How Many Fitness Wearables Do You Really Need?

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Scroll through r/Garmin, r/ouraring, or r/whoop and you'll find threads from users debating the merits of pairing devices. Common combinations include a GPS smartwatch like a Garmin or Apple Watch alongside a recovery-focused tracker like Whoop or Oura, with users assigning each device a distinct purpose: notifications and workout tracking from the watch, sleep and recovery data from the ring or band, and so on.

As wearable technology becomes increasingly sophisticated—not to mention increasingly embedded in how we think about our health—at what point does all this monitoring stop helping you and start just generating noise?

Do you need multiple fitness wearables? 

Before dismissing a multi-device setup as pure excess, though, it's worth understanding why many people arrive there in the first place. After all, different devices have genuinely different strengths. Smart rings, for instance, are widely praised for sleep tracking, but struggle with workout detection (they don't have GPS and have limited ability to capture exercise). A Garmin, meanwhile, excels at activity and training metrics, but it might be too bulky to sleep in night after night. Maybe your Apple Watch has the best notifications and cardiac monitoring, but you like to charge it overnight.

Many multi-device users are simply patching up all these gaps, always trying to use the best tool for each job. So if you’re into tracking your health, a multi-device setup sounds reasonable enough. Surely more inputs mean better data?

Not necessarily, says Dr. James Mitchell, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz. "Apple Watch, Oura, and Whoop are largely measuring the same physiological signals and repackaging them through different algorithms," Mitchell says. "You're not tripling your information—you're tripling your noise."

Zooming out, it’s worth noting that most consumer wearables are not medical-grade devices. And this is not to say that your smartwatches, rings, and bands aren’t legit. Far from it: The FDA has cleared several Apple Watch features as Class II medical devices. What's important to understand is that designation applies to specific, well-validated features, and not to the broad range of metrics you might get on a daily basis. 

Instead, your smartwatch is best used for detecting trends over time—not to give you clinically accurate measurements at any given moment. This difference matters when people start making health decisions based on their at-home tracking.

What's actually worth tracking with fitness wearables

Not all metrics are created equal, but the wearable industry has a financial incentive to make everything seem equally important. According to Mitchell, the essentials include resting heart rate trends, heart rate variability (HRV) (when used as a general recovery indicator observed over time), sleep duration, and step count. "These are relatively well-validated and tend to track with meaningful health outcomes in the research literature," he says.

Then there's everything else. Stress scores are a prime example of a metric that sounds sophisticated but is built on shaky interpretive ground. They're typically derived from HRV and heart rate—real physiological signals—but the "stress" label layered on top is not directly measuring your mental state at that moment. The same skepticism applies to things like "readiness scores" and "body battery" metrics. "They can be directionally useful," Mitchell says, "but they're likely not telling you anything your body isn't already telling you if you pay attention to it."

Keep these risks in mind with fitness wearables

The conversation around wearables tends to focus on their benefits, but there are risks beyond notification fatigue. Privacy is perhaps the most under-appreciated concern. We regularly sign various “terms of service” that are long, vague, and subject to change. "Your health data is among the most sensitive data you generate, and most people have no idea what wearable companies are doing with it," Mitchell says. His recommendation: Research what each company actually does with your data and how seriously they take privacy before you commit.

Mental health is another risk. For instance, there's a documented phenomenon called "orthosomnia"—a term for when people become so focused on optimizing their sleep scores that the monitoring itself begins to disrupt their sleep. More broadly, constant tracking can erode a person's connection to their own body. "Constant tracking can shift you from listening to your body to only trusting what the device says," Mitchell says. People can become fixated on day-to-day metrics that, on any given day, may not be fully accurate. "Focusing on trends over time is a much better way of using the data, and listening to your body is always better."

And then cost is of course a factor, one that compounds. Devices like Whoop and Oura rely on subscription models that add up quickly. If the data isn't changing your behavior in a concrete way, your money is better spent elsewhere. 

Who fitness wearables are actually good for

Again, none of this means wearables are without value. Training for an endurance event and wanting to track recovery is a strong use case. Managing a chronic condition with physician guidance is another. Identifying patterns around sleep disruption or cardiac irregularities is genuinely, clinically meaningful. And for people who simply enjoy engaging with their data, without it causing anxiety, that's a legitimate use case too.

The sweet spot for wearables comes down to specificity. "Pick one or two metrics that actually connect to your goals and focus on those over weeks and months, not days” Mitchell says. Day-to-day fluctuations are mostly noise, and chasing them is a good way to make yourself anxious without getting healthier.

For people without a specific medical concern or athletic goal, these questions are worth sitting with:

• Has any data from this device changed a decision you made in the last three months?

• If you skip checking your stats for a week, does anything bad actually happen?

• Are you buying a second or third wearable because the first one gave you actionable information, or because you're hoping the next one will finally tell you something useful?

"For healthy people with no specific goals, the return on investment for most wearables is pretty modest," he says. "If you're sleeping fine, exercising regularly, and your doctor isn't flagging concerns, you're probably getting more anxiety than insight from layering on more devices."

The consumer market, driven by competition and the constant pressure to justify subscription fees and annual hardware upgrades, has raced ahead of science in many areas. Wearables are still an exciting and promising arena, but it feels like we’re being sold comprehensiveness when what we actually need is clarity.

If you're wearing two or three devices simultaneously and struggling to articulate what each one is telling you that the others aren't … that's probably your answer. Consider taking a week off from using your wearables. If you feel lost without your devices, that's worth reflecting on. At the end of the day, collecting data and acting on data are very different things.