How to Find Fitness Apps on Your Apple Watch
From the book
Right out of the box, Apple Watch is designed to be a powerful health and fitness tool. Activity and Workout are two apps that come preinstalled on the Apple Watch, and that work with the iPhone. Chapter 5 covers how to use these apps in more detail.
Use the Activity App
Activity, shown in Figure 2.22, is designed for use on an ongoing basis, throughout your day. The app takes advantage of the watch’s built-in sensors and continuously monitors your level of movement, exercise, and periods of inactivity (as long as you’re wearing the watch).
As you’ll discover, this information displays in several ways, and syncs automatically with the Activity and Health apps running on your iPhone. The Activity app also shares data with other health and fitness apps, as needed.
The Activity app can help you become more active throughout your day via three daily fitness goals, Move, Exercise, and Stand, which you set up the first time you activate the app. For example, the watch can tap your wrist using its haptic engine and display a message to remind you to stand up for at least one minute every hour (see Figure 2.23).
Figure 2.22 As you wear the watch, the Activity app tracks all of your movement all day and helps you achieve pre-set goals.
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Figure 2.23 The Activity app reminds you to stand up and move around for at least one minute every hour.
The Activity app also encourages you to Move more throughout your day to burn a pre-determined number of calories, whereas the app’s Exercise component encourages you to be active for at least 30 minutes per day. (This means participating in the equivalent of a brisk walk, or more intense activities.)
Use the Workout App
You use the Workout app, shown in Figure 2.24, for whenever you engage in any type of cardio fitness workout session, such as jogging, running, bike riding, or using an elliptical machine (or treadmill). The Workout app collects and displays real-time stats, such as time, distance, calories, pace, and speed.
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Figure 2.24 The Workout app can help you set fitness goals, track your workouts, and view your progress in real time.
Like in the Activity app, the data the watch collects and displays automatically syncs with the iPhone, and a growing selection of other health- and fitness-oriented apps, including the Health app that comes preinstalled with iOS 8.2 on the iPhone, can use this data.
The Health app on the iPhone collects real-time health and fitness-related data from the iPhone, Apple Watch, and other compatible equipment (such as a Bluetooth scale, for example), as well as data you manually input, and then monitors, analyzes, stores, and potentially shares that information from the one, centralized Health app.
Just as Notification Center monitors apps and keeps track of all alerts, alarms, and notifications, and then displays this information in one centralized place, the Health app serves a similar purpose, but deals exclusively with health, fitness, nutrition/diet, and sleep-related data and information.