Welcome back to Fit Body Happy Joints. My name is Shannon. I'm a doctor of physical

therapy and the owner of Evelo Fitness and this podcast is intended to explain the

science behind fitness so that you can make decisions around your workouts in ways that build your body up, not break your body down.

And today I want to talk about why I don't recommend using a fitness watch to track your

workouts and why I don't recommend entering your workouts in something like my fitness pal if you're

someone who is tracking your macros. I want to talk about really what to do

instead and why tracking calories out can actually be sabotaging your results. So I say this all the time but beating your

body up in your workouts and potentially damaging your joints and your

hormones with really

backfire, but what we've slowly backfire.

And I would say it backfires for most people eventually.

But what we've slowly started to believe is that

what is the most effective thing as far as fitness is that we

burn a lot of calories and especially now we can objectively track how many calories each workout burns.

And we lean on really intense exercise because we think,

oh, this type of movement burns a lot of calories and

therefore that means it's effective. But what I'll talk about today is that

using calories as a metric to measure the effectiveness of your workouts is not actually what will move the needle forward and I'll explain why.

Because there's a big difference between a workout that

burned a lot of calories but didn't do much for your muscles and a workout that

really effectively loaded your muscles and will induce physical change, but maybe didn't burn that many

calories.

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