Coach Micah's: Fit Project Podcast · Micah Smith

Are smart watches & other fitness tracking devices worth it? | FPP #149

·33 min·2 clips

Coach Micah says his Fitbit claimed 4,000 calories on 2,500 calories eaten, but his weight did not match.

Coach Micah opens by asking whether smartwatches and fitness wearables are really worth using. He names the devices listeners know best, like Apple Watch, Oura rings, and Whoop bands, and frames the conversation around whether they can help people monitor activity and get any benefit from a fitness journey. He keeps the tone casual. Before getting deeper into the details, he speaks directly to returning listeners, talks about how podcasts fit into commutes and cardio, and settles into the kind of extended coaching conversation the show usually leans toward. The main question stays simple. Micah wants to know what the upsides are, what the downsides are, and whether there is any real benefit to folding these tools into a fitness journey instead of treating them like expensive toys. He leans on his own experience. Using his Apple Watch as the clearest example, he describes how the watch can help with understanding movement, but also how easy it is to misread the numbers if every estimate is treated as exact. Calories are the big sticking point. He explains that his own watch seemed to overestimate calorie burn enough to make his weight-loss math feel off, which mattered because the scale was not matching the pace the numbers suggested. That mismatch is the point. From there, he talks through basal metabolic rate, activity calories, and the difference between a day spent doing almost nothing and a day that includes walks, workouts, and other logged movement. He keeps coming back to logging. A repeated theme is that the watch only really helped when activity was actually recorded, because if a workout did not get logged, the total did not always reflect that effort the way he expected. So the device is useful, but not magical. He treats wearables as tools for awareness rather than perfect judges, and the episode keeps circling back to the idea that the person using the data still has to read it with some skepticism. The episode also wanders a bit. Near the end, he drifts onto the current Apple Watch lineup, compares models, and reacts to pricing in the moment, which gives the conversation a looser, real-time feel instead of a polished product review shape. That looseness fits the show. By the close, the message is less about buying a specific brand and more about understanding what these devices can tell you, what they cannot, and why your own habits still matter most.

As heard by us

Wearables help most when the numbers are treated as a guide, not a verdict.

Micah spends the episode on a simple question with no simple answer: do smartwatches, Oura rings, Whoop bands, and similar wearables actually help, or do they just give people more numbers to worry about?

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want your tracker to guide you without letting one number run your training life.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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