The Apple Watch can be a powerful tool when it comes to getting fit,
provided you use it correctly. The watch can monitor your heart rate
and movement, as well help guide to improving your workouts, as long as
you let it.After using the Apple Watch
as part of my fitness routine over the past year I’ve come up with a
few tips I think you might find useful when incorporating it into yours.
Set an Achievable Goal
The Weekly Goal option is one of the best features of the Apple Watch when it comes to fitness.
Each week you can set new goals when it comes to the amount of time you
exercise, the amount of time you move, and even the amount of time you
spend standing. At the end of the week the watch will give you a report
of how you did on reaching the goals, and offer a suggestion for a
realistic goal for the next week based on how you did.
That
realistic goal part is crucial. When I first started using the Apple
Watch I kicked things off with a daily calories burn goal of 1000.
While that’s certainly a good goal, it was WAY too
high for my present activity level at the time. The result? I failed at
achieving it every single day. Not exactly a motivating experience. I
was used to my FitBit
where calorie goals include not only the calories you burn from
movement, but also the ones you burn just sitting behind your desk.
Turns out I was burning a lot less from movement than I thought, and the
proof was on my wrist.
After my first few weeks of failure, I
took the Apple Watch’s advice and went with a much more realistic goal:
500. Once I hit that for the entire week the Apple Watch suggested I go
up to 550, and then 600, eventually finding myself at a daily goal now
of well over 1000. I just needed to gradually get there.
Easy does it
That
gradual progression is key. Whenever you set a goal for yourself too
high, be it from exercise or otherwise, you set yourself up for failure
and disappointment. For me, if I had continued to fail at meeting my
move goal day after day I would have eventually gotten discouraged and
abandoned the feature entirely. That wouldn’t have helped my health for
sure.
Set a goal your first week that’s definitely achievable.
Sure, you’ll hit it everyday, but think about how successful and
motivated you’ll feel once you do. Once you’ve used the Apple Watch for a
week it will also get a feel for how you move and start to make smart
suggestions for the future. That means that even though your goal one
week one was just 300 calories, the Apple Watch might come back after
seeing how you move and suggest a dramatic increase the next week to 600
or more.
Check out our comparison of the Apple Watch vs. FitBit's Blaze Smartwatch
When
you do bump things up, do some incrementally rather than trying to go
huge in a single week. In your weekly report, the Apple Watch will let
you know how much you moved each day the week before, and make a
suggestion on what the right increase (or decrease) should be for your
new weekly goal. Listen. For quite a while I was convinced that I knew
better, and set goals that were either too high or too low for what I
needed. The Apple Watch is literally paying attention to how you move
all day everyday (as long as you're wearing it). Trust its idea on what
an appropriate goal is.
I also recommend taking a look at the
weekly report and noting what days you’re most active, and what days you
tend to slack off. In some cases, days that I thought I was fairly
active were some of my lowest performers. Knowing that I always tend to
move less on Sundays, for instance, is encouragement to go for a run in
the morning before I settle into my traditional binge-watching routine
in order to get number numbers up. Learning trends about yourself is
one of the most powerful tools you can have to make yourself, and your
workout routines, better. And let’s be honest: there's something truly
satisfying about completing all those circles
Use the Workout App
Just
like setting goals for the week are important, setting goals for your
individual workouts can be an excellent motivator as well. The Workout
app keeps track of each of your workouts, and lets you know before you
start a new one what your calorie burn was for the last. Here's a tutorial on how to use it.
It
sounds like a small thing, but bumping up your calorie burn goal by
even just 25-50 calories a workout can make a huge difference over time.
I started bumping things up for walks with my do in the morning. Our
100 calorie walk quickly turned into a 200-calorie walk, and later 250.
The increase was small. i thin I may have bumped the goal up by 25
calories each time we headed out, and sometimes not at all. By always
forcing myself to reach the same goal I did on our last walk; however, I
eventually got myself in the routine of taking 300-calorie walks each
morning. Certainly small, but that’s triple what we were doing when we
started, and it definitely adds up.
The same method can be used
for running or even hitting the elliptical. Each time you do a workout,
aim to push yourself just a tiny bit further. With a super tiny push
each day, all those tiny increases will add up to one huge one over
time, and chances are you won't even notice. And those are just the
built-in Workout app's features. Third parties have made some amazing fitness apps for the Apple Watch as well.
Actually Stand Up When The Watch Tells You To
One huge eye opener for me with the Apple Watch
was when it came to standing. The Watch suggests that you stand up for
one minute out of the hour, 12 hours a day. If you had asked me how
often I stood before I got the watch, I probably would have
(confidently) told you that I definitely meet that goal everyday without
question. Boy was I wrong.
As a writer, I spend a ton of time
each day at my desk. Either I'm working on a story, surfing the web
looking for my next big idea (or let's be honest seeing what my friends
are up to Facebook), or talking on the phone with a source -- the big
thing everything I do has in common is that it involves a chair.
While
I definitely get up to get more coffee or go to the restroom fairly
often, that isn't actually that often when you fit it into the big
picture of my day. When I first started wearing the watch I ignored the
messages suggesting I stand up, and found that some days I would only
get to 6 or 7 hours in the day that I had stood one minute of. That’s
much, much lower than I originally anticipated.
Now whenever the
watch pings me to suggest I stand up, I seriously consider it. Sure,
sometimes I'm in the middle of a project and keep moving along, but
others I'm mindlessly sitting either at my desk or at a bar with
friends, and could easily stand up for a few minutes. I'm even
considering setting up a standing desk in my home office to use
intermittently throughout the day as well. Not standing and moving often
enough wasn't a problem I realized I had, but not it's very easily
corrected (and trackable!) which I love.
Heart Healthy
The power of wearing a heart rate sensor on my wrist recently
came into play at an unexpected place: my doctor’s office. I started
on a new medication about a year ago. During my yearly checkup,
questions came up about what my normal heart rate was, and whether it
had increased over the past year.
Before the Apple Watch,
I’m 100% sure I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question. I had a
pretty basic idea of what my resting heart rate typically was. Did I
check it everyday? Absolutely not. And I never recorded it anywhere. If
an increase happened over the course of the year I likely wouldn’t
notice at all (unless it was a very dramatic and sudden one). By using
the Apple Watch each day I actually had a record I could show my doctor
from literally almost every day of the past year.
We were able to
see what my resting and high hear rates were back then, and compare them
to what’s going on now. The answer is they were the same, but I
definitely would not have been able to confidently give that answer
without the Health app on my iPhone and data from my Apple Watch.
There’s something both magical and powerful about that.
Find Your Groove
The
best way to use the Apple Watch to get fit is to simply use it. By even
just wearing the watch everyday you’ll gain insights into how you move
ad when that you can use to help improve your fitness over time and
reach your own personal goals, whatever they may be.
source: about.com
