is a senior reporter and author of the Optimizer newsletter.She has more than 13 years of experience reporting on wearables, health tech, and more. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
I’ll be the first person to admit that fitness trackers can be helpful tools. But I’ve also written extensively about how they can unintentionally hurt your health. Streaks and oversimplified fitness gamification are often misguided, anxiety-inducing features. I’ll probably go blue in the face ranting about how wellness and medical features are not the same thing. Lately, I’ve been concerned with a phrase I keep hearing from consumers and company reps alike: “getting credit.”
After a hearty Fourth of July feast, my in-laws suggested a “family fart walk” to unleash our digestive demons. Given that our pants were about to split and there was still peach cobbler waiting in the fridge, the idea was enthusiastically received by all. But when we were out the door, my sister-in-law paused. Her Apple Watch was out of juice. “Damn,” she said, “Now I won’t get credit.” My eye twitched.
A few weeks later, at a Google Pixel Watch 4 briefing, I heard the phrase again. This year, Google expanded automatic activity tracking precisely because it received feedback that people “wanted credit” for workouts they had forgotten to track. And now that we’re in the thick of product launch season, I can’t stop hearing it. Of course, people want credit, I’m told. Workouts, naps, steps, heart rate accuracy, sleep stages — if it can be quantified, people want credit for it.
During the few months I was part of a run club, I heard many iterations of: If my Garmin doesn’t track it, it doesn’t count. If it’s not on Strava, did it actually happen?
I understand the impulse. Exercise sucks. Who doesn’t want a pat on the head for doing the Hard Thing? Trust me. I’ve turned heads in public for letting out a string of expletives whenever a smartwatch fails to correctly log a five-mile test run. Are you kidding me, I have to do it again?! What do you mean this walk didn’t contribute to closing my Exercise ring? Did the 45 minutes I spent ambulating around this godforsaken strip mall mean nothing to you, you overly expensive wrist brick? How dare this five-thousand-dollar smart mattress cover not give me credit for this luxurious afternoon nap as I attempt to fix this cross-country jet lag?
The number of times I’ve crashed out over a Garmin telling me my workout is ‘unproductive.’ But why should that matter? Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
Seeing it all typed out, surely we can all recognize how ridiculous this sounds. Yes, it would be annoying if a smartwatch or fitness tracker repeatedly failed to accurately record your data. But fixating on that misses the bigger picture. Fitness trackers are tools meant to help you measure progress as you work toward health goals. But the only “tracker” that really matters is your body — and it never fails to record an activity.
Remembering that can be difficult, and that’s sort of by design. In recent years, fitness trackers have added scores to make disparate data points more digestible. Scores are easier to understand than seemingly random metrics. But psychologically, I’ve found they often trick my brain into thinking I’m back at school trying to pass a test. My workouts (and other metrics) become weekly homework assignments that I must do well on lest I fail. So when I don’t optimally manage my smartwatch’s battery before a workout, or if my Oura Ring doesn’t have enough juice for a night of sleep tracking, I find myself delaying a run or pushing off bedtime just so I can get credit.
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