How to Set up Apple Watch for Maximum Exercise Motivation
The Apple Watch is packed with health and fitness features – so many they can seem overwhelming. But with a little thought, you can adjust your watch to help you do a great workout and be ready for the next one.
Set goals for your activities
In the Activity app, which is separate from the Watch app, you can check if you “close your rings” every day, and you can set goals for two of the three rings. Rings are:
- Moving (red outer ring) – How far the watch thinks you were moving today. It is measured in calories.
- Exercise (green ring in the center) – How many minutes of exercise you had today. The watch detects exercises when you are moving and your heart rate is high, but it also knows when you registered a workout using the app (for example, you will get a 30-minute yoga session even if your movement and heart rate did not activate automatic exercise detection).
- Stand (blue inner ring) – How many hours a day do you think you spent at least one minute standing on your feet. Target – 12. He is not very good at showing when you are standing, so you may have to wave your hand when he gives you the command “Get up!” reminders when you, say, stand at your permanent desk.
The app encourages stripes, so if you want all of your rings to close every day (and earn matching badges), make sure your movement and exercise goals are set to a level that seems feasible every day (even on rest days).
Disable most notifications
Notifications are bullshit even on your phone , but you don’t need emails to bother you during your workout. Go to the Watch app and then to Notifications. By default, the watch reflects notifications from your phone’s apps. Turn everything off if it really, really can’t wait. (Everyone can wait.)
Choose your favorite fitness apps
If you’re a Strava fan, you’ll love Strava on Apple Watch. If you run the Nike Run Club instead, there is an app for that too. If you don’t know how you want to track your workouts, use the standard Activity app .
Some fitness apps can run on the watch and phone at the same time; others require you to use one or the other, and you may have to figure out which you prefer. (For example, I run outdoors on my watch and exercise on my phone.) Do some workouts to experiment. You can find your new favorite app!
Queue up your audio system
You can play music and podcasts straight from your watch through your wireless headphones, but you’ll need to download them to your watch first. This is ideal if you want to exercise without taking your phone with you.
But if you prefer to carry your phone with you anyway, you can put it in your pocket, connect the headphone cable to the phone, and use the watch as a remote control to control playback. All your favorite music apps, podcasts and audiobooks can work this way; Again, decide what you like best. On long runs, I like to queue up podcast episodes in Castro, then stick my phone in my pocket and control everything from my wrist.
Put motivating complications on the watch face
I use the Infograph watch face as my control center for planning my morning workouts. I have:
- All my workouts are connected to my calendar , which means that at night the dial shows me what will be on deck in the morning. For example: “Easy run at 6:30.”
- Sunrise / sunset and alarm time so I know when I wake up and how much workout I will have to do in the dark (sigh).
- Weather , or rather Dark Sky. I click on this complication, and it tells me what the weather will be at each hour of the day, so I know what clothes to take with me for my morning run.
- Moon phase , which is not necessary, but the darkness is less depressing when there is a full moon.
- Battery level so I know if I have enough juice for a sleep tracking night followed by a morning workout.
- Monthly mileage is a complication arising from the Nike Run Club app. It automatically calculates how many miles I’ve run (with the app) this month, and I love watching the numbers tick away.
I also use a Nike watch face (you can have multiple faces, just swipe left and right) with the default “start Nike run” complication as well as activity rings, battery level, and current heart rate. This is the watch face I use most often for checking the time every day.
Track your pulse
If you track your workouts with your watch, you can see your heart rate in the activity app on your phone or in the heart rate app on your watch. You can see your running intervals, or even your weightlifting approaches, by the rise and fall of your heart rate during the session. (Don’t lie, I used this feature when I forgot exactly how many intervals I did during my workout.)
On your watch, you can check your heart rate at any time with the heart rate app. Scroll down and you will see more data. The very last screen is your heart rate recovery, which is a measure of your heart health and fitness . On average, a person’s heart rate drops by 15-20 beats per minute after exercise; the faster it bounces back, the healthier your heart (usually, your watch is not a substitute for a doctor).
If you wear the watch while sleeping, you can also check your resting heart rate. The heart rate app on the watch will show it to you, but you can also see it as a graph in the Health app. A low resting heart rate is good; if it rises suddenly, you may be overtrained, stressed, or sick.