How (and Why) to Connect Your Apple Watch to Peloton
I’m a person who is practically obsessed with tracking my health and fitness data . I use a smart scale, a calorie and nutrient tracking app, smart workout equipment, and my favorite Apple Watch to create the most complete picture of my overall physical well-being. The only time I take off my Apple Watch is when I’m getting dressed up to go somewhere nice, and even then it hurts me deeply. Just imagine the heart rate and calorie burn data I’m missing out on while I’m waltzing around in my fancy dress. This is disgusting.
All of these apps and devices work in concert to track my every heartbeat and step, but there is one notable exception. I’m generally against linking my Apple Watch to apps that track my workouts, as it has caused headaches in the past due to double-importing data into my food tracking app and Apple Health’s daily summary – it completely defeats the purpose of monitoring, significantly increasing the number of calories burned and total active minutes. I reluctantly connected my Apple Watch to my Peloton Bike today, expecting it to cause the same problems, but I was only impressed. I now believe in combining the two. I’ll tell you why and how to do it.
How to Pair Apple Watch and Peloton Device
In the Peloton app, select your profile (on the right side of the menu at the bottom of your home screen), then find the hamburger menu in the top right corner of your profile screen. Selecting this will take you to a page called “More” and right there, under the “Add-ons” section, you will find the Apple Watch .
Tap on it, grant permissions to Apple Health when prompted, tap on Customize , and you’ll see three options: Connect to the Health app , Share your location , and Track your movement . For our purposes, using a bike and other home workout equipment, you’ll just turn on the first one, but if you want your outdoor runs tracked privately, turn on the second one, and if you want your pace for indoor runs and walks recorded, click the third one, too.
After that, I simply opened the Watch app on my phone to double check that the Peloton app was included in the list of apps installed on the device. I scrolled to the bottom of the Watch app, selected Peloton from the list under Installed on Apple Watch , and turned on Show app on Apple Watch .
Why I Love the Apple Watch and Peloton Connection
After that, I sat on the exercise bike and started training. I opened the Workout app on my watch and selected Indoor Cycling, then opened the Peloton app on my watch. He showed me a blank screen with just a few words on it that said I needed to start a cycling workout, which I did. Suddenly the watch screen changed and started showing my heart rate. What’s even more interesting is that there was a small heart rate tracker in the top left corner of my Peloton touchscreen, as well as a power indicator showing what “zone” I was in based on my heart rate. (My Peloton “power zones” are customized to my fitness level because I took the FTP test offered on the bike , which you should also take.)
There’s already a lot of information on the screen like cadence, resistance and power, but I don’t find it distracting. It was actually very helpful to understand what “zone” I was in. I only chose a 10 minute workout so I didn’t expect to be exhausted, but it was nice to appreciate how hard I was pushing myself to get the most out of those 10 minutes. When the lesson ended, I opened the Lanebreak app on the bike. Lanebreak is a virtual game offered by Peloton that I absolutely love and play every day, so I was interested to see if the heart rate monitor would appear on the screen during a level. It happened!
After my five-minute Lanebreak recovery level ended, I opened the Workout app on my watch again to mark that I was done, as I always do. To my surprise, the Peloton app actually canceled this; The Workout app stopped tracking my indoor cycling workout once the Peloton app took over. This made me nervous because I was afraid the workout wouldn’t show up in my Apple Health daily summary or activity rings, but when I opened it on my phone, there they were: Two “indoor circuit” workouts under Sessions. Where they usually had a green Apple Workout logo next to them, they now had a Peloton logo. It was tracked and classified in the same way as an indoor cycling session, which I usually track with my watch. They counted towards the Movement and Exercise portions of my activity rings and all that.
I opened my food tracking app to make sure the calories I burned weren’t entered twice. They didn’t do it! The Peloton app succeeds where other apps have failed: It doesn’t make tracking your movements across different apps and devices a confusing mess.
Finally, I opened the Peloton app to see a summary of my workouts. These typically include an estimate of calories burned and performance, as well as what muscles you worked and how long you did it, but now they included more detailed information about how long I spent in each heart rate zone and provided more information about my overall performance.
What is the benefit of combining these devices?
As I said, the Peloton app tracked the same things that my Apple Watch tracked on its own using the Workout feature: heart rate, calories burned, and workout duration. So, you might be wondering, what’s the point of attaching a bike (or Peloton Tread or Row) to a watch at all?
Several advantages are obvious here. First, it was convenient to see my heart rate and power zone reflected on the Peloton screen. I didn’t have to look at my wrist to see my heart rate like I usually do; I could focus on the screen, which is important for safety, and monitor my pace in real time to stay in the zone I wanted to be in.
Second, pairing your Apple Watch with your Peloton device allows you to see what’s called “scoring drive.” This is a personal metric that helps you understand and visualize how hard you worked during an activity or trip. It’s based on a combination of your heart rate and the time you spent in each of Peloton’s seven “power zones.” (Lower zones correspond to a lower heart rate, and higher zones correspond to a higher heart rate.)
Keep in mind: you’ll have to turn on the aspiration meter separately, which I wasn’t aware of at first, so my 10 Minute Ride doesn’t have it, but my Lanebreak level does. This is easy to do: in the same “Advanced” menu in your profile, click “Settings” and scroll to the bottom. Turn on the Track and Display Achievement Score option, and then choose whether class members can see it or not. I was annoyed that the only score I got for the day was a measly 2.2 in a five-minute recovery time, but that only inspires me to aim for a higher score tomorrow.
Overall, there are no downsides to pairing your Apple Watch with your Peloton device, which isn’t always true when it comes to other fitness apps. In fact, by doing this you can get even more comprehensive training data, and I for one think that’s amazing.