My fiancé started going to a "high-intensity crossfit gym" three nights a week to get in shape for our upcoming wedding. He claimed the workouts were so grueling that he couldn't check his phone for two hours straight. I didn't think anything of it until I opened our shared health and fitness app to log my own morning run.
The app automatically synced data from both of our smart-watches to track our weekly fitness goals. I clicked on his activity graph from the previous night to see his calorie burn.
According to the data, his heart rate hadn't peaked during a high-intensity workout. In fact, between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM, his GPS tracking showed he was completely stationary at a high-end French restaurant downtown. His heart rate during those two hours was a perfectly resting, relaxed 65 beats per minute- right up until 9:15 PM, when his location suddenly shifted to a boutique hotel, and his heart rate spiked into the cardio zone for exactly twelve minutes before returning to a dead calm.
He had forgotten that the watch doesn't just track if you're moving; it tracks the physiological truth of how you're moving. When he walked through the door at 10:00 PM, wiping fake sweat from his forehead and complaining about "how killer the leg day was," I held up my phone with the biometric graph open. "Wow, looks like a crazy workout," I said, zooming in on the restaurant coordinates. "I didn't know crossfit involved a three-course steak dinner and a twelve-minute cardio session at the Hilton. Care to explain the metrics?" He couldn't even find the words to spin a lie. The engagement was over before his watch could even sync the next day's steps.