that's totally not even close to what your Whoop score was. But, what But, what it does do is it tells you the body battery is telling you in real time how much physiological stress you've exerted on yourself and where you're at in the percentage of your maximum capacity, right? And so, the Whoop score in the morning and the body battery should actually be relatively close-ish, but not not necessarily, because you can have a high a really high Whoop score because HRV is a huge calculator in that and not straining stress. So, every now and then you will get a uh you'll get a 100% Whoop score, but your body battery will be at 50. And you're thinking, well, where where is these calculations mathematically very different? Well, the Whoop score is saying that you've actually recovered from all of your training, and you can do another hard training session today. The body battery is still saying, "Hey, no, no, no, you've had all these hard training sessions." Um and it's calculating it differently, right? And in fact, if you look at body battery at the end of the day versus the Whoop score, they're going to be wildly wildly different. Um the Whoop the Whoop morning score, like the recovery score, right? Is the one I'm talking about specifically. Now, what's funny is if you take your strain score and your recovery score and kind of like calculate them together, your body battery at the end of the day should kind of match that. So, if your strain was really really high, your recovery was really really low, right? Your body battery should be almost zero. Right? So, like you can actually analogous this at the end of the day by taking the two Whoop numbers and putting them together, but at the beginning of the day the numbers are going to be very far apart is what I'm getting at, the recovery score and the the body battery. Um and I wanted to take that and take the eight sleep data, put it all together, and make it meaningful, right? Um because they're all accurate measures, but they're all slightly different accurate measures, and I also have the raw data, too. So, I can take the raw data versus the accurate measures, come up with my own accurate measure that is more accurate to what I feel day to day um and go that route, right? So, this person was trying to say, "Oh, no, no, no, they're all useless because they're not all not 100% accurate." First of all, I was in the hospital with AFib years ago, and I'd probably be dead right now had I not worn a Whoop. Like there's a reason why I still pay this freaking subscription, right? Because um my wife has the Amazfit. Um there's now the Fitbit um that is is looking like they finally have a Fitbit that you can wear on your you can wear on your wrist. Um there's also one other one, the Polar, I think, the Polar Polar Loop. But basically all of these people are coming out with Whoop competitors, and I haven't moved over. And that's because uh I So, years ago and I I don't know if I've talked about this, but years ago during the co- I did, yeah. I did talk about it because I I made some uh innuendos around COVID, right? Um so, during the COVID era um after getting the second vaccine, uh I'm sure completely unrelated and according to the doctors in the hospital, completely unrelated uh you know, totally coincidental right? Um I o- overnight my Whoop registered that I ran a half marathon. At the time I was running half marathons, and I was supposed to be training for another one and I can tell you in the lead up to this training everything was going horribly wrong. I got the shingles. This is stuff that I didn't discuss before but like I got the shingles. I just had so much stress going on in my life at that point in time and obviously I'm a lot less stressed now. We've we've fixed everything. We've moved. There's been a a bunch of changes in our lives but I had the most stress I've ever been under and then I was also trying to train for a half marathon, right? And now I pull back by the way. Like if if like I'm sick right now I'm not running, right? I keep thinking about it but I'm like we're going to get over this first and then we're going to go back to our running schedule and that's because I ended up hospitalized with AFib but the Whoop told me that I ran a half marathon in my sleep and I thought it was broken. So I thought it was completely broken. I thought it was absolutely like I thought the device was broken and I go to do my lifts in the morning. So I used to have a routine of I had an hour drive to the gym. So I had a routine. By the way, people who say they don't have time to to train or work out like realize I had an hour drive to the gym and then I had you know, I was on the road for like 4 hours. It was horrible. But anyways, um long story short uh I you know, I I looked at the Whoop. It said that I ran a half marathon. I went to go do my strength training which I had to do before going in to the gym. So that was the only time of the day I had to do it, right? So I could wake up at 3:00 and start my strength training and so that's what I would do. I'd wake up and then start the strength training and I went to start it and I went to stand up after one of the seated lifts and I almost fell over. Like I almost passed out. And uh I'm like, "Wow, that's not normal. I'm really really dizzy." I don't know what's going on And um I looked down at my you know, I look at the Whoop real-time thing and it it shows my heart rate at 160. And I'm like, I have never registered a 160 from strength training ever. I mean, I'm just doing warm-up sets, right? I was just doing warm-up sets. I'm like, this should not register this kind of load. And so, I ended up sitting down and and checking it, you know, checking it again and then touching my heart and realized no, my heart's pounding out of my chest. Um, and I'm like, well, I guess we're not going into jiu-jitsu, right? I'm like, I'm sure this is fine. This is I don't know what's going on, but um, you know, I'm just going to work and, you know, no, we'll figure it out later. So, I'll just you know, I'll just start my work now instead of going into jiu-jitsu and we'll figure this out, you know, later. Um, and anyways, I end up calling the local doctors and I'm very thankful to the local doctors where I used to live because I I described what was happening and they're like, we have an appointment right now. Normally, it's like a 2 3-day wait. And I just called them casually and I'm like, oh yeah, my heart's kind of elevated and they're like, how elevated? I'm like, 120 to 160 according to my Whoop, but I thought it was inaccurate, but then I touched my chest, you know, I explained everything that I just explained here. And uh, they're like, we have an appointment right now. And sure enough, right to the hospital I went and uh, and by the way, this is where I I kind of don't trust the medical system in a lot of ways, um, because for 6 months I'd been in and out of doctors and they told me I was crazy and it was all in my head. So, uh, because I would have stomach issues, like really bad stomach pain. And so, they did like $20,000 worth of tests on my stomach. They found nothing, right? Uh, and I would get this massive stomach pain. I had the shingles out of nowhere. Like I had all of these weird things happening to me. Um and and like it's un-describable pain and agony. Right? Well, I finally found out what was happening. Uh and so I have a heart valve that can actually like stick shut, basically. And uh so and that's what happened, right? It stuck shut and all of a sudden my threw me into AFib. So, I don't have AFib. Right? So, like day-to-day, if you give me one of these like the Whoop has the AFib test, it's dumb, it doesn't work at all uh for my case because I don't have AFib, right? It clears me every time. Um however, if that valve gets stuck shut, I go immediately into AFib. Right? And then my heart rate skyrockets, right? Because it's trying to pump with a valve that's that's closed. Um and they thought about doing emergency surgery, but it actually cleared. Long story short, it cleared overnight and uh I'm fine now. Uh and actually they they suggested that I do more Jiu-Jitsu training, which is pretty funny because uh they saw my situation and they saw like what caused me to be there, and it was mostly stress-induced from like a myriad of factors. Work was very stressful at the time, life was very stressful. And they're like, "The only thing that you have that's not stressful, believe it or not, is your Jiu-Jitsu training because I treat it like it's fun, right? It's not It's not something that is a job to me. It's something that I enjoy and is very, very fun. Uh and I don't, you know, I treat it like you know, not just like a hobby, but also one that one that I, you know, I I'm entertained by and really proud of the people around me when they do well. Uh we had someone win their first competition a couple weekends ago, and I'm really happy for them. Uh I was watching their videos from their competition and it's the best they've ever looked by a lot, blue belt. Um and honestly ready for their purple belt based upon that competition uh and the domination in there. So, you know, uh some some stuff I would some stuff I would change, right? In the way they approached the match and a couple things like a couple things both me and my coach pointed out that like you know what I mean? Would have would have made you know, would have made things easier for them, right? But, you know, pretty flawless performance, you know, in terms of other than the other than the the first attempted to take down where they they tried the um they tried a very simple sit-down sweep and and they they pulled I think they pulled like bottom side control, right? Which is like the but they reversed out of it. Got It was fine, but um they they missed the they missed the foot on the the the foot sweep and just you know, it was it was a comical, you know, takedown. Um not something I've ever done in a match, but definitely something I've done in training a lot. It's pull out of bottom side control. Like that's you know, I I have a habit now of instead of going for that sweep, if I think I there's any chance of missing that sweep where I'm going and I'm putting my leg underneath, if I realize that I'm going to miss the leg, I throw my leg up in the air and just kind of hit you in the side and throw you like try to throw you over that way or at least prevent you from taking side control. Uh but that's like a reaction time thing and you have to realize as you're falling like, "Hey, I'm about to miss this." and and kind of have a a a a B game plan, but yeah, that that was uh the the fitness trackers thing though, I think they're hugely valuable. I I don't think I don't think you should throw the baby out with the bathwater on these things and say, "Hey, they're not perfect." And I agree none of them are perfect and even Arya's conclusions on how how like what I should be doing are not perfect. I still have to figure out I still of figure out a algorithm around being sick. Right? Cuz this is the third time I've had this flu in a year where I'm coughing up phlegm. And I have to figure out like what to do in this situation and how hard should I train? Uh and that's where I actually have a doctor's appointment this weekend I'm going to ask all of these questions of of a doctor that I trust. Um just because I don't I don't have a great answer, right? You know, that's not my area of expertise. Uh I can tell you running makes makes me a lot sicker a lot quicker. Um strength training seems to do almost nothing as long as it's low intensity. Uh but high intensity strength training has the same effect of coughing up more phlegm the next day. Uh but yeah, that's that's what I wanted to talk to you about today. I wanted to go over some some stuff that's come in to me. Uh show off a little bit of lifting. And uh thank you for your time. And this has been Toby.