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The Best Tech to Push Your Spring Workouts to the Limit

Rejoice, it's finally warm enough to exercise outdoors.

With warm weather comes the joys of fitness in the great outdoors. And with any and all fitness nowadays—running, hiking, swimming, and everything in between—there are dozens of trackers to lend us mountains of performance data, heart rate scores, hyper-accurate GPS readings, and swim stroke counts. But what’s out there? What’s worth the high prices demanded by fitness trackers? The answer to the first question is a lot, but the second is a more complex puzzle to solve, and one that depends mostly on what kind of fitness you’re getting up to, and what you want your fitness tracker to do for you. Below, find the best options for a wide range of workout and health goals.

Best All-Around Workout Tracker: Fitbit Charge 5
Best Affordable Tracker: Scosche Rhythm+ 2.0
Best for General Health Tracking: Apple Watch Series 8
Best for Hiking: Garmin Fenix 7S
Best for Health Nerds: Nutrisense CGM
Best if You’re Trying to Lose Weight: Lumen
Best for Swimming: FORM Smart Goggles

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Fitbit Charge 5

Best All-Around Workout Tracker

As far as value for your money goes, it’s tough to beat Fitbit’s Charge 5 tracker. Listed at $150 and often marked down well below that, the wrist-worn monitor catalogs the following in an easy-to-use app: Sp02, heart-rate variability, stress levels, skin temperature variation, distance moved, pace, calorie burn, sleep quality, and a number of other readings for power users to ooo-and-ahhh at.

It’s also water-resistant up to a 50-meter depth and weighs a whopping 1 ounce on your wrist, a sharp contrast from some Apple Watches that are two- and three times that size. Plus, the battery lasts a full week on a single charge—double the duration of most smartwatches. If you don’t mind the fact that it doesn’t answer calls, display text messages, or do the dishes for you, it offers just about the best bang for your buck in the fitness tracking world.

Excellent value
Durable
Lightweight
Week-long battery life

No cellular or phone functionality

Charge 5

Fitbit

$150

SHOP

at Amazon

Scosche Rhythm+ 2.0

Best Affordable Tracker

It’s oxymoronic to call any fitness tracker “dumb”—especially when you mean it as a compliment—but, relatively speaking, Scosche’s Rhythm armband is a bit dumb. Where other trackers fire a zillion different data points into your phone and crunch the numbers into tidy (but occasionally misleading) “readiness” scores, Scosche’s offering is a bit more blue-collar. It’s a heart rate monitor. That’s it. Its battery life is 24 hours or so and it's water resistant up to 1 meter.

Maybe you’re someone who doesn’t want a stack of personal health data shot to your phone every second, or maybe you aren’t that interested in the modern minutiae of exercise tracking—either way, the $50 Rhythm+ 2.0 is probably a good bet for you.

Very affordable (and often on sale)
Simple and accurate heart rate monitor
Lightweight

Lacks the bells and whistles of other trackers
24-hour battery life is below average

Rhythm+ 2.0

Scosche

$90

SHOP

at Scosche

Apple Watch Series 8

Best for General Health Tracking

It’s not a specialist fitness tracker, but Apple’s mainline smartwatch remains one of the most powerful—and popular—health-tracking devices on the market. From a tracking point of view, its credentials are second to none. Its pulse oximeter (or blood oxygen reader) is nearly as accurate as commercial medical equipment, it has an electrocardiogram on board, it tracks heart rate variability, and on and on. Most importantly, though, it works flawlessly with the iPhone, and the Apple Health app in particular. Apple Health is an absurdly powerful tool, as evidenced by an enormous report released in the summer of 2022. Not only does it track more workout and health data than virtually any of its competitors, but it also brings all that information into a singular, easy-to-navigate program. If you’re an exercise generalist who dabbles in the Apple ecosystem, the Apple Watch is worth considering and then some.

Research-backed health tracking
Pairs perfectly with iPhones
Connection to Apple Health
Fully cellular

$399 for base model ain't cheap

Series 8

Apple

$399

SHOP

at Best Buy

Garmin Fenix 7S

Best for Hiking

It’s not compact, it’s not subtle, and it’s not cheap. It is, however, just about the best hiking or outdoor adventure tracker you can buy. It does all the stuff other smartwatches do—pulse readings, sleep tracking, stress leveling, heart rate monitoring, etc.—then throws a pile of outdoorsy must-haves on top. The watch uses GNSS—basically a super-charged GPS system that pulls data from more than just the standard U.S. GPS system—as well as a three-axis compass, gyroscope, and barometric pressure monitor for navigation. It’s also got a beefy wayfinding system that displays detailed topographic maps on the extra-large touchscreen; a screen which, by the way, is also a solar panel. The watch is solar-powered and runs for 11 hours when fully charged, or 14 days when solar charging (assuming there is at least a little sunlight in whatever deep forest hike you find yourself).

Full array of health-tracking tools
Viewable 3D topographic maps
GNSS navigation
Up to 14 days of solar-powered battery

Costs as much as a decent sofa

Fenix 7S

Garmin

$900

SHOP

at Amazon

Nutrisense CGM

Best for Health Nerds

Nutrisense is a glucose monitoring service. You pop a CGM onto your arm—the company uses Libre's low-profile Freestyle 2 CGM, which looks like a little button on your arm—and the device begins recording your blood sugar levels. After a brief calibration period, Nutrisense assigns you a glucose coach (or glu-coach, as I call them) who reaches out through the app and guides you through the dense thicket of blood sugar trackers. If you're wondering why you'd wear a CGM if you're non-diabetic, the answer is straightforward: your glucose level determines much of your athletic performance, recovery, and day-to-day quality of life. That white bread toast you make every morning? Your body may struggle to process it, artificially inflating your blood sugar level for longer than you want. As mundane as that sounds, managing your glucose levels is massively important to your general health, as well as athletic performance.

Learning about your blood sugar levels can boost performance and recovery
Live human beings provide coaching through the app
Full nutrition-tracking suite
Minimally invasive, as far as CGMs go

Takes some getting used to
Not cheap

CGM

Nutrisense

$299

SHOP

at Nutrisense

Lumen

Best if You're Trying to Lose Weight

Lumen is a little black vape-looking thing that, frankly, can seem confusing at first. You breathe into it and, using a powerful C02 monitor, it spits out a wealth of personal metabolic data into an app on your phone. The idea here is that, by your knowing how different foods and activities affect your metabolism, you can slowly tailor your diet and exercise to the point that your metabolism is optimized for fat burning. Metabolism is connected to more than just weight loss, of course—healthy metabolisms make sleep easier to come by, regulate energy levels, and lead to a longer healthspan.

Helps you build a stronger metabolism
Learn how food affects your workout performance
Peer review research-validated

Significant learning curve
Not suitable for people with a number of health conditions (see site for more info)

Lumen

Lumen Device

$249

SHOP

at Lumen

FORM Smart Swim Goggles

Best for Swimmers

Whether you're a former competitive swimmer, training for a triathlon, or putting in laps for cardio because running sucks, FORM's goggles are just about the coolest thing for your workout. The goggles fire real-time swim data into the lens while you're swimming, meaning you can track your speed mid-swim to get a better idea of pacing (this is especially helpful for competitors). On top of the AR display, the goggles track and record a pile of other, more traditional health workout data—calories burned, heart rate, and so on.