Last updated on April 13th, 2021 at 10:33 pm
If you’ve purchased a GPS watch for trail running, hiking, or fitness tracking you may have experienced the powerful data they collect. Being able to track steps, flights climbed, your VO2 Max, and even your REM sleeping cycles can be addictive. In this post, we provide some reasons why you might want to wear your GPS watch all the time.
Is it Okay to Wear a GPS Watch All Day?
Broadly speaking, it is definitely okay to wear a GPS watch 24/7. It might take some getting used to, but wearing the watch at all times will provide you with a ton of useful (and cool) health data.
Not all GPS watches come with features that make wearing them all day worthwhile. All the mid-level and top-of-the-line models do, and if you own a good GPS watch you can get more out of your watch by wearing it more often.
If you want a GPS watch that can do more while its being worn, consider reading one of our other GPS focused posts below:
- GPS Watches With The Longest Battery Life
- Best GPS Watches For Trail Running & Ultrarunning
- Best GPS Watches that Play Music
Through the rest of this post we will outline the major benefits to wearing your watch all day and night.
Benefits of Wearing Your Watch All The Time
Wearing a GPS watch through more hours of the day has some benefits. These benefits come primarily through the ability to track a wider array of your health data. Below are five major benefits.
1. The Watch Can Have a Better Baseline for YOU
Some watches provide a good baseline for your general health the more you wear them. My Garmin fenix 6s Pro is a perfect example of this.
Using a variety of data compiled over time, the watch provides me with a Body Battery score that gives a good snapshot of my health and energy. It uses a variety of metrics to display this data using a 0 to 100 score.
Below is a screenshot from the Garmin Connect App from my day today. Take note of the stress elements I’ve overlayed with the energy data.
Whether you need a watch to tell you how much energy you have is up for debate. However, for me, it is a good point of reference to remind myself not to get too stressed out at work. Below you can see the stress points throughout the day.
You can see I took the watch off right before lunch (I was loading a truck), but just before that I was experiencing some pretty steady stress. Knowing WHEN you are stressed can allow you to adjust your habits to control that stress.
2. More Accurate Calorie Counting
Calorie counting is likely one of the top reasons people want to wear their GPS watches all day. Whether you are on a diet, or just wanting to make sure you hit a baseline minimum, a quality GPS watch can count calories WAY better if you ACTUALLY wear it the entire day.
Below is an example of my days’ calorie count. I wore the watch most of the day and got a pretty accurate count of how many calories I burned. The watch also is able to tell me how many of those calories are burned during active or resting motion.
Having an accurate count of how many calories you burn on a typical day is the first step to understanding how to lose weight.
With quality baseline data you can better understand what food to consume on any given day, as well as what type of activities burn the most calories for YOUR body.
3. Accurate Tracking of Steps and Flights Climbed
Based on my body type, weight, and other health metrics my GPS watch has developed some standard benchmarks for me to meet.
These benchmarks are not specifically exercise related, but are instead able to be hit through any normal day because the watch can track your steps and flights of stairs climbed very accurately.
For the above screenshot, the goal my GPS watch set for me was 10 floors climbed in a day. Today I happened to get 18 flights of stairs under my belt.
I work on the second floor of a building so this doesn’t surprise me, BUT knowing how much exercise I am getting more specifically gives me a small bit of comfort. This is especially true today since I didn’t get a chance to run.
The data (and peace of mind gained from it) would never be available if I hadn’t been wearing the watch for most of the day.
4. Track Your Sleep (even your REM phases)
The ability to track my sleep, and get extremely comprehensive data from each nights sleep, is the perfect reason to wear my watch through the night. I love the sleep tracking feature and think this is as good a reason as any to wear the watch every night.
I have sleep apnea, which means I have trouble sleeping. I had been tracking how restful (or poorly) I was sleeping because I was waking up throughout the entire night. Apparently my Pulse Oxygen level was dropping drastically through the night. While I already had a hunch, the data from my GPS watch gave me the confidence to set an appointment for an official sleep study. Long story short… now I have a CPAP machine.
To give you an idea of what this data looks like on a nightly basis, I have included a screenshot of my night’s sleep last night.
If you look closely at the screenshot above you’ll notice the various colors on the chart. These colors correspond to different levels of sleep. The purple color indicates REM sleep (dreaming) for example.
At the bottom of the above screenshot, you will notice Pulse Ox, Movement, and Respiration listed. You can overlay any of this data with your sleep data to gain truly in-depth data into your nights sleep.
While it is nice to know how you sleep on any given night, it is most helpful to compare your data more comprehensively. As an example, below is a snapshot of my entire weeks’ sleep data.
With the full week of sleep data, I can get a better average of what kind of sleep I allow myself. Is the approximately 6.5 hours of sleep I allow myself each night enough?
That is a good question, and I wouldn’t be able ask myself that question if I had not worn my GPS watch every night of the week.
5. Know Your Real-Time Pulse Oxygen Acclimation
Pulse oximetry is the method Garmin uses to test your blood oxygen level. 95% to 100% is thought of as a normal reading, and anything south of 90% is considered relatively low.
The GPS Watch I have gets this metric by shining light through your skin where you wear the watch, and then it measures how much of that light is absorbed… yes, I am serious.
Below is an example of what this reading will look like if you wear your watch through the entire day:
While it is very uncommon that you have to worry about Pulse Ox readings, there are practical uses for this technology. As I referenced in a previous section of this post, I used my Pulse Ox readings while sleeping to see if my sleep apnea might be affecting my sleep.
The only thing I would note for those with GPS watches that can read Pulse Oxygen levels would be its’ impact on battery life. Testing your blood continually is a big drain on battery power, and you should expect to charge your watch more frequently if you plan to use this feature.
If you plan on keeping the Pulse Ox feature on you might want to check out our post on GPS watches with the best battery lives.
Wearing Your Watch More Often
Wearing a GPS watch all day can be an adjustment if you don’t even wear a regular watch. For those that like wearing watches, it likely won’t be much of a transition.
The cons of wearing a GPS watch full-time are limited to your own personal preferences. If you still don’t see a point in wearing one through all hours of the day, that is more than reasonable.
For some, tracking personal health metrics more consistently might be best. They can provide a more accurate snapshot for baseline health and how to improve it gradually.
RELATED POSTS:
Image Credit: Peter Mooney |(https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterm7/) | Public Domain Mark 1.0 — reduced file size and image