Fitness App Spotlight #1: Apple Workout App

Apple's Workout App for Apple Watch

It's only right to begin the series with the Workout app that every brand new Apple Watch user would be familiar with.

The Workout app is Apple's default fitness app on the Apple Watch. The application works in conjunction with the Fitness/Activity app on your iPhone by displaying all of the information collected from your watch during your selected workouts. 

It's important to note that the functionality of the Apple Watch fitness app and most other fitness apps on Apple Watch only allow you to record your activity by selecting the kind of exercise activity. Viewing your stats and analysis of activity is all available to view on your iPhone. I originally thought it was all packed into the watch, but it makes sense to view this information on a more adequate screen size. 

An Activity in Progress

The app gives you a large selection of different activities / sports you can track, but running exercises --especially outdoor running exercises -- returns the most stats to review.

Apple’s workout app is pretty basic in all honesty, but it gets the job done for those looking for straightforward exercise stat recording measures. 

Features of Interest

Able to Detect Exercise Activity (Sometimes)

If you were to forget to start recording your workout once you've started, Apple Watch will ask you if you are working out based on the movements you are performing. For activities like walking, running, swimming, elliptical and other more mechanical movements, the watch picks up on this and pushes a notification with the option to start recording based on the possible exercise.

You'll notice once you initiate the activity, the time of activity elapsed is close to the real-time elapsed from when you actually started the activity. In reality, the watch is smart enough to begin recording the exercise in the background and only makes it official if you decide that you are indeed exercising. 

Personally, I sometimes forget to start recording and I find it pretty neat that I have a second chance to record it without starting from 00:00:00 after 5 minutes.

Workout app even detects when you might be finished with an exercise, and prompts to see if you'd like to pause or end the workout. It happens to me a lot where I finish my activity and forget to end the activity on my watch. I'm driving home with the app still tracking my exercise , but luckily the app is kind enough to ask me for my input.

Pace Alerts for Outdoor Running

This feature is really useful for those that are trying to improve their stamina in multi-mile outdoor runs. 

A typical pre-conditioning fitness test used for soccer players is running a mile within 6 minutes. I've done it before and it's quite the challenge. At the time, I did not have an Apple Watch to help track my own fitness work prior to the conditioning test. Yes, I would go on runs to prepare myself for the test, but I did not pace myself and I really didn't challenge myself on these runs due to the lack of not knowing how well I was doing. I passed the conditioning test in 5:54 minutes, but I was exhausted. 

Today, I'm able to use this feature to my advantage when it comes to improving my pace on runs. Based on the pace you desire to achieve, the workout app will alert you if you are running slower or faster than you need to be. 

If I wanted to improve my mile time today, I would fire up the workout app and manually set the pace to be 6:00 minutes for my average mile. The alerts are tremendously useful in pushing myself harder in areas in need more work in. 

Calorie, Distance, Time Goals for Exercises

As for other workouts, you can set goals for the calories you want to burn, the distance you plan to cover and the duration you plan to achieve.

Open Goal Running Activity

6 Mile Goal Running Activity

You set these goals by tapping on the three dots on the top right of the activity.

You are given options of which goal you want to set. Unfortunately, you can't set goals for calories, distance, and time all at once. You can only set a goal for one at a time.

Summary of your Workouts

You're able to see a summary after every activity you complete, where it shows you information like your average heart rate, calories burned, and other information related to the activity. If you didn't set any goals for your activity, it will be an open goal activity. A traditional strength training exercise will record active/total calories and your avg. heart rate. A small graph is also available to visually see how your heart rate varied during your exercise.  

For outdoor runs, you even get to see the trail you left behind on a map. Here's the route I leave behind when I go for a run at Edgewater Park. 

After 180 days of using an Apple Watch, it will have enough data from you to show you your "trends". I like the feature because it will show you overtime any changes in your performances during workouts. It can be a good indicator in telling you if you're making improvements or if you're in need of them.

Conclusion

As I mentioned before, the Workout app is basic compared to other applications on the market, especially the ones with paid subscriptions.

One particular con I experienced when using this app would be the activity would pause itself more times than it should. The activity pauses itself when it detects no movement. This particular con happens more during the 'traditional strength training' activity. We tend to take pauses during strength training exercises because we obviously can't lift weights for a constant time like a running activity. It doesn't happen often, but it happens occasionally. 

The next application to be in the spotlight for next time will be one of the more popular apps for running and one of my personal favorites, Strava.