Women's Health June 12, 2026 0 Comments

Unlocking the Future of Heart Health: The Surprising Breakthroughs That Could Change Your Life Forever

Ever catch yourself wondering just how hard your heart is working when you’re out there crushing those miles or just tackling your day? Me too—more than I care to admit, honestly. It all kicked off when I dove headfirst into serious running and slapped a Garmin on my wrist, transforming my casual jogs into a full-on obsession with tracking my “fitness age” and heart stats I didn’t even know existed. But here’s the kicker—while the numbers on these sleek devices offer a cool snapshot, what’s really going on behind the scenes? Does your “cardiovascular age” actually reflect the truth about your ticker, or is it just clever marketing? And how much power do these wearables really have in helping us take control of heart health? I rolled up my sleeves and chatted with top cardiologists to sift fact from fiction—because whether you’re a data junkie or a newbie, understanding your heart is key to turning those stats into real, lasting health wins. Ready to get your heart’s story straight?

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How often do you think about your heart? For me, it’s pretty often. It started when I began to take running more seriously, around the same time I got a fitness wearable. I wanted to know how hard my heart was working during a run and get estimates of performance metrics I hadn’t previously tracked like my VO2 max. So, I strapped a Garmin to my wrist and quickly became obsessed.

Where some people may scroll social media, I scroll through my Garmin and Oura data. If you dig into either one enough, you’ll find pretty similar heart health metrics: on Garmin, your “fitness age” and on Oura, your “cardiovascular age.” Garmin says their fitness age is an estimate of how fit you are compared to your actual, biological age.

Garmin won’t reveal exactly how they determine your fitness age, but it’s a combination of heart-focused measurements like VO2 max, resting heart rate, how intense your workouts are, and other data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization, says David Lammers-Meis, manager of fitness product management at Garmin. Oura looks at similar stats (the ring tracks all kinds of metrics like heart rate variability, heart rate, daily activity, and sleep) to give you an estimate of how efficiently your heart is working, says Chris Curry, MD, clinical director of women’s health at Oura.

The companies’ main goal with these states? To get people thinking—and talking—about their heart health. While you technically can’t change your heart’s age, the metric is an accessible way for the average person to think about their heart health. “It is a way of relating a really important fitness metric to a broader population,” Lammers-Meis says. Plus, it’s not just Garmin and Oura. Pretty much every fitness wearable gives you a version of this metric. FitBit offers a Cardio Fitness Score. Apple Watches pair with an app called Fitness Age to analyze the data they collect and shoot out a number. WHOOP has its own “WHOOP Age.”

Your wearable shouldn’t be the end-all, be-all of how you view your heart health, but for many (myself included!), it’s become integral to how we think about it. At a minimum, having these gadgets has gamified heart health for me. I see the number on the screen and I want to get it lower and lower and lower. So, I decided to reach out to leading cardiologists to ask what they make of the insights from my wearables—and what I can do to lower the number on the screen.

Meet the experts: David Lammers-Meis, is the manager of fitness product management at Garmin. Chris Curry, MD, is the clinical director of women’s health at Oura. Sharonne N. Hayes, MD, is a cardiologist and founder of the Women’s Heart Clinic at the Mayo Clinic. Stacey Rosen, MD, is a cardiologist and executive director of the Katz Institute for Women’s Health at Northwell Health. Tamanna Singh, MD, is a cardiologist and director of the Sports Cardiology Center and the Stress ECG Lab at Cleveland Clinic. Aaron Leigh Baggish, MD, is the founder and director of the Cardiovascular Performance Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Université de Lausanne in Switzerland.

What is cardiovascular age?

Let’s get this out of the way up top: Regardless of what your wearable says, there’s actually no such thing as a “cardiovascular age,” says Sharonne N. Hayes, MD, a cardiologist and founder of the Women’s Heart Clinic at the Mayo Clinic. “You cannot change the age of your heart,” she says.

Your heart is as old as you are, and you can’t turn back the clock. Any physical activity, sleep, and recovery you do to better your heart health is actually just lowering your risk of cardiovascular disease and/or a cardiac event—and that’s a really worthwhile goal. Heart disease is the leading cause of death globally. In the United States, 2,500 people lose their lives to a heart-related cause every day, per the American Heart Association. That’s one person every 34 seconds.

Another important (and way less scary) stat: most heart disease is preventable, Stacey Rosen, MD, a cardiologist and executive director of the Katz Institute for Women’s Health at Northwell Health.

“Heart age” might not be a doctor-accepted term, but if it is helpful to you to think about your heart health in this light, go for it, they say. “By addressing something like ‘cardiovascular age,’ you’re automatically addressing a lot of those risk factors that can increase your morbidity and mortality,” says Tamanna Singh, MD, a cardiologist and director of the Sports Cardiology Center and the Stress ECG Lab at Cleveland Clinic. Plus, even though we don’t know every detail about how the metrics are calculated, they are generally based on data points that make sense, Dr. Hayes says.

Want the most accurate estimate of your heart’s health? Use the PREVENT Calculator, Dr. Rosen says. It won’t give you a heart age—but it will give your risk of cardiovascular disease over the next ten years. You can fill it out on your own, but will need some results from bloodwork, so plan to do it around your next annual physical.

“‘Age’ is fun—and it’s a nice thing to grab onto,” Dr. Hayes says, so if it’s motivating to pay attention to that number, do it. That’s the top goal of the trackers in the first place: to give you a simplified way to think about your heart. In that little number, you’ll get a rough estimate of some of the most important metrics and health behaviors that make for a healthy heart. Just keep in mind none of that data is a substitute for a check-up with a doctor.

So, how does your fitness tracker fit into your heart health?

That’s up to you, the docs say. “For people who will be motivated to make healthy choices and decisions, they’re fabulous,” Dr. Rosen says. “For those who trackers raise their level of anxiety or increase their inability to do the right things, then it’s not so good.”

Beyond serving as motivation, all that data they’re collecting can be useful when it’s used to evaluate trends. “Wearables allow you to put numbers over time to your body,” says Aaron Leigh Baggish, MD, the founder and director of the Cardiovascular Performance Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Université de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Since the data they’re collecting is ongoing, you can watch how things trend over time. For example, if your cardiovascular age is decreasing on Oura, that’s a sign that you’re developing healthier habits for your heart and that various metrics are improving. You can also get more granular. Paying attention to heart rate, heart rate variability patterns, and how your VO2 max changes can help you understand if things are moving in the right direction with your training, Dr. Baggish says. (And, for the record, the tech does a pretty good job at estimating all these data points these days, even if they’re not perfect, he adds.)

That’s precisely the goal with fitness age, if you ask Garmin. “It gives you a holistic picture of how today’s habits are affecting your long-term health,” says Lammers-Meis. “It’s also really conversational—it’s one of those fun things that you can say, ‘Hey, guess what? Here’s my fitness age.’”

Oura’s cardiovascular age is similarly all about giving people an easy entry point for talking about their health. “It opens up a conversation about overall very good health behaviors and the very basic ways to have a better cardiovascular age,” says Dr. Curry.

It’s also not just about data. A lot of wearables are practically helpful in improving heart health. For example, my Oura ring sends me a notification if I’ve been sitting down for too long, reminding me to stretch my legs. That has a real impact; sitting for long periods of time is linked with obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer, per previous Women’s Health reporting. Meanwhile, my Garmin has suggestions for ways I can change my workouts (right now, it says I should increase vigorous minutes) to take my heart to the next level.

Overall, wearables can help you be more in-tune with your body, and give you a reason to get talking about your health. “For us, it’s that idea of prevention,” Dr. Curry says. “It is that idea of body literacy, and the notion that you have some control over the trajectory of your health and well-being.”

Wearables can’t replace a doctor—obviously—and they can’t tell you definitively if your heart is healthy, Dr. Baggish says. But they can be a really good way to check in on your heart and see how it trends over time. Most importantly, they may inspire you to get moving. No matter what your wearable says, though, don’t forget to pay attention to how you feel. “Data is just data—you know your body best,” Dr. Singh says.

How to Lower Your Heart “Age”

Good news: taking care of your heart is surprisingly simple. The American Heart Association encourages people to prioritize “Life’s Essential 8,” which are four markers and four habits that have the biggest impact on heart health. “They’re optimistic; they’re proactive; they’re doable,” Dr. Rosen says.

These are the factors you should keep in mind—and prioritizing them might even lower your fitness tracker’s heart age too.

The Markers of a Healthy Heart

Ultimately, people who use wearables are often looking for data. Part of the AHA’s Life’s Essential 8 are the factors (a.k.a. datapoints) that are most closely linked to heart health and cardiovascular risk: cholesterol, blood sugar, or A1C, blood pressure, and weight. These are metrics your watch can’t give you much insight on, so it’s important to check in on each and make a plan to treat anything that’s awry.

When you do go to the doctor to get your blood work done, keep these ranges in mind. If your numbers are outside of the healthy limits, have a conversation with your doctor about what you can do to get them in check.

Cholesterol: less than 100 mg/dL for LDL cholesterol—with the lower the better

Blood Sugar: less than 100 mg/dL when fasted

Blood Pressure: less than 120/80 mmHg

When it comes to weight, a higher body mass index (which is an imperfect metric, but what we have, says Dr. Rosen) is associated with a higher risk for different heart conditions like hypertension, glucose intolerance, pre-diabetes, and other metabolic conditions that can affect heart health.

The Habits for a Healthy Heart

The four main factors that improve heart health are exercise, healthy eating, sleep, and avoiding tobacco—all things trackers can help you keep in check.

Sleep is the latest addition to the list, but there aren’t hard and fast rules beyond making sure you’re giving your body time to rest. Seven to nine hours is the sweet spot for most people, though some need more and some need less. “We know that those who don’t get healthy sleep have troubles with blood sugar, with hypertension, with lung and other heart disease,” Dr. Rosen says. Wearables tend to give insights into sleep, but you don’t need a gadget to tell you how you’re doing—just pay attention to how rested you feel and how many hours you gave yourself to actually get some shuteye.

The other three behaviors for a healthy heart are exercise, eating well (which mostly means following a Mediterranean-style diet of whole foods, healthy fats, and limited meat), and quitting tobacco. None of these behaviors are about being perfect; they’re just about doing the best you can, doctors say.

For example, with working out, you want to aim for 75 to 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per week, but how you get there is up to you, even if it takes time to build up to it. “Anything is better than nothing,” Dr. Hayes says. Even “going from zero to 15 minutes—you get a huge bang for your buck.” That means if you want to do your favorite dance cardio workout with friends, walk your dog around the block, or take up running, it’ll all make a difference. Go with something that raises your heart rate that you’ll do consistently.

Overall, spending more time thinking about your heart health is a good thing and every little tweak makes a difference—whether it’s with the help of a wearable or not.

Olivia Luppino is an associate editor at Women’s Health. She spends most of her time interviewing expert sources about the latest fitness trends, nutrition tips, and practical advice for living a healthier life. Olivia previously wrote for New York Magazine’s The Cut, PS (formerly POPSUGAR), and Salon, where she also did on-camera interviews with celebrity guests. She recently ran the New York City Marathon.