Whether you trampoline in the backyard, hike deep into the wilderness, hit the gym daily, or run on trails for hours, the best health watches can help optimise your workout goals or kick-start your training routine.
Fitness trackers or health watches have evolved a lot to outperform simple wristbands. They are more sophisticated and powerful and can monitor everything from your heartbeat and oxygen saturation to how well you’ve healed from an exhaustive bout of exercise.
To help you choose the best fitness tracking devices that can help you hit your fitness targets with ease, we have rounded up a list.
What is a Heath Watch?
A fitness tracker or health watch is a tracking device, coming with a sensor galore that can detect and measure data and transform it into heart rate, running span, steps, sleep time, swimming laps, etc., to help track your body stats, movement, orientation, spins, and activities over a specific period.
A quality fitness watch notifies you of a spectrum of items so you can keep up with your daily routine – meeting the running/walking goal, drinking ample water, sleeping time, etc.
A health watch interacts with a dedicated mobile application via Bluetooth to enable you to set up the device configuration and make your daily activity data downloadable.
Types of Heath Watches
Basic Fitness Trackers
Record the number of steps you’ve taken and calculate the crossed distance based on the collected data. These fitness trackers are suitable for runners and walkers who need to follow up on the distance-based workout.
Heart Rate Monitoring Fitness Trackers
A basic wearable tracker with a heart rate monitoring system – with it, you can get data on the number of calories you burn daily.
Heart Rate Monitoring Fitness Trackers with GPS
These are the most advanced health watches that can triangulate your position irrespective of your location in the World. If you are up for hitting the trails or are a pro cyclist, such sophisticated trackers with GPS can be your best match.
How Does a Health Watch Work?
Most wearable fitness watches have a three-axis accelerometer to track your physical movements in any direction – sensing and measuring motion frequency, speed, time, intensity, and patterns. Some avant-grade trackers include optical sensors to glean and monitor your heart rate data based on ‘photoplethysmography’ (PPG). While the LEDs on the undersides of your wearable tracker radiate lights of different wavelengths onto the skin on your wrist to illumine your veins, the varying light refraction/reflection helps compute the pulse.
They have built-in GPS to keep track of the distance you have covered while running – it constantly pings the wearer’s location to calculate the span between two pings operating based on the time the GPS receiver requires to acquire signals from satellites.
Why Do You Need a Health Watch?
- Monitor Your Progress: As we have already said, a health watch helps you keep up with the fitness plans it projects. Whether you are busy at work or forget about the workout session, daily and in-time alarms remind you to get in the physical activities and be on track with ease. Plus, you get motivated to push a little harder with your exercises!
- Free Exercise Trainer and Guidance: With a quality wearable fitness watch, you get customised workout ideas and schedules tailored to your current physical stats and fitness level.
- Helps in Devising Attainable Goals: Thanks to health watches that help avoid sedentary lifestyles by setting realistic and achievable workout goals and tracking them as you keep hitting them successively.
- Health watches are designed not just to follow up on your daily activities. They also log your daily water and nutrition intake. You can also visualise how your exercises line up with your daily calorie consumption via interactive charts. So you can easily comprehend how fast you are shedding weight or hitting the everyday calorie intake target to slay the day!
Best Health Watches to Choose From
Let’s unpack our precise list of best health watches you can choose from:
Fitbit Charge 5
Key Features
Despite facing stiff competition, Fitbit Charge 5, the latest fitness tracker with a sleek and thin body, bringing too many fascinating upgrades to overlook, has topped our list.
With an always-on colour torch OLED display, Built-in GPS, ECG function, cutting-edge heart rate, step and sleep tracking presented via interactive graphs and exclusive top-end training features like Active Zone Minutes, Charge 5 is constantly pumping out some of the chart-topping health watches.
Pros
- Charge 5 Daily Readiness Score helps you optimise your exercise routine by disclosing how ready your body is for a big workout.
- Tracks overnight heart rate, calories burnt, blood oxygen level, breathing rate, and body temperature
- Interactive Fitbit’s companion app is a treasure trove of health data.
- Super lightweight, secure, and comfortable
- Stress management and EDA sensor
Cons
- No music control
- Altimeter not supported
- No Alexa and Google Assistant supported
Garmin Forerunner 245
Key Features
Fusing breakthrough technology with a stylish design that cuts back on bulk, the Garmin Forerunner 245 is the next-generation health tracker that elite runners can give a try for daily wear and while running.
With cutting-edge, exclusive running features like the always-on mode option, onboard music storage, V02 max score calculation, daily training suggestions, and more, this GPS-based health watch helps track your body stats, crunch the numbers and keep a close eye on your running dynamics.
Pros
- Sweatproof silicone-based band and long-lasting Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3 protector
- Super lightweight and effortless-to-assemble
- Real-time pulse oximetry data is available
- Avant-garde training load monitoring system
- Supports built-in sports apps
- 6-hours continuous GPS-on mode with music support
Cons
- One of the more expensive watches on the market
- No barometric altimeter
- It doesn’t work particularly well with other third-party tracking apps
Apple Watch Series 7
Key Features
Incorporating marquee features with a more luminous and bigger display and improved battery life and durability, the Apple Watch Series 7 is the staple of almost all premium iOS health watches currently on the market.
Apple Watch’s upgrades may seem iterative each year, but the latest Series 7, with whooping features, makes iPhone users look no further.
It’s more crackproof and water-resistant and comes with high-level algorithms for cycling and a revamped charging system that takes far less time to juice up than the previous versions.
Pros
- Always-on LTPO OLED 70% brighter Retina display with up to 1,000 nits brightness level when active (drops to 500 nits when always on).
- Low, high, and inconsistent heart rate alarms
- Supports a QWERTY keyboard to let you tap and slide on the watch screen using QuickPath and operates on Machine Learning to suggest the term you want to type accurately
- Oxygen saturation measurement and ECG functionality with built-in high-level sensors and apps
- Always-on altimeter supported
Cons
- Expensive
- Basic workouts
- Should improve the battery life
Samsung Galaxy Watch4
Key Features
Nail your daily activity targets and fitness plans and drive yourself to another level by having the power of your go-to Android apps on your wrist with wear OS Samsung Galaxy Watch4.
Samsung Galaxy Watch4 has got a spec bump – it’s robust and packs a 3-in-1 fitness sensor to better track your heart rate and body compositions – water level, fat, and more.
Pros
- Always-on crisp AMOLED display
- Real-time ECG monitoring system
- Sleep score and SpO2 calculation
- The latest One UI Watch software brings the best innovation to the Watch series.
- Supports 1.5GB RAM for seamless multitasking
Cons
- Battery life should be improved (1-2days)
- No rotating bezels
Christian Scott is the founder and director of MindBodyFit, a website dedicated to providing the latest information on fitness, health, and mental well-being technology. With over six years of experience in the health and fitness industry, Christian is a passionate fitness enthusiast who combines his love for technology and wellness to help others achieve their best selves.
