Health and fitness
Get moving and stay healthy with help from Apple Watch
One key aspect of the Apple Watch is its built in health and fitness features. The Watch keeps track of your movements, and its Activity app lets you know when it’s time to stand up or go for a walk.
67 Honesty counts
When you first open the Activity app it’ll ask you your sex, age, weight and height. Answer the questions honestly as they are used to determine what level of activity is appropriate for your demographic. 68 Keep an eye on your Activity
Once an hour you’ll get a notification asking you to stand up and move around. You also get notifications every four hours that provide an update on progress towards your daily calorie burn and exercise quotas. 69 Understanding Activity rings
Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to open Glances, and then swipe horizontally to view the Activity rings. There are three rings, coloured red, green and blue. The red one shows how many calories you’ve burned towards your daily total through general activity, the green one shows brisk activity, while blue tracks how many hours you have stood for at least one minute.
70 Activity in detail
Open the Activity app to view each area in detail. Swipe left and right to view each ring individually and swipe upwards on any of them to view a graph showing a breakdown of your activity over time that gives you an idea of which activities have contributed most to your totals.
71 Adjusting Move goals
The medium amount is 550 calories. You can adjust it by opening the Activity app and performing a deep press. Tap Change Move Goal, use the plus and minus icons to adjust the value, then tap Update to commit to it.
72. Checking Pace and HeartRate
When tracking a run with the Activity app, swipe leftwards to see calories burned and your heart rate. Swipe rightwards to see your pace, distance and workout time. A deep press works as a shortcut to the End and Pause buttons. 73 Add an Activity complication You can add an Activity complication to most Apple Watch faces. This small graphic displays how well you are doing towards your daily movement, standing and exercise goals without having to go to the Activity app. 74 Manage activity notifications
Activity notifications are managed from your iPhone. Open the Apple Watch app and scroll down to find Activity. The Progress Updates setting enables you to get updates less frequently than the default four hours.
75 Run
with your iPhone
Apple Watch calculates calories more accurately if you exercise outdoors with both your iPhone and it together. The GPS signal from the iPhone is used to calculate calorie burn; if you run without an iPhone, your Watch relies solely on the heart rate sensor to calculate calories. 76 Change miles to kilometres The Workout app defaults to miles, which is awkward if you’re used to tracking runs in kilometres. Before starting a distance-based run or walk, perform a deep press to reveal an option to switch to tracking in kilometres instead.
77 Measuring blood pressure
When paired with the right accessory, your Apple Watch can monitor your blood pressure and feed readings back to Apple’s Health app on your iPhone. Check out the Quardio Blood Pressure monitor and app (getquardio.com).
78 A better hearing aid
The next-generation of hearing aids integrate with Apple’s HealthKit technology, and one of the first is Trulink’s Made for iPhone Hearing Aid (trulinkhearing.com). It integrates with the Apple Watch to adapt hearing aid settings to your surroundings (its presets adjust automatically when you enter a bar or restaurant, for example). It’s a clever use of the Watch and an example to medical companies.