In this weekly column, Android Central Wearables Editor Michael Hicks talks about the world of wearables, apps, and fitness tech related to running and health, in his quest to get faster and more fit.
If you're like me, stuffing down turkey, candied yams, and, uh, stuffing over the past few days while sitting at home looking at Black Friday deals, then your body probably needs a technological kick in the pants, courtesy of your fitness watch.
Whether you plan to buy a Cyber Monday smartwatch deal or already have your trusty fitness watch, it's already time to use it. Don't wait until New Year's to make fitness resolutions after spending a month setting yourself up to fail.
Instead, now's when you familiarize yourself with your smartwatch's health and fitness tools, to help you lose those Thanksgiving pounds — and preemptively keep yourself active during the cold winter months! I'll start with my "easiest" advice to follow, then progress to the harder stuff.
Turn on those obnoxious move alerts
For anyone with a desk job, there's nothing more annoying than being reminded every hour how sedentary you're being. Apple and Galaxy Watches have Stand rings, while Fitbits or Pixel Watches tell you to walk 250 steps per hour. But most people I've asked say they turn off those reminders immediately.
Your first December pledge is simple: Turn those move alerts (back) on for the month. Sitting all day is extremely unhealthy; that article links to several studies showing that sitting 8 hours actively undoes the health benefits of an hour-long workout the same day. So if you want to start working out to lose weight, you also need to stay active outside of workouts.
Taking just 1–2 minutes every hour to walk around your cube farm or do squats by your desk won't specifically lose weight — you need a sustained walk to actively burn calories — but I guarantee that staying limber will help prevent you from putting on more weight and get you ready for workouts later.
I specifically recommend a Pixel Watch 3 or Fitbit Charge 6 for move alerts, because they require you to move around for a specific 250-step goal, not just stand and wave your arms around. But an Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch's ring-closing goals are also great motivation.
Add X,000 steps to your daily average
Speaking of steps, I'm sure you've all heard the cliche about walking 10,000 steps a day, which began as a marketing gimmick. But even though that number is arbitrary, the need for steps isn't. The medical consensus is that 6,000 steps a day will actively improve your health, with younger people requiring a higher daily average.
When I walked 10,000 steps a day for a month, I lost seven pounds and 2.4% body fat, lowered my resting heart rate and blood pressure, and improved my cardiovascular fitness. I admittedly ran as well during this month, but the extra walking was the cause; case in point, I gained weight throughout 2023 despite running about 40–50 miles per month, up until that point.
For the next year, I continued to walk more frequently each month, and it helped me lose 30 pounds in 12 months — weight that I've since kept off. Seriously, walking works. But it's also a subtle, long-term solution; don't expect it to have the same impact as some unhealthy crash diet.
It's harder to walk so much in winter when the days are short, so I'm not insisting you follow my lead exactly. Instead, look at your current average daily steps in your fitness app of choice, and pledge to add 2,000 steps, or 4,000 steps, or whatever number you can handle. Each extra mile will either counterbalance or subtract your weight gains from overeating, without being too difficult.
For me, it usually takes about 15 minutes to walk a mile, or 2,000 steps, at a brisk pace; I know in advance that 6,000 steps is about a 45-minute commitment. Figure out your average time, find a safe morning or evening walking route near home (or buy a treadmill), and commit to walking a mile+ more per day (as much as your schedule can handle) at least five days per week. Make it a group activity with family members, if you can.
Any fitness smartwatch should count steps more or less accurately, while a smart ring is accurate during walks but gives lots of false positives while you're sitting and typing. I prefer a Garmin watch, not only because they're extremely accurate for step count, but because they have step incentives. Every month has a 10,000-step "Challenge" to hit 300,000 for the month, helping you track your progress; plus, there is a weekly steps leaderboard where you compete with other random Garmin users to get the most steps that week.
Count calories (the right way)
I'm not a dieting proponent. It's important to cut back on unhealthy foods and use portion control for your favorite snacks — like only one slice of pie at Thanksgiving — but everyone I know who counts calories tends to hyperfixate on feelings of hunger and devolve into binge-eating before too long.
That being said, calorie counting is the best way to determine if you're overeating and which foods are directly contributing to your weight gain. And I know other people who swear by apps like MyFitnessPal as a way to keep themselves honest and lose weight, so I'm including it here.
First, you need to figure out your body's basal metabolic rate (BMR), or the maintenance calories your body typically burns per day to sustain itself. You can use an online calculator, or buy a smart scale like the Withings Body Scale that auto-calculates it based on every weigh-in.
Once you know your baseline, your caloric goal is simple: If you cut your intake by 3,500 calories, you'll lose a pound. So you need to either decrease what you eat below your daily BMR to slowly add up the deficit to 3,500, or increase your daily maximum by working out (or walking).
Someone with a 2,000-calorie BMR can try eating 1,500 calories every day — which would hypothetically add up to four pounds of weight loss in a month — but you need to be realistic about what your mind and body can handle over a sustained period, especially with so many tempting opportunities to overeat in December. So set yourself a reasonable goal to (at the very least) break even by reducing bad calories, and raise your threshold with workouts and walking.
Available on both Apple Watches and Wear OS watches, MyFitnessPal is the best smartwatch-based tool to keep track of this. It lets you log your most frequent meals, snacks, or drinks with a few taps, then see your daily carbs, fat, calories, or other bodily stats on a Tile view at any time, to make sure you're not overdoing it on sugar or slacking on your daily protein intake.
Start running (responsibly)
Walking is a safe, low-impact, and monotonous way to burn calories. If you want to really kick things into overdrive, you should start your couch-to-5K journey and start jogging more regularly. The problem is that most people who start running overdo it, hate the experience or injure themselves, and give up quickly.
That's why I recommend finding a watch that'll calculate your body's VO2 Max, or the ability to convert oxygen into energy effectively, and then give you recommendations for how much your body can work out on a given day.
More and more smartwatches now track your weekly or monthly training load, then tell you if you're improving or worsening your fitness, or if you're overtraining. Apple, Pixel, Garmin, and even Amazfit have differing tools for judging when your HR rises above resting, creating a TL score based on how high and for how long, then judging how your TL effort compares to past days and weeks.
On top of that, some watches like the Pixel Watch 3 or Garmin Forerunner 165 will use your training load data to generate automatic, daily run suggestions. Garmin gives you a specialized workout based on whether you need more low-HR or high-HR activities, with a specific time and pace. Fitbit generates a few different types of runs per day and has you stick to a particular heart rate zone instead, so it's less about results and more about individual effort.
If you're new to running, the Pixel Watch 3 is an excellent option; two other Android Central editors who aren't regular runners have told me that its Cardio Load and auto-generated workouts make running more accessible to them. Otherwise, people looking to get seriously into running should look into the Garmin Forerunner series — especially since several of them are discounted for Cyber Monday right now!
