The Case for Ditching Your Fitness Trackers

I have a love-hate relationship with the smartwatch on my wrist. This relationship is undoubtedly shaped by the fact that I write about fitness technology for a living, but I know I’m not alone in succumbing to an obsession with the numbers on my wearable devices. Have I reached 10,000 steps? What is my resting heart rate today? Is my sleep score better than yesterday? When did progressive overload also turn into screen time overload?

The fitness tech boom shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon — and with it, we consume a steady stream of promises that this data will make us healthier, stronger, and faster. With the amount of health information potentially available at any time, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I’ve seen my less health-conscious friends get caught up in measures they never knew about two years ago. They track bone density trends, obsess over cortisol levels, and panic over stress scores that fluctuate for reasons no algorithm can fully explain. I can feel my fitness trackers pulling me away from true wellness and leading me into a mental health disaster. The good news: When I look up from my screens and start talking to real people, I see that I’m not the only one who wants to unplug and fight against the overly quantified self.

A growing anti-tech fitness movement

When I made a call on Instagram When asking people about their relationship with posting workout data and fitness content, I received hundreds of responses from people burned out on fitness performance. Even if your only audience is your own reflection, simply owning a cell phone can create a real barrier between feeling good about your body and your fitness journey. Did I work enough today? Will my friends see that I skipped a workout? Do I have to overcome an injury to maintain my streak?

For these reasons, celebrity trainer Lauren Kleban says she doesn’t like relying on wearable devices at all. “Counting steps or calories can quickly become an obsession,” says Kleban, and it “takes away the joy of moving and learning what’s truly best for us.” She says her clients want to focus on their mind-body connection more than ever. There is a real and growing desire to rebuild a sense of intuition that does not depend on the return of a watch.

Likewise, Marshall Weber, certified personal trainer and owner of Jack City Fitness, says he’s “definitely been surprised by the growing trend toward unplugged fitness” but “totally understands.” Weber says customers have expressed feeling “overwhelmed by their Fitbit or Apple Watch micromanaging their workout.” When every workout is all about numbers and tracking an average, it’s too easy to lose touch with your body. “The anti-technology movement is about taking back that personal connection,” says Weber. After all, when was the last time you finished a workout and didn’t immediately look at your stats, but just noticed how you felt?

This is the paradox at the heart of fitness technology. Tools designed to help us understand our bodies have created a new type of illiteracy. Maybe you can tell me why you’re aiming for zone 2 workouts, but you can’t actually recognize what that effort looks like without a screen telling you. In a sense, you may be entrusting your own intuition to algorithms.

At the very least, the data risks are real. (Because if you think you have all your health data, think again.) Every heart rate spike, every missed workout, every indicator of nighttime stress is recorded, stored, and potentially shared. Yet, for me, the most insidious risk is psychological: the erosion of our ability to know ourselves without first consulting a device.

How to Unplug and Exercise Intuitively

So what does unplugged fitness actually look like in practice? This isn’t about dismissing all technology or claiming that GPS watches and heart rate monitors have no value, I promise. Look, I need data and answers as much as – and maybe more than – the average athlete. I’m just not woo-woo enough to completely ditch my Garmin.

Rather, I advocate for the reestablishment of a hierarchy in which technology serves your training, and not the other way around. “Sometimes the best performance improvement is simply learning to listen to what your body is saying and feeling,” says Weber. But what does “listening to your body” actually look like?

If you’re like me and need to rebuild a connection with your body from the ground up, try these approaches:

• Start with tech-free workouts. Designate certain runs, yoga sessions, or strength workouts as completely unplugging. No watch, no phone, no tracking. Notice what changes when there are no devices to check.

• Relearn your body’s signals. Can you gauge your effort level without looking at a heart rate monitor? Do you actually know what “recovery pace” looks like for you, or is it just a number? Practice assessing fatigue, energy, pain, and readiness without looking at your watch.

• Replace metrics with sensory awareness. Instead of following the rhythm, notice your breathing rhythm. Instead of counting calories burned, pay attention to how your muscles feel. Instead of obsessing about sleep scores, ask yourself a simple question in the morning: How am I really feeling?

• Set goals that cannot be gamified. Rather than chasing steps or consecutive days, aim for qualitative improvements. Can you hold a plank with better form? Does this hill seem easier than last month? Are you enjoying your workouts more? These are the markers of real progress.

• Create technological boundaries. Maybe you use your GPS watch for long runs, but leave it at home for everything else. Maybe you track the workouts but remove the social features. Find the minimum effective dose of technology that meets your goals without dominating your free space.

• Reconnect with the community in person. The loss of the shared culture of the gym – people talking to each other instead of staying connected to individual screens – represents more than just nostalgia. There is real value in training alongside others, in having conversations about training instead of just comparing data, in gaining knowledge through shared experience rather than algorithm-based information.

The essentials

Unplugging is easier said than done, but you don’t need to go in cold turkey. Maybe in the new year you can make “body literacy” a worthwhile resolution. Ultimately, exercise should add to your life, not become another source of performance anxiety. It should be energizing, not exhausting – and I don’t just mean physically. The endless irony of modern fitness culture is that, in our quest for optimal health, we continue to invent new forms of stress and anxiety. While all forms of wellness come with trackable metrics and social pressures, I think we have fundamentally missed the point.