Big Tech devices create problems, not solutions
The next time you’re in the gym or on your local Parkrun start line, take a look around. How many of your fellow lifters or runners are wearing a smart watch, fitness tracker or heart-rate monitor?
A decade ago only serious runners and other endurance athletes would have tracked their performance with technology, but now – thanks to Big Tech players such as Apple and Samsung moving into the wellness-tech space with smart watches and fitness trackers – almost everyone is able to monitor every single important health biomarker, from sleep quality and duration to resting heart rate, breathing rate and heart-rate variability on a daily basis, as well as their strength, speed and power output in real-time when training.
You might think that the arrival of Big Tech companies with billions of dollars of R&D resource behind them, as well as the emergence of Silicon Valley “well tech” start-ups such as Whoop and Oura, would be a cause for existential crisis for established players on the exercise performance technology space, such as heart rate training pioneer MyZone.
But you’d be wrong.
Get in the zone
Indeed, for MyZone founder and former CEO Dave Wright, the new products and services coming along don’t threaten his company’s existence, but underpin just how special and unique the MyZone experience is.
As he explains in our exclusive Unfiltered conversation, MyZone’s strength lies in its focus as a fitness company that uses technology to enhance the user experience, rather than being a tech company trying to fit into the fitness world. This distinction, he believes, allows MyZone to prioritise making exercise enjoyable and accessible, setting them apart from competitors who often overwhelm users with excessive or irrelevant data and insights into their current level of health, performance and wellbeing.
Wright aimed both barrels at the increasing tendency of many new fitness devices to include a “readiness to train” score, calculated from sleep quality and quantity stats alongside resting heart rate, heart-rate variability and other metics, to “inform” users whether or not they should exercise and, if so, how easy or hard they can push it.
Features such as this, Wright says, are more of a hindrance than a help for the average user, because the overwhelming majority of people aren’t elite athletes who can adjust their schedules based on a “readiness” score. Instead they need to fit exercise into their busy lives whenever they can, even if they’re very tired and not at their best, making these scores demotivating and providing more excuses not to work out rather than encouraging some form of activity for the myriad mental and physical health benefits it will deliver.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the amount of personal data that follows your every move, listen to Wright’s advice on how you can get back in tune with your body and reignite your love for the simple pleasure of how training makes you feel, rather than feeling forced to forensically examine how optimally you performed every single rep or step.
