We Tested Wearable Fitness Trackers Across Lifting, Endurance, Sleep, and Recovery. These Were Worth the Money

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The excitement over wearable tech is at an all-time high. It's an exploding field with watches and rings dominating the market despite a glut of innovations on the horizon. There are swimsuits that tell you when you’ve spent too much time in the sun and alcohol-monitoring wristbands that alert your family (or parole officer) when you’ve had a drink, but the biggest benefits of wearables for most people are in all-rounder devices such as rings and health-tracking watches.

These devices extrapolate essential health data right to your smartphone. The rapid improvements in sensors are responsible for bringing medical-grade health tracking, but health information overload is a real concern.

“The issue with wearables as a tracker is you need to have an intervention,” says Tim Rosa, CEO of sleep tracker Somnee and former FitBit CMO. “It’s one thing to have clinical-grade datasets, it’s another to have a closed-loop product that’s a diagnostic as well as therapeutic that drives you to a helpful intervention.”

The best devices pair your data with software that helps you make sense of it and take useful action.

There are hundreds of wearable devices on the market, many of which promise better health, fitness, and recovery, but deliver little more than an overload of data. We tested a wide range of options, from niche devices to well-known brands, and narrowed the list down to the wearables that are genuinely useful, easy to live with, and capable of making a real impact on daily habits and performance.

Want the inside scoop on the best fitness gear of the year? Explore more from the 2026 Men’s Journal 2026 Fitness Awards, where we’ve tested everything from weightlifting shoes and workout shirts to cross-training shoes and smart home gym equipment.

Related: Think Your Wearable’s Spot-On? New Research Reveals Which Devices Nail HRV and Resting Heart Rate (and Which Don’t)

Best Wearable Fitness Trackers at a Glance

• Best Health Tracker Ring: Oura Ring 4
• Best Wearable Fitness Watch: Garmin Fenix 8 Multisport Smartwatch
• Best Budget WearableFitness Tracker: Fitbit Charge 6
• Best Wearable Fitness Tracker for Strength Training: Whoop MG (Life Subscription Plan)
• Best Wearable Fitness Tracker for Tracking Nutrition: Abbot Lingo Continuous Glucose Monitor
• Best Wearable Fitness Tracker for Tracking Sleep: Somnee Smart Sleep Headband Bundle
• Best Sport-Specific Wearable Fitness Tracker: Carv Ski 2.0
• Best Wearable Fitness Tracker for Meditation: Muse S Athena

Best Wearable Fitness Trackers of 2026

Best Health Tracker Ring: Oura Ring 4

Health tracking rings have surged in popularity largely because they're easier to wear around the clock than watches, and Oura Ring 4 makes a strong case for that approach. It's low profile, comfortable enough to sleep in, and far less intrusive than a smartwatch, which matters if you want consistent 24-hour data. At $349 plus a $5.99 monthly subscription, it also comes in at a lower upfront cost than many high-end health watches, while still offering a broad snapshot of daily health metrics.

Researchers I spoke with believe Oura offers the best sleep tracking available in an all-around health wearable, with the caveat that users should focus on long-term trends like sleep, wake times, and average hours slept rather than night-to-night fluctuations. The Ring 4 is not FDA cleared as a medical device, but it is widely used in academic research, with hundreds of published studies referencing Oura data. If you have serious sleep concerns, a sleep clinic is still the best option, but tracking your patterns with Oura can be a powerful motivator for improving sleep hygiene.

Where the Oura Ring falls short is in sports and fitness tracking. It lacks GPS and will not replace a dedicated watch or phone for logging runs, rides, or hikes, though it does attempt to automatically detect activities with mixed accuracy. Its real advantage is consistency. Oura Ring 4 is comfortable to wear overnight, needs charging only every five to eight days, and is discreet enough to keep on all day. Those qualities make it easier to stick with long-term use and collect the continuous data needed for meaningful health insights over time.

Best Wearable Fitness Watch: Garmin Fenix 8 Multisport Smartwatch

Health-tracking sports watches are the most mature category in wearables, and the Garmin Fenix 8 feels like the most complete version of the concept. I’ve tested dozens of these watches, and while there are plenty of good options, Garmin is the ecosystem I consistently return to when testing ends. The Garmin Connect app presents core health metrics like sleep, heart rate, and HRV in a clean, easy-to-read dashboard, alongside features like Body Battery, Garmin’s version of a readiness score. I generally find these algorithmic scores easy to ignore, and experts I spoke with agree they're not essential, but the underlying data is well organized and useful if you want it.

Where the Fenix 8 truly separates itself is in sport tracking, especially for endurance athletes. Running, cycling, triathlon, skiing, and dozens of other activity profiles are deeply supported, with metrics that reward a numbers-driven training approach. Garmin is also one of the few platforms that's made a serious effort to account for strength training in a meaningful way. For outdoor use, the on-watch mapping and routing features are best-in-class and have proven invaluable in real situations, from navigating back to a trailhead to retracing steps to recover lost gear. Features that feel secondary on paper, like the built-in flashlight, alarms, timers, LiveTrack, and find-my-phone, end up getting used constantly.

Sleep tracking was long a weak point for me simply because I hated wearing a bulky watch to bed, but Garmin’s Index Sleep Monitor solves that problem. The $169 armband collects sleep data like heart rate, blood oxygen, and breathing patterns and syncs seamlessly with the rest of your Garmin data, letting you skip the watch overnight. As for upgrades, the Fenix 8 adds a mic and speaker for calls and AI interactions, plus new dive features that will matter a lot to some users and not at all to others. If you want a basic smartwatch, Apple, Samsung, and Google all make capable options. But if you want one wearable to track health, training, and serious outdoor activity in a single package, Garmin Fenix 8 remains the industry benchmark.

Best Budget Fitness Tracker: Fitbit Charge 6

The buzz around health-tracking wearables means more people than ever are interested in collecting personal health data, but the price tags on these devices reserve them for those serious enough to spend hundreds. Thankfully, FitBit (acquired by Google in 2019) still offers an affordable basic health tracker in the wrist-worn Charge 6. Fitbit arguably started the wearables trend with its simple step-counting devices that estimated calories burned and gave you a sleep score way back in 2009. 

Charge 6 is a more full-featured device, but the roughly $120 price tag keeps it palatable for folks who aren’t sure how much they’ll get out of watching their health metrics day-to-day. At its core, Charge 6 is an accurate heart rate tracker, but like more expensive wearables, it has a sensor for blood oxygen, gives you sleep scores, and automatically recognizes and records workouts. Charge 6 comes with 6 months of Fitbit Premium, but you’ll still be able to see your health metrics if you choose not to renew.

Best Wearable Fitness Tracker for Strength Training: Whoop MG (Life Subscription Plan)

If a diverse mix of sports and fitness has you unsure whether a ring, watch, or other tracker is right for you, Whoop 5.0/MG is worth a look. It’s essentially a screenless wristband tracker, but with accessories, sleeves, and apparel with mounting pockets so you can wear it almost anywhere on your body. Like an Oura ring, it’s meant to be worn 24/7 to capture health metrics such as sleep, heart rate, and fatigue trends. Unlike a ring, the wristband design rarely interferes with lifting, playing basketball, or working with tools, which makes it easier to keep on consistently.

The lack of a screen and automatic activity detection keeps tracking low-maintenance. While this feature is now found in many other devices, Whoop still does it better than most, accurately detecting my activities and pairing it with a clean, intuitive app. A standout feature is the Strength Trainer, which logs sets and reps to better account for the strain of weight training. It’s not perfect (the exercise library could be larger, and it sometimes underestimates fatigue), but it offers far more insight for lifters than most trackers.

The main drawback is the cost and subscription model. The Whoop MG band is “free” with a required 12-month subscription of $359 a year. The Whoop 5.0 can be had for $199/year but lacks some features. For comparison, Oura’s $5.99 monthly fee is far more reasonable, and a subscription-free sports watch can offer many similar features for the same cost. Despite this, if you want a comprehensive 24/7 tracker that handles strength and endurance training with minimal fuss, Whoop remains my favorite all-around device.

Best Wearable for Tracking Nutrition: Abbot Lingo Continuous Glucose Monitor

If you know anything about nutrition, you know most popular advice leans into fad diet hype or untestable guru claims. Quantitative data from a wearable could help people test dietary interventions, and the Lingo CGM from Abbott delivers exactly that. This triceps-mounted device inserts a tiny needle for up to two weeks, sending near-constant blood sugar updates to your phone. While obviously crucial for diabetics, it’s an enlightening tool for anyone curious about how food, exercise, or even heat affects their glucose.

I was surprised by how unobtrusive Lingo is. Beyond the flu shot-like prick at insertion, it stayed securely in place despite bumps and brushes. Accuracy can dip during extreme heat, but it tracks spikes remarkably well, even showing blood sugar responses to sauna sessions and adrenaline-heavy sports. The device isn’t meant for year-round use, but even a few weeks can provide valuable insight into how your diet and lifestyle impact glucose levels.

Unlike general health trackers that mix reliable data with proprietary scores, Lingo is a medical-grade device designed for consumer use. Matthew Smuck, MD, director of the Wearable Health Lab at Stanford University, says devices like this are the future of wearables because they offer detailed, clinically relevant measurements. For anyone looking to take a data-driven approach to nutrition and metabolic health, Lingo CGM is a powerful, eye-opening tool.

Related: This Simple Tool Made People With Diabetes 10X More Likely to Start Working Out, Study Finds

Best Wearable for Tracking Sleep: Somnee Smart Sleep Headband Bundle

Sleep is one of the biggest areas of interest for people getting into wearables. Almost every device since the first FitBit has tried to quantify sleep quality and quantity, but almost all use heart rate or some other metric to approximate what’s going on at night.

Sleep clinics and the Somnee Smart Sleep Headband track brain waves directly to give a more accurate picture of sleep onset, sleep stages, and wake-up. Critically, the Somnee Headband has an additional therapeutic layer of administering neurostimulation before bed to help prepare your mind for rest. I wore the Somnee Heaband for several weeks, and while I can confirm I don’t love sleeping in a headband, it improved my admittedly poor sleep hygiene in just a few weeks. 

I’m ill-equipped to test all of the claims in Somnee's marketing copy, but it has the expert halo around it from founder Dr. Matthew Walker, Ph.D., the Berkeley neuroscientist who literally wrote the book on sleep. Using Somnee forced me into a wind-down routine I'd been talking about implementing for years. I stopped eating right before bed, cut out late screen time, and picked a set sleep and wake time. 

How much of this is down to the pre-bed stimulation from Somnee and how much is the device just providing an anchor for a bedtime ritual is hard to say. Either way, my sleep improved, though I never got used to sleeping with it on and frequently woke up with it half-on or even on the floor. This hurts regular sleep data collection and makes me think it’s best used as a DIY intervention for a few months at most, at least as a nightly sleep monitor. You could experiment with using it simply for the pre-bed stim, though the app may struggle to adjust the stim prescription without your sleep data. If you have more persistent sleep issues than that kind of use can address, seek out professional help.

Best Sport-Specific Wearable Fitness Tracker: Carv Ski 2.0

Almost all professional sports leagues use wearables. The NBA collects player positioning data and stats with small trackers, and the NFL puts sensors in players’ pads and mouthguards, but very little of this sport-specific tech has trickled down to recreational athletes. One exception is Carv Ski 2.0, a Zippo-sized tracker that mounts to your ski boots to collect a mind-blowing array of metrics about your speed, hip angles, body positioning, and more, which enables software to provide ski coaching that’s helpful.

I live in a ski town and have skied my entire life, but one season using the Carv sensors made obvious improvements in my ski fundamentals and made all my ski days more enjoyable, despite my thinking it might suck the fun and spontaneity out of my favorite hobby. Carv works because all the data aggregation and its team’s ability to make sense of it, but it’s equally reliant on the prescriptions it offers. 

Rather than simply bombard you with numbers or tell you your turn shape sucks, the Carv app uses your next lift ride to present coaching suggestions. Carv partners with some of the top ski instructors and pros around the world to develop the coaching modules, so the tips tend to actually make sense and give you something actionable to work on for your next run.

The cost is less than a ski jacket, and the hardware is free with a $249 annual subscription, which means a substantial recurring fee to keep with it. However, Carv offers a very generous 100-day money-back trial period that’s as long as a ski season in many places and is plenty of time to see if you get see improvements from wearing it.

Best Wearable for Meditation: Muse S Athena

Meditation, like yoga or eating more salads, is one of those things people struggle to start or stick with. As someone who’s dabbled in meditation apps and books as well as semi-regular practice, I can attest that part of the problem is feedback. There are hundreds of teachers and methods, and if you’re practicing on your own, you never know if you’re doing it right. Done right or wrong, it’s all in your head, right?

Muse S Athena Headband is a neurofeedback device designed to help you better understand what’s happening in your brain during meditation, relaxation, and recovery. After a quick calibration, the app guides you through sessions that range from traditional meditations to tutorials that teach you how to interpret your brain activity in real time, creating a feedback loop that helps you learn how to shift your mental state more intentionally. Like the Somnee headband, I found that if nothing else, having Muse S Athena around gave me a reminder to meditate.

Beyond meditation, the headband collects additional data through built-in sensors: an accelerometer tracks breathing rhythms so you can pace your breath for relaxation or focus, a gyroscope detects subtle movement changes that offer insight into posture and balance, and sleep tracking adds another layer to its recovery focus. PPG sensors monitor heart rate, providing biofeedback that helps connect mental states to physical responses, turning abstract feelings like stress or anxiety into something you can see, track, and gradually learn to manage more effectively.

Related: TAG Heuer and New Balance Just Dropped a Smartwatch and Running Shoe That Can Transform Your Training

What You Should Look for in Wearable Fitness Trackers

Lifestyle Fit

It’s important to ask what you want a wearable to do for you before you start shopping for one. Do you have a specific health concern you’re hoping to work on with the help of a device? If it’s something hyperspecific, chronic, and/or serious, you’re better off making a doctor’s appointment. 

For general health metrics and for generally healthy people, wearable trackers are a great way to quantify health in a broad range of aspects, including sleep, heart health, stress, and general fitness. 

What your lifestyle and, particularly, your exercise regimen looks like will probably dictate which device makes the most sense for you. Dedicated athletes will likely turn to a Garmin watch or similar device or possibly the Whoop band, while folks simply wanting basic round-the-clock, hands-off health tracking may turn to an Oura Ring. Our picks above should help you find the device that’s best for you.

Track Record

As with social media networks, the experience on a health-tracking platform is generally better the more popular it is. The bigger the user base, the more data they have to draw insights from. There’s also likely a correlation between the increased profits and more attention to developing better hardware, software, and data analysis behind the scenes. 

For this reason, we suggest starting with established platforms from brands such as Garmin, Oura, Whoop, and others. We tested dozens of startup wearables as well as budget options, and the drop-off in app experience and usability from the more established platforms was noticeable and made us less enthusiastic about sticking with the devices long-term.

Value Check

Many of the wearables we recommend here cost hundreds of dollars in upfront cost plus some recurring subscription costs, meaning that despite wearables gaining mainstream interest, they still provide the most value to folks willing to commit to using them consistently for a long period of time. Like a New Year’s Day gym membership sign-up, a wearable purchase can be a well-intentioned move that ends up being a waste of money if you don’t put it to use.

If you’re on a budget or just concerned you won’t get value out of a wearable, but want to give something a try, FitBit Charge 6 provides a lot of value for $120. It also kind of falls between a watch and a screenless tracker to give you a feel for wearing either long-term. And for many folks, that’s the only health tracker they’ll ever need.

Why Trust Me

I’ve spent years testing the latest sport watches, rings, and trackers and logged thousands of miles of biking, running, and hiking in them to assess their real-world utility. For this article, I tested dozens of devices new to me, from the weird and wacky to the everyday and outwardly boring.

Related: The Best Running Shoes of 2025: We Tested Dozens of Pairs to Find Our Favorites

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I trust the data from my wearable device?

Accuracy with wearable data has been a sticking point since people questioned the accuracy of the first step counter devices. Thankfully, as hardware improvements have found their way into even cheaper devices, the basics, such as heart rate, are converging on clinically accurate standards. Still, most consumer devices aren’t officially considered medical devices and should be treated as data points, but not the absolute truth.

"It's important to understand that the medical professional standard for accuracy and validity is based on a specific regimented scientific approach with results presented in peer-reviewed research, and this is different than what the tech industry means when they talk about the accuracy and validity of their wearable devices,” says Dr. Matthew Smuck, MD, is Director of Wearable Health Lab at Stanford University and Fellow of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. 

The experts I spoke with for this article all echoed the idea that, rather than obsess over daily or to-the-minute numbers such as sleep scores, pay attention to broader trends. Longevity expert Dr. Amanda Kahn says it’s akin to how you should use a scale for weight loss. “Wearables are good for broader trends over time. Just like your weight on a scale, you should pay attention to your numbers over the long haul rather than obsessing over one day,” she advises.

Similarly, just because your wearable’s numbers may not be clinically accurate doesn’t mean they can’t be useful. Even if your home scale isn’t accurate to the gram, you can use that particular scale to see if you trend in the right direction over time, and the same goes for your heart rate data on a watch. 

My wearable device gives me a ton of information. How do I know what to pay attention to?

Wearable manufacturers hear the complaints that consumers feel overwhelmed and have trouble making sense of all the data. I’ve noticed app interfaces getting streamlined and favoring single score metrics over confusing graphs and charts. 

If you find algorithmically derived scores such as FitBit’s Daily Readiness Score or Whoop’s Strain metric helpful, by all means use them, but these numbers are calculations derived from other core metrics and can get confusing. What are you supposed to think when your “Body Battery” hits 1 out of 100 and you go for a run anyway? These scores are also highly dependent on the unverified accuracy of the data captured, as well as your consistency in how and when you wear the device.

Dr. David Dodick, Chief Science and Medical Officer at the Atria Health Institute, suggests sticking to the basics and watching long-term trends. “Steps and daily movement are important health metrics, and one should aim for steady increases and less sitting time. Sleep is also very important, and it's more useful to track total hours and consistent bed/wake times rather than trying to micromanage or alter nightly sleep stages,” he says. 

Dodick also recommends comparing numbers to your own previous data rather than to friends or professional athletes. He says some metrics, such as calories burned, sleep stages, stress scores, and isolated “bad day” numbers, can be safely ignored in most cases.

Should I talk to my doctor about the data from my wearable devices?

Yes! While the healthcare industry has been slow to adapt to the proliferation of wearables and the data isn’t standardized, doctors we spoke with said having long-term round-the-clock monitoring data from wearables can help them diagnose health issues and give patients ways to improve their metrics.

Dr. Dodick of the Atria Health Institute says healthcare providers want to see and discuss your wearable data and offers these tips for a more productive conversation.

• Bring a one-page summary with the last 4 weeks of steps, sleep, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability, and any alerts you might have received. 
• Ask for clinical targets like blood pressure goals, activity minutes, step count, sleep duration, and sleep regularity windows.
• Agree on boundaries: what to contact them about, such as sustained heart rate irregularity, versus what to just monitor, such as a single poor sleep score.

Dr. Ben Sanchez, Engineering Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and Scientific Advisor to alcohol-monitoring wearable SOBRsafe, says he sees the next steps in wearables converging the worlds of medical devices and consumer wearables. “I’m interested as a scientist in how novel consumer tech can empower patients and physicians,” says Sanchez.

“Some of the metrics, such as the heart rate, are nearing clinical standards, but there are lots of other 'scores', such as muscle fatigue, that you get. Scientifically speaking, is that well-defined? It’ll be easier to bridge the {consumer-medical} gap when the numbers are clinically meaningful.”

Find all the winners from the 2026 Men's Journal Fitness Awards