Anyone who owns an Apple Watch is motivated to exercise enough. Thanks to the Activity application you can track your movement throughout the day. With the app, Apple consciously wants to make you move more, a good example of this is the blue standing ring. The Watch motivates you to stand and move for a minute at least once an hour.
The Activity app is central to these measurements, where you can see how many ‘hours’ you have stood, trained and how many calories you have burned in a day. You can also use Activity to hold competitions with friends and earn medals. A nice addition that can be found on other smartwatches such as the best Fitbit is not present.
Purpose of the Activity app
With the help of Activity, Apple wants to encourage the Watch user to exercise more. With the help of rings, the tech giant tries to respond to your sense of achievement. As soon as you put on the Apple Watch, the rings are empty, but by moving and being active they are slowly filled. The aim is to have all the rings filled by the end of the day. The better you perform, the more likely you are to earn a medal. But that’s not what you do it for, you do it for a healthier lifestyle.
First boot
When you start the Activity application for the first time, you will receive a brief explanation about the app and you will have to enter some information regarding your gender, age and body measurements. You can also change the exercise goal, which is the red ring and indicates how many calories you want to burn at least in a day to achieve the ring.
The different Activity rings
Move: calories burned in a day
Training: active training minutes
To stand: hours you have been standing
Red ring ▸ Move
The Apple Watch tracks your fitness and monitors your efforts based on your heart rate, steps, distance and movement. Based on your efforts, age, gender and weight, a calculation is made for the number of calories burned. You can find this via the red ring in the Activity app. You can adjust the exercise goal and the number of calories burned in a day by changing the exercise goal for the Apple Watch.
Green ring ▸ Training
To complete the green training ring you ‘have’ to work hard. The intention is to exercise intensively and/or exercise for at least 30 minutes every day. You will notice that your green circle will quickly complete during the first few days, but that will decrease. The Apple Watch will analyze your movement and then walking with the dog is no longer enough to complete the circle.
The circle comes full circle based on your heart rate and movement, the idea is to challenge yourself so that your heart has to pump well and you move enough, so that the Apple Watch notices that you are training intensively. Naturally, the workout application is closely related to this circle and you can fill it more easily via this app, because your heart rate and fitness are continuously measured during a workout. It is not possible to adjust the 30 minutes for Training.
Blue ring ▸ stand
Do you want to complete the blue ring at the end of the day? Then you ‘must’ stand and move for at least 1 minute every hour. If you succeed, you will have earned another hour out of twelve. Obviously it’s not as easy as you might think because Apple has been smart. You can hardly influence the Apple Watch for the standing ring. You really have to get up and walk around the office or around the house to earn the hour.
Pause Activity Rings for Apple Watch
The Stand, Move, and Exercise rings show the ways you’re active, and the goal is to complete them every day. But if you want to rest for a while, you can now pause your rings for a day, a week, a month or longer without this affecting your performance streak.
- Open the Activity app on the Apple Watch
- Tap the graph symbol
- The weekly overview opens
- Scroll down
- Tap ‘Pause Rings’
- Choose a desired period
- Use ‘Custom’ to choose your own period
You can also pause the activity rings via the Fitness app for iPhone. Open it and go to the ‘Overview’, tap on the rings and scroll down. Choose ‘Pause rings’ to set a period.
Set schedule for activity goals
It was already possible to change the activity goals for moving, training and standing to your personal wishes. Since watchOS 11, you can also set the goals for your Activity rings by day of the week. This way they offer the motivation you need at the right time. Apple uses a schedule for this, so you can add an extra incentive on days when you are less active.
- Open the Activity app on the Apple Watch
- Tap the graph symbol
- The weekly overview opens
- Scroll down
- Tap ‘Change goals’
- Tap the calendar icon
- Choose schedule
- Select a day of the week to change the goal
- Confirm with ‘Set schedule’
- Repeat this for all targets
Do you find adjusting the goals on your Apple Watch complicated? Then you can also use the Condition app for iPhone. Open it and tap your profile photo at the top. Select ‘Change goals’ and tap ‘Schedule’. Adjust the schedule to your own wishes and repeat for all goals.
Earn activity medals
To motivate you, the app sends you regular notifications to achieve your goals, and you can also earn Apple Watch medals. This includes completing your first workout, filling all the rings for the first time, achieving all goals 7 days in a row, etc. You can also extend earned medals so that you have already set a record for more than x number of days. All medals can be found in the Activity app on your iPhone or Apple Watch.
Consult Activity and Condition app
The application can be found on both the Apple Watch and your iPhone, where it is called ‘Condition’ because the app processes multiple data from different apps.
The smart watch only shows today’s data, on the iPhone you can view the entire history of achievements. In addition to the rings, you can also see your steps, distance and stairs walked on the Apple Watch, by scrolling down on the rings page. Then you will also see more details about your goals.
More Activity Tips
- Trends gives you a good overview of Activity performance
- Challenge friends to Activity competitions
- View weekly overview in Activity app
- Turn off daily notifications for Activity
- All Activity tips for Apple Watch