Should You be wearing a wearable?

Does Your Whoop/Oura/Apple Watch/etc. help - or hijak - your performance?

Wearables are everywhere, and each brand claims to give you the inside edge:

• Whoop markets itself as the gold standard for recovery and strain, offering readiness scores that claim to tell you when to push and when to rest.

• Oura Ring emphasizes sleep tracking and circadian readiness, promising detailed nightly sleep stage breakdowns and readiness insights in a sleek design.

• Garmin and Polar highlight performance metrics like VO₂ max estimates, training load, and recovery windows, popular among endurance athletes.

• Apple Watch and Fitbit frame themselves as all-purpose health companions, with everything from heart rate tracking to stress alerts and activity rings.

The problem? Not all claims hold up equally. Sleep stage scoring, in particular, is far less accurate than many people realize. Consumer wearables rely on movement and heart rate proxies, not EEG brainwaves, so while they can estimate time in bed and general sleep trends, their breakdowns of REM vs. deep vs. light sleep are often off by large margins (Jamieson et al., 2025). Relying on these numbers can create a false sense of security...or worse, unnecessary anxiety when your “sleep score” doesn’t match how rested you actually feel.

So before we crown wearables as the ultimate performance tool, let’s look at where they truly help AND where they may quietly hurt your performance.

The Benefits (When They Help)

• Heart Rate & HRV Tracking: HRV (heart rate variability) is a non-invasive marker of autonomic balance. Higher HRV generally reflects resilience, adaptability, and recovery. Wearables now use sensors like photoplethysmography (PPG) or even single-lead ECG to estimate HR and HRV with good accuracy at rest (Jamieson et al., 2025).

• Readiness & Training Load Guidance: Devices that integrate HRV with training volume can help athletes and executives avoid overtraining or overreaching by flagging when recovery lags behind workload.

• Accessibility: Once available only in labs, continuous HR and HRV data can now be collected from your wrist or finger, offering useful trendlines for high performers without clinical visits.

• Accountability Partner: Knowing you have a little virtual partner tracking your moves can be a helpful reminder to actually get those steps in or get to sleep on time. Using these devices as cues to engage in healthier behaviors is beneficial long-term.

The Risks (When They Hurt)

• Accuracy Limitations: Studies show that accuracy drops during movement, sweating, or intense activity. Even heart rate can deviate by >10% in some intense conditions (Jamieson et al., 2025).

• Sleep Scores = Misleading: Wearables often misclassify sleep stages. Over-relying on them can undermine your natural perception of rest. If your device says you slept “poorly,” you may feel worse...even if you slept fine.

• Nocebo & Dependency Effects: Over-focusing on “bad scores” can reduce performance confidence. Athletes may subconsciously perform worse if their device says they’re “not ready.” Research on placebo/nocebo in sports performance supports this effect (Schütz et al., 2019).

• Opaque Algorithms: Proprietary readiness scores differ by brand. Two people with identical physiology may get different results, making it risky to blindly trust the output.

• Over-checking Progress: Setting and tracking performance and progress goals is necessary to effectively reach larger long-term goals, but wearables now allow us to track our progress CONSTANTLY - often too much. This can lead to over-checking progress which research suggests may make progress feel slower and therefore hamper motivation to continue (Huang et al., 2012). 

Physiology & Performance Context

• HRV and readiness metrics are indicators, not destiny. Laborde et al. (2017) emphasize HRV as a robust marker of self-regulation but warn against overinterpreting ultra-short measures.

• Neurochemically, obsessing over wearable data may shift motivation. Instead of pursuing mastery and effort (intrinsic reward), your brain starts chasing numbers (extrinsic reward), altering dopamine-driven goal pursuit.

Practical Takeaways

• Use wearables as guides, not judges. Look at trends across weeks, not single-night scores.

• Pair with subjective tracking. How do you feel? Often, perception outperforms an algorithm. Regardless of what your numbers say, do you feel like it's better to rest today? Or can you push the wall back a little further in your next workout?

• Train your physiology directly. HRV biofeedback, breathwork, quality sleep, and recovery practices will improve resilience more than obsessively refreshing an app.

• If you don’t own one, you’re not behind. A simple journal tracking sleep/wake times, energy, perceived stress, and workload can provide insights without the digital nocebo.

Wearables can be powerful tools, but only if you control the narrative. Use them to confirm patterns, not dictate your belief in readiness. Remember: performance comes from the training you put in and how you regulate your physiology and mindset, not from the number on your wrist.