Accuracy and Utility of Fitness Trackers

What's up guys, Luke and Matt checking in to answer the public. We have answered the public open and we're going to be answering the questions we have about health and fitness with our best answers. So I will start Luke by saying, how accurate are fitness trackers? You know, I suppose you mean watches. Yeah. So like, uh, like the Phoenix Garmin, things like that. Uh, it depends if you get a really cheap one, they're not that great. You get a cheap Fitbit, you know, but, uh, I find them actually quite accurate these days. The technology has come along a long ways. When you look at the early research on them, a lot of them didn't use watches that were expensive or quality types of watches. And most of the research is like five, six years ago or before. Technology changes really quickly because I used to be in the I used to be a computer programmer. And that's what I went to college for initially. And the one thing we would say about the computer industry, there's basically doubled every 18 months. and now it's faster. So a lot of coaches will say, oh, the fitness watches, they're not accurate. They're not accurate. They don't do heart rate accurately. They don't do calories accurately. But if you know how to use them correctly, I find that they actually are fairly accurate. And at least if they're not, even if they weren't accurate, like fully a hundred percent, they're accurate against themselves. That's what I was going to ask you next is, does it matter if they're accurate as long as they're consistent? Yeah. I mean, look, a lot of stuff we look at isn't accurate. A DEXA scan. The scales were wrong in the gym yesterday. That's right. If you're student on the same scales every day, you know your deviation from the standardized base. A hundred percent. And if you look at like people go do body composition tests, like a DEXA scanner. Right now, commercially, that is the cream of the crop, right? It's not accurate. It has a variance of plus minus three to five. But that doesn't mean it's worthless. That just means that if you go into a scan and then you go into a scan in 12 weeks, you can compare those together. But if you went into a different company and did a different machine, now there's no accuracy. So is it accurate or is it not? I mean, it just depends how you view it. So buy a good one. Okay, next question.