I’ve had the Huawei Watch GT 2e for over a month, and I’ve been able to explore a whole lot of features that it has to offer. For this article, I wanted to focus on how great this device is in terms of monitoring your fitness.

Just a bit of background first. I’m not a hardcore fitness buff. Nowadays, I just work with my kettle bells and elastic bands at home. For devices, I used a Xiaomi Mi band 3 and a Xiaomi weighing scale to measure my progress.

I used to be quite happy with my Xiaomi Mi band 3 and how I used to track my progress. In all honesty I was drawn to the overall ecosystem of Xiaomi’s massive device selection.

Then along came the Huawei Watch GT 2e. Although much larger in size than my previous fitness band, it comes with a massive array of sensors, trackers, and enough post-workout reports to make me feel guilty about every sugary sweet that I put in my mouth after my workout.

So here’s my opinion on why the Huawei Watch GT 2e should be your next fitness smartwatch.

ITS SENSORS ARE ABSURDLY ACCURATE

The main sensors of the Huawei Watch GT 2e, as far as normal daily exercises are concerned, are the O2 sensor and the Heart Sensor.

For my normal workout, I used the “Strength” workout mode (which shows a small pink weightlifting icon) – I don’t think it adjusts any of the sensors’ sensitivity or magically tracks the actual calories that my muscles burn specific to the workout. The modes are there more for reporting and making sure that you remember what kind of workout you actually did during that period. Given that strength workouts focus primarily on short-burst, high intensity anaerobic exercises, it shouldn’t really bring up my heart rate that much, or at least consistently compared to running or jogging. In addition, anaerobic exercises normally focus on stimulating muscle increase through muscle tearing, rather than on fat burning by activating your heart and lungs.

The Huawei Watch GT 2e measures where your heart rate reacts in terms of a theory called exercise zones or heart rate zones. This means that each range of your heart rate will result in a specific muscular effect, also in line with your age. Depending on your fitness goals, there is a certain heart rate which you would need to maintain, and the Huawei Watch GT 2e helps in monitoring that.

For example, in one workout, I tried to do the following exercises using a 25lb kettlebell:

• One arm overheads: 15 reps x 2 sets
• Overhead squats: 10 reps x 3 sets
• Figure 8’s: 15 reps x 2 sets
• Double overheads: 10 reps x 2 sets

During the first few reps, the Huawei Watch GT 2e showed just warm-ups, even though I was already sweating like a pig. My heart rate, basically, did not elevate to a much higher level, although theoretically my body may have already been actively working.

Within the next few sets, finally my heart rate jumped to the “fat burning” zone, starting at 120 BPM. This is the ideal heart rate that I tried to maintain, since this was my fitness goal as well.

Near the middle of my workout, my heart rate reached 140 BPM, which is the aerobic zone. This was likely due to the more lighter weight and faster reps I did during the latter part of my workout (figure 8’s and double overheads). Although with an elevated heart rate, it is not actually the type of workout I aimed to have, so I tried to slow it down again.

I did some cooldowns near the end of my 20-min workout, so it brought back my heart rate to almost normal pace.

I pressed the stop workout function on my Huawei watch GT and it recorded my Strength workout, which could be seen further in the health report on the Huawei Health app. This now brings me to my second point…

THE REPORTS ON HUAWEI HEALTH APP ARE FANTASTIC

In fact, they’re so great that I still find it a bit creepy that technology is accurate enough to record almost every single progression that’s happening in my body.

Upong reviewing the overview of my recent workout, it basically gave an analysis of it, not just the data. Since the sensors can only normally track heart rates, the results are somewhat skewed towards focusing on aerobic fitness, which might not be the goal of everyone. Nonetheless, it does give you quite an accurate perspective.

As mentioned earlier, the sensors are extremely sensitive, and does refresh every few seconds, so it’s easy for the software to create a nice graph that shows the trend of your heart rates. Pretty clean and cool looking.

The basic goal of these reports is to show you how much time you spend in each heart zone, and also adjust your future workouts accordingly. If you do take these reports seriously, it will make a HUGE difference to reaching your fitness goals.

THE SMALL FEATURES MATTER

The thing about fitness and health is that it’s not just about exercises and heart rates measurements. There are a lot of other things that the Huawei Watch GT 2e analyzes with the data that it gets from you.

For example, the Huawei Watch GT 2e also gives you your recovery time after workout – this is the optimal time that is needed by your body to be able to start working out again. Normally, this is measured by the intensity of your workout, with regards to your current fitness levels, among other things.

In between of workouts, the Huawei Watch GT 2e also measures your stress. However, this is also related to your heart rates outside of workouts. When used at the beginning, it will calibrate first to your normal, non-stressed setting, and will continuously check on whether you are stressed in certain situations. It’s nice to see also a quick analysis of how stressed your are in a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. Not many people actually measure their own stress, it’s a considerable factor to your overall health.

Of course, since the Huawei Watch GT 2e also has a 3-axis accelerometer, it can measure your steps or if you are standing, walking, running, or moving upwards as well. This is why there are workout modes that also include elevation such as climbing. The steps measured aren’t just linear, but can also include information such as climbing stairs, which is a significantly more difficult exercise altogether.

Aside from these, there is also a sleep tracker, which requires you to wear the smartwatch during sleeping. This measures if you actually moved while sleeping and how much “deep sleep” you had. Not really quite sure if you can change the way you sleep subconsciously, but still nice to see your own sleep patterns.

These three major reasons are why the Huawei Watch GT 2e is a great companion for your fitness goals. Aside from being a handsome-looking watch, it’s a great device that helps track your movements, heart rates, and blood oxygen, and recommend which actions you should do to improve yourself. Of course, you would need to constantly wear the watch to track everything, but it’s a small price to pay for monitoring your self-improvement.