What is a Fitness Tracker?
Fitness trackers cover a wide range of devices, from entry level band-style simple trackers like Fitbits that monitor the activity basics, right up to do-it-all, adventure-ready Garmin sport watches that handle everything from step counts to scaling mountains. Then there are fitness-focused watches from Fitbit and Amazfit that increasingly pack smartwatch skills while regular smartwatches from Apple and Samsung now offer serious fitness credentials, too.
What to Look for When Buying a Fitness Tracker
Fitness trackers now serve up a vast array of fitness, health and wellbeing features. Here are some of the key tricks and tools to look out for.
AMOLED Screen
When it comes to bright, crisps, responsive touchscreens, smartwatches like the Apple Watch set the pace but fitness trackers are increasingly following. The kicker here is that you tend to trade battery life for sparkly screens but the best devices are pushing those limits too. But if you want the sharpest display, AMOLED is the way.
Dual-Frequency GPS
Dual frequency GPS lets devices receive satellite signals from multiple frequencies – in theory helping to plug gaps and weed out inaccurate reads in more challenging environments like built up urban areas. Just because a watch offers dual frequency doesn’t guarantee better accuracy but it’s a good sign you’ll log better training traces.
Heart rate (HR)
Keeping tabs on your BPM during a workout is one of the most effective ways to make sure you’re getting the most from your training. The majority of fitness trackers will monitor heart rate and offer heart rate zone training, but the rate at which it’s recorded (outside of workout tracking) can vary from device to device.
It’s not all about your fitness or calorie burn, though. Many fitness trackers now continuously measure your resting heart rate (RHR) — the number of beats every 60 seconds at rest – as a reliable way of checking your heart health. They also used it to feed stress readouts. If heart health is a focus, it’s also worth looking for devices that offer ECG readings and irregular heart rate alerts.
Readiness, sleep, recovery and HRV insights
The rise of readiness redouts has been pretty swift. These attempt to crunch things like your sleep quantity and quality, skin temperature and your heart rate variability into one estimate that helps you understand how hard you should push that day. But be warned: once you start combining estimated metrics into singles scores, it increases the room for error. Taking a simple, same time, same protocol heart rate variability reading daily is a far more reliable way to get a window into how your body is handling the stresses of training and life.
Other smarts
When it comes to the tools for handling daily life, music, contactless payments, weather and chat/messaging, bona-fide smartwatches like the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra win this battle hands down. But we’re seeing brands like Garmin playing some catch up offering offline music, contactless payments, camera controls and even chat.
How We Test Fitness Trackers
Our team has put more than 50 fitness trackers and smartwatches to the test to find the best. We lived for weeks at a time with each watch, ran, swam, hiked, biked and worked out, testing each feature of these powerful training partners, before rating the results.
For each model, we looked at the design, comfort and durability, conducted detailed side-by-side tests of the GPS accuracy, battery life and optical heart rate performance up against a chest strap. We sized up the in- and post-workout insights and recovery recommendations, including all the features that help you make progress.
Why You Can Trust Us
All the products featured in this guide have been personally tested by our team of health and fitness journalists. Ever product listed has been editorially selected and personally tested. Retailers, brands and PRs never dictate the products we cover in our content. The products we personally receive for review are supplied courtesy of brands, but we never guarantee inclusions in return for samples. We occasionally feature promoted content in these guides, in which case they are clearly signposted for full transparency.
