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Counting More Than Steps: How Wearables Can Help (or Hinder) Your Health

From step counts to sleep stages, heart rate variability to blood sugar spikes, wearable devices are giving us a front-row seat to what’s happening inside our bodies. Strapped to wrists, slipped onto fingers or wrapped around our biceps, wearables like the Oura Ring or Whoop strap promise insight and advice in the quest for better health. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. At Vail Health, wellness experts incorporate wearables into a multi-disciplinary approach, blending numbers with nuanced human care to create a more complete picture of well-being.
 

Healthspan vs. Lifespan: A Wellness Approach

Unlike lifespan, which measures how long you live, healthspan focuses on the quality of life — helping people remain active, strong and mentally sharp as they age. At Vail Health, specialists in exercise physiology, nutrition, functional medicine and behavioral health encourage a customized approach for each person’s healthspan journey. They encourage setting a baseline for your health to know where you stand. This can include blood work, fitness testing and metabolic and movement screenings. Knowing this detailed information can help a person address any underlying health issues and tailor a plan. 

Another essential component? Wearables. Data from straps, rings and monitors can help connect day-to-day choices with long-term goals.

“We believe in a multifaceted approach with exercise, nutrition and functional medicine all working together,” says Josiah Middaugh, Vail Health’s lead exercise physiologist. “Wearables give us objective data and valuable insights into training load, recovery, exercise intensity and sleep metrics.”

That data can highlight everything from how sleep, stress or alcohol affect heart rate variability to how specific foods impact blood sugar in real time. Custom heart-rate zones also help users fine-tune exercise intensity.

Still, Middaugh stresses that the numbers are only part of the picture. “Perception of effort, fatigue and recovery is just as important,” he says. “The technology is there to help us learn more about our bodies — one piece of the puzzle.”
 

When Wearables Provide Insight

For many people, wearables like the Oura Ring, Whoop strap, Apple Watch or continuous glucose monitor offer tangible feedback about how their daily choices affect their body.

Dr. Eliza Klearman, a functional medicine provider at Vail Health, recalls a patient with anxiety who used her Oura Ring to monitor heart rate variability (HRV), a measurement of the body’s response to stress.

“She used her Oura Ring to track HRV while practicing breathing and HRV training,” Klearman says. “Seeing the improvement in her numbers helped her stick with her practice, and her anxiety lessened over time.”

One feature of wearables that Klearman finds particularly helpful is the ability for people to ‘tag,’ or manually log, lifestyle choices, habits or conditions, such as if they drank alcohol or had a particularly stressful day.

“Logging things like food, alcohol intake, travel, stress or illness, so they can truly see how lifestyle choices affect biometrics like sleep, recovery and readiness — that’s when the data becomes deeply personalized and actionable,” Klearman says. 

Christine Pierangeli, a nutrition therapist at Vail Health, has found that wearables provide a practical window into how food and energy needs line up. 

“I had a client who was constantly tired in his workouts,” she says. “When we looked at his Oura data, we saw he was under-eating for his daily burn. Adjusting his intake made a huge difference in his energy.”

While it can be hard for people to make connections between their behavior and its effects on their health, wearables can uncover subtle trends — like underfueling and low energy availability — as well as early signs of illness or overtraining. Their real strength, however, lies in how they empower clients to connect the dots between choices and outcomes and then make meaningful changes.
 

The Slippery Slope of Too Much Data

While wearables are proving to be a powerful tool in the healthcare arsenal, health experts emphasize the technology isn’t infallible — or appropriate for every situation. Without guidance, the numbers can sometimes create more stress than clarity.

“People can get so fixated on a sleep score that they actually make their sleep worse,” Klearman says. “If the data starts creating anxiety, that’s when we encourage stepping back and focusing on how you feel — your mood, energy and focus — rather than chasing a number.”

Pierangeli agrees. “There’s a time and place to be data-free. One client went on his honeymoon and left his Oura Ring at home, which I thought was brilliant. Sometimes you just need to live without metrics.”

Middaugh, a professional triathlete and XTERRA World Champion, has been using wearables since the 1990s. Yet he’s firm that no single metric should ever be taken in isolation.

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,” he says.
 

Finding the Balance

When used with intention, wearables can help practitioners tune into their patient’s needs in new ways, including spotting dips in sleep, readiness or HRV. “It gives us a chance to share strategies and offer support,” Pierangeli says.

But across the board, the practitioners stress that technology should enhance — not override — intuition.

“Wearables can gamify exercise and promote adherence,” Middaugh says. “But the goal is to use them as one piece of the puzzle, not the entire picture.”

Wearables can’t replace wisdom, but they can spark insight. Used with curiosity and balance, they remind us to move more, rest deeper and pay attention to what our bodies are telling us. As the Vail Health team emphasizes, the numbers are there to guide — not define — us.
 

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Betsy Welch is a Carbondale, Colorado-based journalist, storyteller and Registered Nurse. She is a former senior editor for Outside's cycling group. When not on the bike herself, you can find her in the garden, on a trail run or trying to finish the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle.