Apple’s approach to fitness is all about cardio and burning calories.
That’s great if you’re into running or cycling. But for other kinds of exercise, like bodybuilding or yoga, it’s not relevant at all. And if you want to lose weight, cutting the calories you eat is usually more important than burning calories through exercise.
So why does Apple Watch focus exclusively on cardio, and what does this means for people using one to get in shape?
You can’t get in shape just by doing cardio
Apple Watch encourages you to be more active, but will this help you lose weight? While Apple doesn’t promote its smartwatch as a weight-loss device, this is many people’s primary fitness goal.
It’s true that the more active you are, the more calories you burn. But if you regularly overeat, exercise alone will probably not be enough to burn off all those excess calories. To reduce your body fat, you may need to make changes to your diet as well. Third-party diet tracker apps can help with this.
Getting in shape for most people also means increasing muscle size, and this requires weight-resistance exercise rather than cardio.
So why do cardio at all?
The cardio craze took off in the ’70s, when Bill Bowerman introduced America to jogging as a recreational activity. It got even bigger in the ’80s, when Jane Fonda promoted “aerobics,” with its shiny leotards and sweatbands.
Cardio, also known as “aerobic exercise,” is defined as any kind of exercise sustained at a light-to-moderate intensity over several minutes or more. Like brisk walking, jogging or cycling.
You get a variety of benefits from doing cardio, including making your heart and bones strong, relieving stress, helping your insulin work better and improving blood flow. And, of course, it burns calories.
But fitness trends come and go. These days, gym-goers tend to scorn cardio, arguing that it’s just a way to “lose gains”. They don’t want to get skinny, they want to get buff. A surplus of calories is required to build muscle mass, so the last thing they want to do is burn calories.
“Other” kinds of exercise
Apple Watch uses its accelerometer and GPS to measure your movement during the day. This, combined with the built-in heart-rate sensor, is ideal for logging cardio activity. But it doesn’t tell us much about other aspects of fitness, like strength, power and flexibility.
This causes some confusion. For example, reviews of Apple Watch have suggested that the Workout app’s “Other” setting could be used to estimate calories burned from weightlifting or yoga sessions.
But weightlifting is about strength, measured by how much you lift in pounds or kilos. And yoga builds strength, flexibility and spiritual wellbeing. None of which can be counted in calories.
Apple Watch only measures workouts in duration, distance, heart rate and calories, which provides a narrow perspective on fitness and simply isn’t relevant to the kinds of workouts many people do these days.
Cardio is at the heart of HealthKit
This focus on cardio is not just due to the limitations of Apple Watch’s sensors. It’s also built into Apple’s HealthKit framework, which lets third-party health and fitness apps share data with the Health app and with each other.
The HealthKit framework supports more than 50 workout activity types, including yoga and strength training. But regardless of which workout activity a developer specifies, the only details an app can log are duration, distance and calories burned.
Sound familiar?
The problem here is that it would be almost impossible for Apple to provide a standardized framework for every kind of workout activity — it’s just too complex.
For example, there are many of styles of yoga, each with its own unique poses and techniques. In weightlifting, people are always coming up with new exercises. And strength and conditioning techniques vary from one sport to another.
As a result, Apple concentrates on one area: cardio, which has relatively simple and standardized details that need to be logged.
Quality, not just quantity
This focus on cardio and calories is not unique to Apple Watch. Other fitness trackers are similar in this respect.
I believe the perfect fitness tracker would measure the quality of your movement, not just the quantity. And Apple have already made some steps in this direction with the introduction of the barometer in iPhone 6 that can measure how many stairs you climb.
But there is still more that could be done. To provide a more comprehensive view of a user’s fitness, strength and flexibility should also be tracked.
Strength is potentially a forth ring that could be added to the Activity app, measured not only during structured exercise sessions, but in every day life situations where you encounter weight resistance, like carrying shopping bags or pushing a stroller. (Whether this is possible using the sensors in a smartwatch, however, I don’t know).
In the meantime, as I’ve previously argued, Apple Watch is great for people who are serious about getting fit and enjoy cardio activities like running or cycling. Alternatively, if your fitness goals include weight loss or increasing muscle mass, there are a growing number of 3rd party watch apps that can help.
Graham Bower is a designer, writer, fitness geek, and long-time Apple user. He is the co-host of Apple Core a podcast about the history of Apple. In his spare time, Graham writes fantasy and sci-fi novels. Connect with Graham on Bluesky or at www.grahambower.com.
19 responses to “The trouble with Apple Watch’s fitness tracker”
It’s even worse than just the focus on “cardio.” I’ve heard from reliable sources that the Apple watch doesn’t count walking as “exercise” at all. You have to do a “brisk walk” (almost a jog) to have *anything* count on the monitor which just goes against reason.
There is a prevalent belief in the fitness community that you have to elevate your heart rate to a certain level, and then maintain that level for a significant amount of time, for it to be true exercise, or for it to count against calories eaten, but this is actually not based on any facts. It comes form a US Army study in the 1960’s, but every single attempt to replicate the result has either been “inconclusive” or it’s been flat out disproven.
ALL movement, (walking, moving around, yoga, etc.) burns calories. ALL of it. It doesn’t have to be “sustained” to contribute to your health, it doesn’t have to be sustained to count as exercise. Even if the periods of “exercise” or activity are widely spaced throughout your day and consist of five minute bursts that don’t elevate your heart rate, they still burn calories, and they still count as exercise in the same way that running a marathon will.
Apple’s Watch will necessarily give faulty information then. Because it won’t be able to tell the difference between a person that walks everywhere all day long (but doesn’t “briskly walk”) and someone who drives their fat ass around in a car. The whole thing is based on a faulty, if prevalent assumption about health and exercise.
Nice response, thanks. Diet is the deal for maintaining or losing weight after age 30 (from experience). Calorie counting is a must and it’s got to be “good” food if you’re something of an athlete. I’m 6’2″, 240lbs and over 50 when I stopped eating as much as I wanted. It took a year to get to180lbs. It hurt a little but I’m still there two years later.
The word Exercise is used to categorize activity intended to improve fitness. Health improvements are made by all physical activity, but improvement in cardio respiratory fitness does require more than just a slow walk. The Apple Watch is correct in distinguishing between movement and exercise, and you can decide if you want to solely improve health or improve health and improve fitness.
Happy is correct. You must be walking at least at 3.3 mph for walking to count as moderate intensity exercise. Slower than that and you aren’t reaping the benefits of exercise.
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You can also use an elliptical machine in trade of jogs and treadmills. Resistance is better than speed and height.
The watch records two things calories burned from movement and exercise. If you walk too slowly, it will still record it as movement and as calorie burning, it just won’t count it as minutes of exercise. If you walk fast enough, it will count towards both.
Having the Apple Watch for a week I can definitively say it does count walking as an exercise. You do not have to be almost jogging. If you walk like a sloth, then it will not count it as exercise, and it would be justified in not counting it as exercise because lazy walking is not exercise. As a weight guy myself, a way to measure strength is something weight people need… BUT we already have it! You measure strength by how much weight you’re lifting and how many reps you lifted at that weight! It’s pretty straight forward. What I love about the HR tracker on the Apple Watch is that I can use the HR as a way to get a sense of the intensity of my workout. It allows me to make sure I’m not just lifting on auto-pilot and can be a way tomorivate me to up the intensity of my workout. That’s valuable to me as a strength guy who can already measure the development of my strength by how much weight I’m lifting!
Cardio is very important for weight loss, along with strength training and eating a better diet (not starving yourself)… i have been using the Watch for a week now and can give some insight: it will attempt to motivate you to workout more, but it doesn’t try to tell you how to gain muscle… I see this as a tool to get people moving, sitting less, and getting decent excersise in where they may not have before. It is a motivator mostly, but it also makes cardio into a game, which is awesome for people that like to see a little reward for their work. Some people simply do not have the discipline to properly maintain a daily workout, but with a fitness tracker, like Apple Watch, it reminds them that all they need to do is fill in “rings” of move, excersise, and standing that helps them visualize a goal every day… This helps people with FitBits, as it will help the millions who buy an Apple Watch. Apple is not aiming to make the world muscle men and women, just get people a little healthier by moving a little more throughout their day.
Oops, didn’t mean that to be a reply, just a post lol… I agree with your post Dan
No worries Allewsive. Your comment is spot on as well! Apple Watch is a tool to motivate more movement and getting on your feet (as most of us work a job that requires sitting a lot which is really bad for our health). Apple Watch is not an attempt to transform the exercise industry. It’s a tool to cultivate heathy habits- stand more, move more, exercise more. Tracking it motivates us to keep up those habits. Simple as that.
Weightlifting is my primary form of exercise (along with walking almost everywhere). I alread use the Vesper notes app to plan and track my workouts, but it’d be nice to be able to incorporate this information into the Watche’s fitness app.
I like the idea of using the HR tracker to keep yourself honest about how intense your workout is. Naturally your body will adjust so last week’s intense workout may be the new normal today and require that we take it up a notch.
I’d also like to be able to use the Watch to watch my rest in between sets, this is probably the biggest area of improvement that I can work on to up the intensity and not spend too much time at the gym. It’s probably best just to have a timer running on the Watch and glance at it between sets?
Agree with you 100%. There is no need to measure strength for the Apple watch as you already know what you are achieving by weight and reps. I can’t see a way how a watch could possibly register the right weights etc without nfc for example. But that’s more work to register then actually doing your workout. And although many people don’t like it but if you want to burn fat you’ll need some cardio exercise along with muscle building and the right diet. Fitness plans come and go but everyone with some basic knowledge knows quite well what you need to do to get in shape. But what many don’t want to Hear is that it takes some hard work and dedication. It’s not rocket science or something.
“It’s true that the more active you are, the more calories you burn. But if you regularly overeat, exercise alone will probably not be enough to burn off all those excess calories. To reduce your body fat, you may need to make changes to your diet as well. Third-party diet tracker apps can help with this.”
Actually, this is exactly why the calorie information is important. If you’re trying to lose weight, you not only need to monitor how much you’re eating, but also, how much you’re burning. That’s how I manage my weight, through making sure that I work off enough calories to balance out what I’m eating. Nominally I could just eat less, and not workout, but at least with some knowledge of my calorie burn I can balance this as feels best to me.
As to the emphasis on cardio it is largely because cardio is something that the watch is capable of tracking. Think about it. If you bench press 100lbs, or 1000lbs, it’s exactly the same physical motion to the watch. So how is it going to determine the relative calorie burn of this?
By Heart Rate. The greater the physical exertion you put in, the higher your Heart Rate, the more calories you burn.
The relationship between caloric burn and heart rate doesn’t work the same in an anerobic activity. In an aerobic activity your heart rate goes up as your body processes more oxygen as a part of the caloric burn process. So it’s a much more direct measure of the energy expenditure that’s happening during the exercise. Effectively, the higher the intensity, the more your heart rate goes up, and the more you’re burning calories.
In anerobic activities, your heart rate doesn’t go up in the same way. Yes it goes up, but it isn’t in proportion to oxygen consumption and calorie burn. So for example, if you’re in good shape and lift a 100lbs weight, your heart rate may move little if at all. But even if you’re in good shape, if you go for a run, your heart rate will go up as your body burns calories and processes oxygen.
You actually burn more calories when you’re in bad shape because your body is being inefficient. In the long run though the added muscle mass from getting in shape leads to a better resting calorie burn so it somewhat balances out.
In terms of what is available to us to measure caloric burn, HR has to be the measure that give us the best estimate. Maybe someday they’ll be able to measure oygen consumption (I’ve heard there were some complications with integrating an O2 sensor due to it being ‘medical advice’ if they were to provide such a reading, and the FDA would not allow that). Compared to the inaccurate HR sensors in other devices worn on the wrist, or running apps on my iPhone estimating calories burned by the pace I’m running at, it’s no contest. I’m sure Apple did extensive research and found pretty reliable numbers between trials. In terms of making a good estimate I’m sure Apple Watch is the best device on the market. At the end of the day how much more can we expect from a watch in terms of the technology that is available? People just have to chill out with their expectations. It’s not a magical device that does unreal things. If people think in the realm of what is actually possible, this device is really awesome in my book. It’s a watch… That’s right, it’s a watch… A watch that does a lot of cool things AND has an accurate HR sensor. It gives me a really good way to gain an informed sense of my fitness goals, for cardio and more than good enough for weight lifting too. I’m a very satisfied customer.
As the father of two little girls, I have found the Exercise part of the activity tracker to be fair and accurate. I am always doing ‘dance parties’ with my girls and simply do cheesy moves all around the living room while listening to whatever horrible music they have in mind (what can I say? I love my kids enough to listen to that stuff). The watch always gives me credit for these moments and I find that extremely rewarding. I know it’s not a perfect OS and I am sure the science is not perfect either, but it is very satisfying to see my activity being tracked as exercise.
The focus on cardio is reflective of the generation that’s running Apple.