I woke up this morning as I do on most Saturdays, a bit later than usual, and set out with my usual routine, which usually starts off with making a cup of espresso, checking my sleep quality, and reading the news on my iPad Before I even got to the kitchen, I received a message from my Apple Watch Series 8 thanking me for meeting my sleep goals the day before.
Because I have always had to manually sync to see my sleep data from my phone, I am not sure how long it will take for my Fitbit to sync with the service. When that sync fails, I have to wait before I can see it. It’s for some reason.
It took me a second to realize that my sleep data is found in the Health app, not in the other two apps that interact with the watch. Two of those apps, Fitness and Health, have workouts in them.
There are niceties if you use Apple watch. Or something else. Any apple watch fan will get that joke.
I discovered another nicety when I realized where my sleep data was on my phone: the visualization for such things as sleep stages and so on are much more attractive and easy to understand than is the case with Fitbit. There is at least one sleep-related data point that Apple Watch relays. I have been keeping track of my resting heart rate data for a long time, and I am interested in this new information.
My resting heart rate is usually 66-67 bpm, but it goes up on the weekends when I drink. I got food poisoning when I came back from Mexico after I got Covid-19, and it stayed up until then. I was very happy to see my resting heart rate cycle return to normal after a one-month-long blip, and I was excited to see it return to normal over the course of weeks. I pay attention to what’s happening.
The morning didn’t stop. Since the dog has slowed down a lot this summer, she doesn’t seem to mind as much when we do this in the late morning on Saturdays and Sundays.
A nice day for a stroll.
This was a great opportunity to work out on the Apple watch. Another example of the nicety/complexity of this device is shown.
When confronted by its complexity, I had spent some of the previous afternoon configuring Apple Watch and researching how to interact with apps and start and end workouts. With the latter, I was thinking about how it might be different from what I’ve done on Fitbit over the past several years: I go on walks, which are auto-detected, tracked, and sync automatically, and I go.
I was tempted to take a stroll and see what happened. I found out that the Apple watch doesn’t automatically track workouts. It can detect movement-based workouts and prompt you to decide if you want to watch what it is doing. Today, I started it manually.
That needs a story. Everything with Apple Watch needs a story.
A number of workout types can be tracked by the fitness tracker. I like the fact that you can change which exercises appear on the device, since I don’t want to participate in any of them. You start exercising on my Charge 5, if you want, by using a combination of two fingers to the left and a single finger to the right to choose the exercise you want. The most recent exercises are at the top, so I always see weights and ellipticals there.
You can start a workout on Apple Watch. This may be available from the default clock face. You can find it in the apps list, which is long and alphabetical, which would be great. You can add it to the dock by pressing the side button, which brings up a list of recent and favorite applications. If you have an app that you like to use a lot and want to get it to more quickly than from the Apps list, it is a good way to go.
I use the Taskbar, Start Menu, and the All Apps list in Start for the same levels of app access as I do for the quick, semi- quick, and all apps levels. There is a Dock for a limited number of app shortcut that are visible on all home screens, one or more home screens, and then an all apps view on the mobile system. It’s time to move on.
I looked it up first and I am glad I did. If you run Workout for the first time, you are confronted by the next complexity: Apple Watch supports an astonishing number of workouts, and you can’t remove any you won’t use. The workouts have their own names and some aren’t obvious. The workouts that start with “w” are not included in the Apple Watch. There is no weight loss workout either. I think I’ll be using something called traditional strength training. It’s really serious.
The bad news is that Apple doesn’t put workouts you’ve used at the top When I use outdoor walk, elliptical, and traditional strength training, those should always be at the top of my list and easy to find. Since I use a watch face called Activity Digital that has a link to workouts, I can get to that interface very quickly. It’s quicker than on a fitness tracker. That is also a good thing.
As we walked out the front door, I opened the workouts, selected the outdoor walk, and began the workout. The watch displayed the workout fullscreen with information like duration, calories burned, heart rate, average pace, and miles walked.
The watch announced that we had reached a split at the one mile mark. I swiped up from the bottom of the screen and used a labeled button to end the workout. There is something about the three-step process that results in me not ending an exercise successfully only to discover the mistake later that makes me not want to do it again.
The data from the workout was available in both health and fitness on my phone. I can tell you that Health covers everything health related, from sleep and workouts, to cycle tracking for women, and much more.
It’s just about working out. This app won’t show you trends until you use it for 180 days, which is crazy. It’s just… nuts.
There are different ways in which the data from a workout is displayed. There are different ways in which Health and Fitness are displayed. Whatever the reason, for it.
Health is aholistic view of your health because it does so many things. Apple Watch/Fitness use a three-ring system to track your movement (in calories, not steps, which I find odd), exercise (in minutes), and standing time. It’s nice in its own way, but I prefer the visualization in Health, and it’s more useful than what Fitbit provides.
I didn’t learn anything new from my walk, even though my heart rate went up because of the previous night’s drinking. The Apple Watch will be happy with me soon. We are still not friends today. I don’t pay much attention to walks, even if it’s light, and I only casually think about the duration and not much else.
I am able to compare the data because I wore both devices with my wristband. My average heart rate was over 100 bpm, I burned over 300 calories, and I walked for over 30 minutes. My max heart rate was 129 bpm, my lowest was 99 bpm, and I burned 205 calories, according to Apple.
The Apple Health app shows a nice map of my walk because the watch has a built-in gps, and it notes that I walked 1.2 miles and had an average pace of 24 minutes, 47 seconds per.
This second look at Apple Watch Series 8 will probably be enough for more to be done. I will look at how it works at the gym with elliptical and weights workouts.
There is more to come.
There is an Apple watch series 8.