Alright. Howzit everyone? Today I want to highlight a great book that I've been reading called “Unplugged” by Brian Mackenzie and Dr. Andy Galpin.
Everyone knows that in today's society were all about being attached to technology and using our wearables to monitor our progress. I've got a watch and a ring that monitor different body characteristics. But many of the times people let these control their life.
When you originally got your wearable, you got it to help motivate you to stay on track and monitor your sleep, to track your steps, blah blah blah, and it's constantly giving you updates.
If you're out on a run, your watching your heart rate, your pace, your split times, and so you're constantly getting that little hit of dopamine every so often.
It’s the same like Facebook and all those others, but over time you forget to actually listen to your body and use that as the motivation to continue on.
So they found a lot of the people who are using the wearables constantly rely on that motivation over time. But if you're not hitting those little goals that it sets forth for you, then those little dopamine hits stop coming and then eventually people lose motivation, they stop wearing it and then they stop doing their workouts.
So the biggest thing is to, yes, use the wearable to help keep track of how many miles you did per week and how your sleep is going on a long-term scale,
but don't let it control how you feel on a workout.
For example when I go run, I don't have it so that it gives me notifications on every mile or how fast my heart rate is, I listen to my body, listen to the breathing and pay attention to how I'm feeling on those runs. They found that you can control your pace based off how you're feeling.
One example in the book was they tested runners using the wearables to control their pace based on their certain speeds, then they had them do the same thing the following week without the wearables just based on how they felt during that run the previous week and they were able to maintain that same pace within seconds of what they did when they wore the wearables.
You can control a lot of things based on how you feel, but if you're constantly looking down at the watch to see what your pace is, then you're not paying attention to how you're actually feeling.
So take the wearable and use it but don't let it control your workout. Focus more on how you're feeling during those and then use that to help keep you going.