14/04/2023
PSA: Thinking about maximising your training results with getting extra fitness data to fine tune your nutrition/training programmes?
Investing your hard earned cash in a fitness tracker/watch is usually a good start. But beware! Permanent or temporary changes to your skin, such as some tattoos, can impact heart rate sensor performance. This is because the majority of wrist-based wearables rely on photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors.
These optical sensors work by shining light into your skin and determining various biometric data based on how much light is reflected back.
I bought an Apple Watch 8 and the ink, pattern and saturation of some tattoos can block light from the sensor, making it difficult to get reliable readings resulting in the watch randomly auto locking and pausing any tracking data in progress and obviously giving incomplete/useless data on calories, heart rate, workout duration etc.
If you’re lucky and have no ink on/under your wrists then you’re good to go. If you’ve got full sleeves, then you’re fu**ed! I was lucky enough to have just a bit of light shading where the watch sits on one of my wrists so it works 90% of the time. They say you can disable wrist detection but doing so makes most of the tracking features redundant 💩
Yes, you could use a chest strap but who wants to mess around with that nonsense!? Ain’t nobody got time fo’ that! There are some hack workarounds if you look around online, but you really shouldn’t have to!
I spent a good 30 minutes fu***ng around with the settings thinking it was something I’d done or not done before I stumbled on the tattoo tech conflict 😡. They definitely don’t make it known easily that tattoos could be an issue. It is in the fine print somewhere apparently but it’s definitely not common knowledge.
Absolute bandits 🖕🏽
