Wearable technology has changed the way we get fit. From basic fitness trackers and GPS running watches to armstraps loaded with biometric sensors and recovery tracking smart rings, we’ve never had so many tools to monitor our every move – in and out of the gym. Armed with these little labs, everyone now has access to elite level insights at the raise of a wrist or the swipe of an app. The only struggle is finding the fitness gadgets that best suit your goals. So, we’re here to help.
In this guide we’ll walk you through all the different options, the major fitness metrics they track and recommend some of the best fitness wearables you can buy right now.
How We Test Products
All products featured in this guide have been either rigorously tested in our state-of-the-art Men’s Health Lab testing facility or personally by our team of fitness experts and editors.
Fitness Gadgets and Their Main Metrics, Explained
Fitness trackers now serve up a vast array of fitness, health and wellbeing metrics. Here are a handful of the essential fitness metrics explained.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
A measure of the variation in time between heartbeats, HRV is a window into the flexibility of your cardiovascular system. Monitoring HRV – and how it trends against a longer term baseline – can reveal how well you’re responding and recovering from stressors. Higher HRV is associated with better health, indicating your heart’s ability to adapt to stress from training and life in general. A lower HRV may suggest stress or fatigue.
Readiness
A trendy new metric that you’ll find on everything from Whoop and Garmin to the Oura smart ring, readiness attempts to reveal how ‘ready’ you are for the exertion of the day ahead. Scores are generated using a combination of data, including sleep quality, heart rate variability, activity, body temperature and resting heart rate. Generally served up each morning, they often come with guidance on whether to rest or train. There are some big limitations of readiness though.
Stress and Strain
Stress is another relatively new metric the wearable boffins have tried to master. Devices like Garmin, Whoop and Oura attempt to quantify our stress levels in real time with readings that tend to be based on comparing your HRV at any given moment, to a baseline. Whoop also offers a workout-based Strain score that combines your heart rate readings with motion sensor data to estimate the cardio and muscular load of your session.
Recovery Time Estimates
Many watches serve up recovery time recommendations immediately post workout, based on workout data like heart rate and VO2 max scores. This is the amount of time your watch estimates you should rest before you’re 100% back to your best and ready to go again. It’s designed to prevent overtraining and some devices offer adaptive recovery times that improve with good sleep and rest.
VO2 Max
VO2 max is a measure of the maximum oxygen you can use during intense exercise. Used as a benchmark of cardiovascular fitness, a higher VO2 Max reflects better oxygen efficiency and endurance. Fitness trackers estimate VO2 Max mainly through a combination of heart rate monitoring and algorithms that factor in age, weight, duration and intensity of workouts. Remember these are estimates and best used for benchmarking progress.
Sleep Scores
Most trackers serve up some form of sleep tracking with an overall sleep score (often out of 100), along with a breakdown of how long you spent in each sleep stage, estimates of how long it took you to nod off and your wake-up time. But be warned: there’s huge variation on the accuracy, with studies suggesting sleep trackers are only accurate 78% of the time compared to lab-grade sleep trackers.
Fitness Watches and GPS Sports Watches
Fitness watches cover a broad range of devices, with everything from entry level Fitbits that monitor the activity basics, right up to £1,000+ adventure-ready Garmin sport watches and fitness-friendly smartwatches.
What to Look For
Your tracker should handle the basics well. That means accurate optical heart rate, GPS and decent battery life (more than a day at least). Beyond that, size, comfort and durability are important. Then you can get into things like whether you need extra sensors such as skin temperature or blood oxygen monitoring. Or extra smarts like music and contactless payments.
This compact, lightweight multi-sports watch focuses on tracking runs, rides and swims along with some gym workout modes including HIIT and yoga. It’s a good option if you’re on a budget and don’t mind keeping things simple on the features front.
The built-in heart rate sensor does a solid job or you can hook in an external heart rate chest strap to boost the accuracy. It offers 20 hours’ GPS tracking time on a single charge and a general usage battery life that’ll get the most committed through at least a week’s training.
You also get features like fitness age insights, daily workout suggestions based on your workout history, adaptive training plans and loads of general fitness, stress and body battery energy level tracking. A good entry level tracker.
Pros
- Excellent screen
- Great health all-rounder
- Huge range of apps and tools
Cons
- Shorter battery life
The Apple Watch remains the best smartwatch in the business and its fitness credentials are now excellent. It offers excellent optical heart rate and GPS accuracy along with ECG and blood oxygen monitoring.
The native training apps for running, cycling, swimming and HIIT workouts are highly customisable and increasingly capable. There’s plenty here for newbies and hardcore trainers alike.
The Apple Rings that challenge you to move, stand and exercise each day to close your rings is highly addictive and motivating and the watch connects seamlessly with Apple’s Fitness+ platform to beam your metrics up on screen with a large library of guided classes for all levels. But it’s the unrivalled range of third party apps that really sets this apart and makes this a killer fitness tool.
One downside: battery life has improved but in general it won’t last as long as your Garmin or Polar watches between charges. If you’re doing serious training, the longer battery life on the Apple Watch Ultra 2 makes that the best option.
Bang for buck, the COROS Pace 3 is one of the best multisport watches you can buy. It’s well built with a full suite of biometric sensors, a competitive 38-hour GPS training time battery life and a simple lightweight design that’s comfortable to wear 24-7.
The COROS Pace 3 training, performance and recovery feature set is also comprehensive. Running, cycling, swimming are all covered and the strength-training mode offers automatic rep counting and muscle heat maps to make sure you’re not neglecting those lower-body sessions
You also get access to a full suite of COROS’ EvoLab training, recovery and fitness insights that includes training load, training effect, base fitness and fatigue along with a huge range of fitness benchmarks and the usual sleep and general activity tracking. Navigation tools are good at the price, too. Good value all-rounder.
Pros
- Great sharp screen
- Excellent recovery insights
- Great rest-work set guidance
Cons
- Missing smartwatch features
Polar’s range-topping tracker packs a stunning bright, crisp AMOLED display that brings all your vital metrics to life. And with more than 150 sport modes, there are a lot of metrics to sift through.
Polar’s recovery tools are also some of the best going and you get FitSpark workout recommendations tied to that recovery. We also love the Work-rest guide that analyses your heart rate during work and rest phases of a session, to tell you when it’s the optimal time to start your next set. The weekly summary is also fantastic for seeing whether you’re spreading your training intensity smartly over the week. The V3 even offers up insights whether you’re burning fat or carbs during your workouts.
Under the shiny hood, there’s new dual-frequency GPS to boost the outdoor tracking accuracy boost and a new Polar Elixir sensor that tracks heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen and skin temperature.
Throw in offline maps and up to 140 hours training time on one charge and this a fantastic all-round fitness watch.
There are too many models in the Garmin Fenix 7 line-up to go into here but if you’re after an endurance friendly, rugged watch that’s built to handle everything from a 5km round the block to scaling Mont Blanc, this is it.
It’s made for the outdoors with Garmin’s latest multiband GPS mode to boost tracking accuracy but it also offers a truckload of gym profiles including indoor rowing, HIIT (with AMRAP, EMOM, Tabata) and a strength training mode that supports automatic rep counting (though it’s a bit hit and miss).
The performance, recovery and fitness insights are as extensive as it gets. The Fenix 7 will benchmark just about every metric from heat and altitude-adjusted VO2 Max, to real time stamina and recovery time advice. Beyond that, there’s all the usual suspects like sleep, stress and Body Battery – an estimate of how much juice you’ve got left to take on the day.
This beast also has up to 57 hours GPS staying power. So we predict you’ll give up before it does. The toughest bit is working out which size Fenix 7 to splash the cash on.
Smart rings
Smart rings are still a fairly new concept that cram a watch’s worth of sensing tech into compact finger bling. If you want the insights and advice but aren’t sold on the style statement of regular sporty watches and fitness trackers, a more discreet smart ring might be the answer.
Stick on a smart ring and you can see the impact of all your lifestyle choices – good and bad. From late evening gym sessions and those weekday cheeky pints, to consistent bedtimes and early morning walks, the choices you make affect your sleep, stress, training and recovery. The rings – in theory at least – see it all.
What to Look For
Your top smartring priorities should be style (it’s got to look right), sizing and comfort. You need to wear them 24-7 to extract the full benefit of the tracking insights. Because there’s no screen to dig into that bio-feedback, the app is also critical. It pays to have a look at that before you invest. Also, bear in mind that some rings lock the most meaningful data behind a subscription.
Pros
- Simple, actionable advice
- Good HRV insights
Cons
- Subscription needed for some features
- Lifting weights can cause scratches
When it comes to smart rings, the Oura Ring wins the reliability and simplicity battle hands down. It’s also light, comfortable and pretty stylish.
You get pinpoint readings of SPO2 levels, heart rate, and sleep metrics in an app that works hard to make complex physiology simple. Some data-heavy trackers are hard to decipher but the daily advice in the app is much more human, quicker to digest without a science degree and easier to act on.
The Oura even goes so far as to help you with activity goals, which alert you when you’ve hit specific fitness metrics set by you on the app. The battery life is great, too. You can get up to 7 days of consistent power with a full charge that takes between 20-80 minutes.
Two downers: it’s not entirely scratch proof – particularly if you’re throwing heavy metal around in the gym. And you have to shell out a monthly sub to get the juiciest data.
Pros
- AI assistant
- Customisable bands
Cons
- Looks bulky
We haven’t had the opportunity to test Circular’s ring yet (we’re on it) but it’s been hard to ignore the buzz about this tiny Oura rival.
On paper it looks capable. It measures heart rate, spO2, a number of sleep metrics, a number of wellness metrics including temperature detection. It also offers vibration-guided breathing sessions to ease your troubled mind.
But perhaps the most exciting feature is an AI wellness assistant called Kira that claims to offer advice on things like activity load, stress, sleep schedule and even illness detection,
Plus, unlike Oura and Ultrahuman where you’re stuck with the design you choose, you can change the outer band of the Circular ring to swap in different colours.
Heart Rate Monitors
Heart rate monitors (HRM) were the OG fitness trackers. We were strapping on BPM tickers even before we clipped on basic pedometers.
In essence, not much has changed with HRMs – chest straps still track and beam ECG-based heart rate reads to watches and other devices. The biggest shift is the arrival of more versatile optical-based arm straps that can be worn on the forearm, biceps, and some can even be strapped to swimming goggles for more accurate reads in the pool. The top end HRMs will also now track things like running form metrics.
What to Look For
Accuracy is king here. That’s a non negotiable. And for the best accuracy a chest strap is the only way to go. Particularly for high intensity, high movement workouts with lots of gear shifts. Arm-based optical HRMs struggle when you start to move your arms a lot. Next comes comfort and practicality. Sometimes it’s easier to wear a strap on your bicep even at the cost of some accuracy. Some HRMs use coin-opp batteries that’ll last a year, others offer USB charging. Finally, factor in connectivity – what and how many Bluetooth devices will your strap sync to.
Pros
- Excellent accuracy
- Long-lasting battery
- Good connectivity
Cons
- Additional run tracking
The Garmin HRM Pro is another gold standard chest strap that nails the accuracy. It also offers a few more smarts mainly geared at runners. It monitors metrics like vertical oscillation, ground contact time, stride length, vertical ratio and keeps tabs on running pace and distance for indoor track or treadmill sessions.
All that info can be sent to compatible watches and treadmills and if you’re not wearing a watch, it’ll still track steps, calories burned and intensity minutes. You can also workout, store the data and then share it direct to the Garmin Connect app later
At 52g it’s light, compact and marginally lighter than the Polar H10. It offers 12 months battery, training an hour daily and has slightly better waterproof skills than Polar’s top dog – 50m against the Polar H10’s 30m.
Pros
- Convenient swappable design
- Good battery life
Cons
- Less comfortable chest strap
While chest straps are easily the most accurate option, if you sometimes struggle with the way they feel during certain workouts, you might want a bit more flexibility. If so, here’s a great option. The Bluetooth and ANT+ compatible MyZone MZ-Switch is an ECG chest strap / optical arm strap in one. So you get the best of both worlds.
It offers a regular ECG and optical sensor that can be worn on the chest, wrist or arm, and still offer reliable data capture whatever the activity.
It’s an impressive solution, and combined with MyZone’s Effort Points system, gamifies your workout efforts, which those of you with a strong competitive streak will love.
The Fourth Frontier X2’s price tag might set your ticker racing in a bad way. But this isn’t your average BPM tracker. This is the most serious heart tracking tool on our list. It’s the first smart heart rate monitor to record ECG during exercise.
It’s built to monitor heart health during and after performance with all the chest strap basics like heart rate zone training. But it also offers 24-hour ECG tracking with ECG spot checks.
The 25g, sweat and swim-proof tracker spots changes in your heart rhythm and can detect life critical issues like atrial fibrillation. It also monitors the oxygen deprivation experienced by your heart, to assess heart strain during your harder sessions. In essence, it’s offering a smarter way to manage workout intensity and avoid overstraining your heart for prolonged periods.
It’ll also measure breathing rate, Heart Rate Variability, periodic training load and clock cadence and ground impact. Paired with the smartphone app, it’ll even track your run and overlay ECG data on your routes.
Workout Wearables
Whoop 4.0
The screenless, wrist-worn Whoop strap tracks workouts, sleep and overnight recovery via a combination of sensors that includes an optical heart rate sensor. But it’s the real-time strain score that appeals to many workout warriors.
The idea is to gauge your accumulated daily exertion from your workouts – and the grinding rigours of everyday life – to make it easier to spot when it’s smart to push or when it might be time to ease off in your training schedule.
Whoop serves up loads of daily data in shiny graphs but even for someone who’s tested fitness trackers for a decade, it can be an overload and hard to pluck out the actionable insights. And that strain score suffers from the same reliability problems as the readiness scores on most fitness watches. If one data point isn’t accurate, nor is your daily readiness readout.
There’s also a range of workout apparel that lets you swap where you wear your sensor for convenience and accuracy. Having the choice is great but that’s somewhat ruined by a fiddly strap design that makes moving it to and from the smart gear a surprisingly frustrating affair.
Prevayl
Prevayl’s sensor-packed pods slot into small pockets in special gym gear including vests, t-shirts and shorts. It uses heart rate to track your workouts and serve up daily training and recovery insights, along with other common readouts like a body check test that uses heart rate variability (HRV) to assess your ‘readiness’ to train. But there’s no all-day strain or sleep insights like you get with Whoop.
One of the benefits of Prevayl – if you opt for training tops – is that it tracks closer to the heart, using electrodes integrated into its gear where you’d usually wear a chest strap. Prevayl says it samples ‘four times more ECG data than any other wearable’.
Other handy features include the ability to set long term targets for time spent at specific heart rate intensities – excellent if your training requires disciplined adherence to balanced training zones.
- The Men’s Health Guide to Recovery Tech
- The best fitness trackers and watches for tracking your workouts
- The best Garmin watches to buy in 2024
- The best Apple watches for tracking your fitness
- The best Garmin alternatives: Coros, Suunto, Polar and More
- The best heart rate monitors for more accurate workouts stats
- Whoop 4.0 review: Is it worth the cost?
- Oura Ring review: Here’s Why You Should (and Shouldn’t) Buy One
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