I'm not an athletic person. A pretty solid mix of clumsiness and chronic pain have kept me from a lot of active things I'd like to try out. Once in a while I'll go for it, but I'll almost certainly pay the price for days and weeks to come.
That said, you probably won't be surprised to learn I'm not the kind of person you'll find at the gym. Though I've tried it a few times, I'm much more comfortable doing active things on my own at home, in my yard, and around my neighborhood. I'm talking super-basic stuff here, that I'll do when I do feel up to it, but it's a system that's worked for me so far.
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A number of my friends have recently gotten more interested in getting active. In the last year or two, many of them have gotten fitness trackers. Those devices never really appealed to me, until even more recently when my friends started mentioning their step counts. Suddenly, I needed to know how many steps I was taking in a day. Thus, I fell down the slippery slope into the fitness tracker world and became a little obsessed with my own wellness data.
It all started with a little curiosity.
At first I figured I could just track my steps on my phone's fitness app. Easy enough, right? I started doing that, but I felt like the number was low … like seriously low. Then I started paying attention to how many times a day I would put down my phone and totally walk away from it. I knew it couldn't be an accurate count if it wasn't on me a lot of the time.
I decided to take the dive.
After a little back and forth about how badly I really needed to know this information, I picked up a super-simple fitness watch on Amazon for $28.99. It measured steps and heart rate and also monitored sleep, which was more than I'd initially been curious about, so it worked for me.
When it arrived, I charged it and put it on. It took a few minutes to Bluetooth-sync to my phone and download the app so I could access my information anytime. I got it all ready and was pumped to learn about the many millions of steps I take in a day.
Ha, did I say millions?
I wore it for a whole day, wondering about my data and occasionally checking on the step numbers. I was kind of shocked to see I took just about 1,500 steps on my first day. It didn't sound bad, but my daily goal was configured to 5,000 steps, and I was feeling a little judged.
I reasoned that I needed a full week's data.
I decided to wait until the end of the first week. Once I could look at seven days' worth of data, then I could fairly start judging myself. Truthfully, it took till about the fifth day that week for me to realize I could stretch the same logic to the whole month and year. I had to face it: I'd taken only 15,000-ish steps in a whole week.
My friends' numbers put me to serious shame.
In comparison to friends in teaching and health care who were reporting anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 to 20,000 steps a day, I was feeling pretty couch potato-esque. I vowed to make an effort to up my activity.
But there was some other data for me to be worried about, too.
I checked out my sleep data chart and found my watch clocking me at getting an average of eight hours of sleep a night. I knew this to be untrue since I haven't gotten eight straight hours of sleep in recent memory, but I figured it accounted for the time I was lying there pre-sleep binge watching. I was averaging only about 2 hours, 45 minutes of deep sleep, which didn't sound like enough.
Little did I know that was actually a good amount.
It turns out that for an eight-hour night of sleep, an average of 62 to 110 minutes of it will be deep sleep, according to Healthline. With 162 minutes of deep sleep on average, I was actually overperforming. It turned out to be an off week, as I fell back into the average range the week after.
Some family drama taught me a thing or two about my heart rate.
A few weeks after getting the fitness watch, I was making sure to have it charged and ready at all times. I was moving around more and more, conscious of my sleep schedule, and so far, it seemed like a generally easy way to improve my habits. Another metric it tracked was my heart rate, which seemed steady at a good amount of beats per minute for the most part.
Fast-forward to a particularly trying day in parenting an 8-year-old and a fight I overheard with my boyfriend and the kiddo, and my heart rate was racing.
I was shaking when I realized it had doubled.
The last of my resolve to stay out of the fight melted away. I broke it up and got my peace back while informing them both what they were doing to my heart rate. This bought me approximately 24 hours of peace, for which I was grateful.
I learned way more than I expected.
I went into this wanting to know about steps, but it brought attention to a few other things I needed to be taking care of, too. I realized how important it is to get some sleep and move around and take better care of myself. It gave me a nudge I didn't know I needed, and hopefully my story does the same for you.
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