keep fit with apple watch

Make the most of the Watch’s fitness tools

Apple Watch has always been a health and fitness device as much as anything else, but Apple has been careful to make sure that those features were accessible to everyone, not just gym rats or runners.

Its status as your healthy conscience starts with the Activity rings – three measurements to keep an eye on, no matter how much you’re into fitness. The Stand goal (blue) is designed to push you into standing up and moving around for at least one minute per hour, and to reach that target 12 times per day.

The Exercise goal (green) pushes you to do 30 minutes of semi-vigorous exercise per day. Again, than doesn’t mean a half-hour jog – if you walk briskly, it will usually count, and that adds up over a day easily… provided you’re doing enough of it.

You can’t adjust these goals at all (raising or lowering them to suit you), because they’re all about getting you to meet a recommended minimum health standard – it’s great if you do more, of course, but the important thing is consistently reaching that milestone.

The last goal of the three Activity circles is Move (red), and this one’s more about traditional fitness – it counts calories burned over the day. You can adjust this as much as you want, so you can decide that you’ll have to go for a five-mile run (or an equivalent) to get to the target you’ve set yourself.

Working out

When you do more intensive exercises, your Watch can still be your partner – use the Workouts app and it will record data such as your heart rate, how long you exercised for, and how many (estimated) calories that period of exercise burned. All that data is fed to the Health app on iPhone, to browse through later.

The Health app can draw data from places other than your Apple Watch. A heart rate monitor chest band, such as the Polar H10, will provide more accurate heart readings than the Watch, for example. You can also get home gym equipment that sends information about your exercise to its companion app, which can then pass it onto the Health app – when you open the accessory’s app, it will ask for permission to do this.

You can also add other info that might affect how you interpret your exercise data, such as inputting blood glucose levels, so you can cross-reference when that’s had an affect on your fitness over time.

it will take 10 minutes you will lear n How to tweak your Move goal, use the Workouts app, and analyse your data Yo u’ll nee d An Apple Watch, an iPhone The three rings are useful activity indicators, no matter how much you’re into fitness