Have you hit your 10,000 steps today?!

Smartwatches have greatly increased in popularity over the past 20 years as a way for people to keep track of their fitness goals. Most people in my life have a watch that will keep track of how many steps they've taken each day, their heart rate, how many miles they've walked/run, or how fast they've walked/run if they're exercising.

According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 1 in 3 Americans uses some type of device to keep track of their daily health and fitness. There's no denying the convenience that comes with wearing a smartwatch. Having this little device that helps you keep track of your fitness goals and/or how active you are is a nice luxury to have. I love putting my watch on when I walk my dog every day, just to see how far we go.

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While these devices are convenient and can help motivate you to be more active, supposedly they aren't always giving us the exact truth of how much activity we've done

10,000 Steps...Or 9,000 Steps

When you hit a fitness goal or you reach a certain number of steps, it can give you a small inner boost of encouragement. "Alright, I hit 10,000 steps today." Now you have an idea of what you have to do every day to hit that goal. Sadly, your 10,000 steps might be closer to 9,000.

According to Life Hacker, most smartwatches will underestimate or overestimate certain metrics. For example, most smartwatches tend to underestimate your calories burned by 21% OR overestimate calories burned by 14%. Step counts are often either 9% less than what you've stepped OR the count is 12% more than what you've stepped in a given day. Sleep duration is usually overestimated while sleep latency is normally underestimated.

What's Important

The most important thing to remember when using a wearable device to keep track of your daily fitness is if the watch is useful and not necessarily how accurate it is. According to Life Hacker, even if your smartwatch isn't 100% correct all of the time, does it give you useful information that can at least help you keep track of a trend?

If you want to take 5,000 steps every day and your watch is telling you you're only taking around 2,000 daily, you know that you have some work to do to get closure to your goal. If your goal is to eat 2,000 calories every day and your watch is either grossly under or over, you'll have some work to do on keeping track of your caloric intake.

You will likely never find a perfectly accurate smartwatch and it is recommended to use these devices as a guide to help you discover trends and/or patterns, as opposed to concrete data.