For the last 1,675 days, John Greenwood has done yoga, lifted weights and went on miles-long walks — whatever it took to close his Apple Watch’s rings, a set of daily goals users can set for calories burned and time spent exercising.
There’s an element of stress around consistently closing his rings, said Greenwood, a 31-year-old financial services professional who lives outside Denver. He’s so deep into closing his rings that breaking his four-and-a-half-year streak would leave him feeling “crushed,” he said.
People like Greenwood will have a reprieve soon enough. The Apple Watch can still act like a wearable cheerleader, but Apple’s forthcoming WatchOS 11 software will give the gadget new tools to help take stock of how your body is holding up, and leave you better equipped to know when it’s time for a break.
Some of these new features are available now as public preview, with a full release coming this fall. And together, they reflect a shift in Apple’s thinking about a device that, since the early days, strongly emphasized motion.
“We thought the most important thing we could do was to get [people] to be more active,” Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, told The Washington Post in a recent interview. That’s why the company cooked up those three rings. But things are a little different now: Williams says the company has a “moral responsibility” to try to help people live healthier lives, which may not always include going hard at the gym everyday.
“There’s a chance to give people a deeper understanding of their body and maybe identify when something might be off,” he said.
Give it a rest
There are a few ways Apple’s new smartwatch software can help you take it easy.
For one, fitness fans will be able to set different calorie-burn goals for specific days, and temporarily pause streaks to take a guilt-free day off.
“I’m glad that they’re making those changes, so then it is easier to be like ‘Okay, today, I’m actually not going to do anything,’” Greenwood said.
Another new tool, Training Load, is meant to measure how hard Apple Watch owners are pushing themselves.
Over the course of about a month, Apple says an Apple Watch with the new software will attempt to automatically measure the intensity of some workouts by chewing on data like exercise duration, your age and the swings in your heart rate. (Other kinds of workouts, like weightlifting sessions, require you to estimate your level of effort yourself.)
As you continue to work out, the idea goes, you’ll begin to see how the intensity of your week compares to your past performance. That’s something more seasoned athletes have long wanted from Apple Watches, since similar features have come baked into rival wearables for years.
Jay Blahnik, Apple’s vice president of fitness technologies, admitted that the tool may be especially helpful for people working on specific training plans to avoid ramping up too quickly — and potentially injuring themselves in the process.
But some non-athletes who wear Apple Watches may still find some useful insight here. After testing the feature myself with my own (halfhearted) workout regimen, it’s been helpful as a tool for reflection — a way to take stock of what I’ve been doing, and how those changes in intensity leave me feeling.
“I find it can be really easy to lose track of why I’m tired, or why I’m not getting results, or why I might be getting set back,” said Blahnik said.
In my case, Training Load has helped me be a little more mindful of how hard I exert myself. I’m not training for a marathon, or prepping for a weightlifting competition — I’m just trying to get a little faster, a little stronger over time. And that doesn’t necessarily mean I need to push myself every single day.
Apple also said Apple Watches running this new software can also offer a closer look at what our bodies are doing — as well as the quality of the rest we’re getting.
Users who wear their smartwatches to bed will eventually wake up to an update on certain body metrics, like sleep time, temperature and respiration rate through a new Vitals app.
Overnight is “one of the best opportunities to do a physiological test” because it’s the closest your body gets to its baseline level of function, said Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, in an interview.
For seven nights, the watch attempts to determine what that baseline level looks like for you. If any two of those measurements deviate from your baseline, you’ll see a message pointing out the changes and suggesting possible causes.
On a night that my sleep duration was lower than normal, for example, my Apple Watch running a preview version of this software suggested my time in bed could have been affected by “environmental factors such as stress, medications, alcohol, caffeine, illness, or travel.”
That app can also offer updates on a user’s overnight blood oxygen levels, which could signal conditions like sleep apnea. The catch? For now, you’ll need some specific versions of the Apple Watch to get those blood oxygen readings in the United States. (The feature is absent from the company’s most recent smartwatch models due to an ongoing patent dispute with the medical technology company Masimo.)
Insight, not advice
Taking in the context these tools offer can be helpful — just don’t wait for the watch to give you specific advice.
Even if an Apple Watch can tell that your training load is vastly higher than it used to be, for instance, or that your sleep duration and body temperature were abnormal, it will never explicitly say that you should take the day to rest. That feels like a missed opportunity for, well, people like me, who aren’t always sure where to turn for fitness guidance.
“We do actively decide to stop short of saying you need to not work out today,” Blahnik said, adding that just telling a person to take the day off “may not be perfectly correct for any one individual.”
Desai said the decision to avoid giving this kind of pointed feedback stemmed from internal debate.
“Some people don’t want to be told that,” she said.
But your Apple Watch can tell a lot about you, and what you’ve been doing — what if it could leverage that data to offer more personal guidelines? Imagine your watch noticing that your training intensity is way up, and that you’ve been logging a lot of high-effort weight sessions. It might be nice for the watch to recommend, say, a leisurely long jog to unwind.
For now, it’s not clear whether Apple — a company that’s rapidly pivoting to build tools powered by artificial intelligence — will bring AI to bear on the loads of information the Apple Watch can monitor. Williams, Apple’s operating chief, wouldn’t elaborate much on the matter.
But as he looked back over the Apple Watch’s nearly 10 years on people’s wrists, he was quick to point out how the wearable has “gotten smarter and smarter over time” and how that was unlikely to change.
“I think as we move forward, you’ll see intelligence continue to play an important role,” he said.