New toy!

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to buy an Apple Watch.  Now that I’ve played with it for a while, I have some things to say about it as a fitness tool.  (I have, accidentally, also answered my wrist while driving and felt like Dick Tracy, but that is not my area of expertise.)  I am not a particularly tech-loving human, so I want my tech to be easy to use and mostly intuitive.

Before choosing the Apple Watch, I also considered Fitbit’s smart watch options.  They are, among other things, less expensive.  Reviews also suggested that the Fitbit options were more suitable to those of us who want the gizmo specifically for fitness tracking.  What made me choose the Apple Watch was, finally, a lack of faith in the durability of Fitbit products—I have killed too many other Fitbits.  What I like about Fitbit, however, is the ability to track food from my computer, so I also went searching for a food tracking application that meshed well with the Apple Watch.  (I will talk about the food tracking part below.)

The Apple Watch tracks three things in its Activity app:  movement, exercise, and standing.  It’s easy to get a visual read on where I am on my goals at any time—each goal is displayed as a concentric circle and the goal is complete when the circle closes. 

One of the most noticeable differences between the Apple Watch and my dearly departed Fitbit is that the watch is much pickier about what counts as exercise—my daily dog walks used to count as exercise and now they are almost entirely movement because Cricket doesn’t want to go at flank speed.  Also, it is entirely possible to get in 15,000 steps and still barely meet the exercise goal—no amount of movement that does not cross the threshold to exercise will add up to exercise minutes.  For me, this is, on the whole, a good thing.

When it comes to the standing goal, I’m a little less enthusiastic.  I don’t have a particularly sedentary vocation and I drink a lot of water, so I do in fact stand up and move around nearly every hour.  However, if I’ve already done over an hour of exercise in a day, I feel like it’s all right if I want to sit on my behind a little longer.  (There is probably a way to turn off the notifications, but I haven’t cared enough to figure out how yet.)  People who work desk jobs may appreciate the reminders more than I do.

Tracking individual workouts is simple enough.  There are plenty of workouts it already knows about.  I’ve used walking, indoor cycling, swimming, yoga, and “other.”  The swimming workout is almost scarily perceptive, knowing how many laps I do in freestyle and how many in backstroke.  I use “other” for weight training and Pilates.  There is a HIIT workout available, too, that I could see applying to some of my weight workouts.

I did not like the band the watch came with, so I bought two others, the metal mesh one for most uses and a perforated rubber one for swimming, although I could swim with the metal one if I wanted to.  When I ride my spin bike, I need to wear elbow and wrist supports; the watch does a good job of perceiving my effort even when it is higher up my forearm above the wrist wrap.  That is probably not something the designers were thinking about, so gold stars to them for making it work anyway.

As previously mentioned, I don’t love tech, so I did not want to try out a bunch of different food tracking applications.  I googled best food tracking for Apple Watch and got the free version of Lifesum.  It interacts seamlessly with the workout data from the watch and tells me how many calories I have consumed, used, and have remaining.  Each meal gets an easy-to-interpret face rating (the smilier the face, the healthier the meal).  Data is entered via phone.  I was skeptical that it would be easy, but I was pleasantly surprised.

So far, I think that the watch has been a good choice.  It does what I need it to do for fitness with little to no frustration on my part.  I expect it to endure more than my last several Fitbits.  Choosing a fitness tracker is a highly individual decision and I can see why someone would choose one of the other options instead, but for me, this one works.