“Did you see me running down your street?” » sang Charlebois. Since the advent of GPS and connected watches, the answer is yes. And this, thanks to sports tracking applications. Pace, route to the nearest meter, elevation: the amount of data to be shared online is impressive. But have these applications made us addicted to our sporting performance?
I had good performance [sur Strava] and I started accumulating lots of trophies, the famous Queen. It sure makes people react! They make likes and say to me: “You’re good. You’re the Queen.” And that means it can go to your head a little,” says Annie Bélanger, sitting at a table near Fort-Chambly.
On the Strava app, users can compete against each other to win the King or Queen of the Mountain (called KOM/QOM): a trophy – virtual of course – for the best time in a segment. And if another athlete beats the record, this trophy goes to him.
Passionate about cycling and running, Mme Bélanger registered on Strava in 2016 to have data on her performances. After a few years of use, what was initially a tool began to take up a lot of space in his life. She then became more and more addicted to her data.
Overanalysis of his results and too frequent consultations of the application: his performance came before the real physical well-being felt by the sport. “If I had a bad performance at a time when it was very windy, I made sure to say so so that it justified a maybe lower average,” explains the 39-year-old.
For Véronique Boudreault, professor of sports psychology at the University of Sherbrooke, this is classic behavior. Even among people who don’t have Strava, some cannot do physical activities without their connected watch, says the specialist.
Technology and self-quantification
“If we do physical activity and we are addict to the figures, and that this leads to overtraining, to an injury, that is to say a cessation of physical activity, for me, that is what is worrying”, says Brice Favier-Ambrosini, professor at Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi.
For this sociologist of sport, the popularity of these technologies can be explained, more broadly, by a phenomenon of self-quantification — self-tracking in English — which has grown. Since the 2010s, a form of commonality has taken place, notably through the accessibility of technological tools and their lower costs. “This made it possible to move from practices which were still reserved for the sporting elite [à des pratiques axées] towards the amateur sports population,” he recalls.
Self-quantification therefore allows you to obtain a lot of data. This information can remain private, but it is also possible to communicate it using numerous applications. One of them is Strava, which has been around since 2009 and has nearly 100 million users worldwide. On it, athletes have access to their results and their subscribers encourage them by sending “Kudos”, the equivalent of a “Like”. The aspect that interests many is that Strava is a real social network for athletes.
A predisposition?
“If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen” is a well-known quip on the platform. But does the joke reflect a form of obsession? In itself, the application is neither good nor bad, it all depends on each person’s use.
Competitive by nature, Annie Bélanger believes that she was perhaps “predisposed to go there”. “Facebook has never really appealed to me, nor has Instagram. But here I had a community of people doing things I loved. »
According to psychologist specializing in sports Véronique Boudreault, some people are indeed “predisposed” to have compulsive behaviors on applications like Strava, which she describes as “the perfect tool to feed obsessions”. “We can compare our performances to those of others. So, it remains a context that can facilitate the development of performance anxiety,” explains the specialist. She specifies that this comparison mechanism also occurs on Instagram, TikTok or Facebook.
“It can affect self-esteem, it can lead to feelings of worthlessness and frustration with oneself. If we draw a parallel with Strava, we compare ourselves to standards that are unrealistic, and therefore unattainable,” she continues. Signs of an obsession can be “thinking about it a lot, spending a lot of time analyzing its performance or planning how you’re going to use it,” says M.me Boudreault.
The Queen is dead, long live the Queen!
In 2022, after six years of use, Annie Bélanger was challenged by a friend to stop using Strava, because she saw that she was spending a lot of time there. “I saw that it was becoming harmful for me,” she says. And she left the app for a year to rediscover her true passion for sport.
Professor Favier-Ambrosini notably studied what factors mean that a person using a connected watch can lose the quality of their experience. For him, Annie’s reaction is an “unconscious protection strategy”. “People sometimes abandon quantification over a period of their life and start again [ensuite]. That’s very, very common. »
There are different strategies for using sports tracking tools in the long term without losing your enjoyment. One of them is to maintain a critical vision of them. “People who pursue quantified physical activity and who continue to enjoy it are people capable of not taking all the responsibility for poor performance on their shoulders,” says Mr. Favier-Ambrosini.
Learn how to use the tool properly
So it’s true that some people can become addicted to their performance because of apps like Strava. For others, it’s just a way to stay connected to their friends who live further away. During the pandemic, the application has, among other things, allowed many people to stay motivated by seeing their friends go out and play sports. “They were able to continue moving while feeling connected, by forming small clubs inside the platform too,” explains Véronique Boudreault.
As for Annie Bélanger, the break she took helped her develop a new way of loving sport, which she also passes on to her two daughters. “It allowed me to learn to run slowly, to play sports, to enjoy doing things more slowly sometimes. To develop the sport, too, in a certain way, because it is an endurance sport, so as not to injure myself. But also to talk with friends while I run or to do an activity for pure pleasure, and not with a focus on performance,” she explains.
“If it is used flexibly, it can be a super-interesting tool and really pleasant to use, indeed,” recalls M.me Boudreault.