Whether you exercise four times a week or you have just discovered the joy of trail running, adding a sports watch to your program can upgrade the entire experience, improve your performance and keep you healthy as you work on your fitness.

A key element of any effective training program is logging the details of each training session. One session builds on top of the other, so keeping track of metrics like distance, pace, cadence and elevation is important to continuously improve performance and avoid over-training. Leading sports watches from Garmin, Polar and Fitbit combine sensors such as a precise GPS locator, a compass, an altimeter, an accelerometer and a thermometer to provide you with complete details of your run, your route and the environmental conditions. Many watches are sophisticated enough to track different types of activities, including cycling and indoor training. Whether you choose to focus on improving performance in a specific activity type or if you like to alternate activities for all-around fitness, having a sports watch that can track them all provides you with an ongoing window into your overall fitness.

Another key advantage of sports watches is that they also help look out for your health. This goes beyond simply measuring your biometrics with heart rate sensors and pulse-ox sensors. By comparing this data with medical models, sports watches also track how much rest you are getting, how much you are stressed and the intensity level of each session. This helps you understand recovery times better, so you can adapt your lifestyle to your training schedule or schedule exercise for when your body has fully recovered. Either way this can both improve the quality of your training sessions and also prevent stress-related injuries.

In the digital world that we live in, we are surrounded by metrics and data. Whether we are watching professional sports, the news or our car’s gas consumption, we have become accustomed to the comfort of being able to quantify everything. The introduction of digital fitness trackers proved just how much being able to track our progress, using numbers, can motivate us to exercise more and more often. There are few things more satisfying and motivating than cooling down after a good workout, your blood stream flooded with endorphins, and reviewing your latest achievement on your sports watch or its companion app.

Sports watches are significantly more useful than simple fitness trackers; they pack in more functionality, include more sensors that provide more data, allow customization and enable you to download specialized apps for specific activities. A sports watch is useful even when you are not exercising, pairing with your phone to support smart watch features such as alarms, music control, social media sharing and receiving notifications. This utility keeps the watch on your wrist, so it can also log your activities throughout the day such as walking your dog, taking the stairs or grabbing a power nap.

And let’s not forget the impact of convenience on our motivation to exercise. The convenience of GPS-enabled sessions, automatic tracking and a compatible mobile app means that you can simply lace up, warm up and be on your way without having to pre-plan your route, navigate to a particular point or remember the details for later. The connectivity of a sports watch also comes in handy for weather forecasts and alerts, sunrise and sunset times and emergency functions, so you can be prepared even if you haven’t prepared.

A sports watch will not get you fit; the hard work is up to you. However, strapping on a sports watch will certainly help you reach your goals faster, healthier and safer.