The arrival of smartwatches was supposed to spell the end of dedicated fitness bands with Gartner predicting that ‘half the people who would have bought a fitness wristband will buy a smartwatch instead.’ However, the lukewarm reception to the army of Android Wear powered smartwatches has meant that it’s now over to Apple to prove that smartwatches can indeed serve as an adequate Fitbit replacement.
Sales wise, the Apple Watch is on track to ship 15.4 million Apple Watch units this year alone, which would give the company more than 50 per cent of the global smartwatch market. But is the Apple Watch really a capable health and fitness tracker?
To answer that very question, I integrated the Apple Watch into my own personal fitness regimen for four weeks which consisted of a mixture of cardio based activities from running and cycling to strength building with weight training and yoga. To mix things up, I also threw in a few sessions of basketball and boxing circuits.
So is the Apple Watch fit for fitness?
The fitness tracking on the Watch relies on three sensors to deliver the data.
First up is the three-axis accelerometer that essentially acts as the pedometer, measuring your steps and body movement to calculate calories burned from your daily activities. The optical heart rate sensor, located on the underside of the watch face, detects your heart rate during workouts and functions in a similar fashion to what you would find on other fitness bands. And finally, the watch relies on the GPS on your iPhone to more accurately measure the distance and pace for outdoor workouts.
Apple claims that the Watch even uses the barometer in the iPhone 6 to determine whether you’re cruising downhill on a bike or gruelling it out uphill, for instance, to more accurately calculate how many calories you’re actually burning.
The movement and heart rate data collected from the sensors in conjunction with your gender, height, age and weight information, all combine to produce an estimation of how many calories you burn during daily movement and dedicated workouts.
However, the lack of on-board GPS means that you have to carry your iPhone with you if you want to map your runs or the most accurate fitness tracking data. Given that most sub-$400 fitness bands and smartwatches like the Sony Smartwatch 3 offer built-in GPS, it is a disappointing omission.
That said, once you have calibrated the Watch with a few iPhone tethered runs, it does provide fairly accurate readings on distance. In my regular neighbourhood routes, I found the total recorded distance to be out by 100 metres on average versus running with the iPhone GPS.
Even if you do run with your iPhone, neither of Apple’s Workout or Activity apps are capable of showing you maps of courses you have run or other running metrics like cadence or splits. You won’t get audio alerts at key points throughout your run either.
While you can use third party fitness apps like Endomondo or MapMyFitness, the Watch’s heart rate monitor won’t deliver readings to those apps. In fact, third party apps don’t run natively on the Watch at all and are instead pushed out from the iPhone. This means that you will need to keep your iPhone strapped to your arm and within range to the Watch during workouts if you want to use your preferred fitness tracking app. Non-Apple made apps are also accompanied by lengthy load times.
These issues should be rectified with the release of Watch OS 2 later this year where Apple is promising support for native third party apps but until then most are likely to stick with Apple’s overly-basic Workout app.
The main Workout app has profiles for various cardio-based workouts from running and cycling through to using machines such as the rower, elliptical trainer and stair stepper. You can set the workout goal to be based on duration, calories burned, distance ran or have an open goal and the nice thing is that it will show you what your previous best was for a little extra motivation.
For all other workouts, such as weight training, yoga or hitting the bag, there is no option but to use the generic ‘Other’ profile. This still gives you an approximation of the calories that you have burned, however, the inability to rename these workouts makes it needlessly difficult to tell them apart when reviewing the accumulated exercise summaries at the end of the week.
Like the Fitbit, the optical heart rate monitor on the Watch can be woefully inaccurate during rigorous exercise like weight training where constricting muscles impede the blood flow during reps, resulting in much lower readings. The Watch picks up the heart rate fairly accurately in between sets where you’re able to rest and your heart is able to push blood through those muscles again but the up and down readings ultimately mean that the recorded fitness data is not as accurate as it could be. Pairing the Watch with a Bluetooth chest strap like the Polar H7 for heart tracking duties is definitely recommended if your fitness regimen involves regular strength training exercises.
That said, the Apple Watch is more than up to the task of monitoring your resting heart rate throughout the day and during cardio-based activities like jogging and cycling.
It’s worth noting that it can be difficult to register touches on the watch face with sweaty perspiring palms during workouts, which is a problem that the button-driven interface of the Fitbit or Garmin VivoActive doesn’t share.
On the plus side, you can run unencumbered and still have access to your workout music provided you own a pair of Bluetooth headphones. The Watch can handle up to 2GB worth of music from iTunes but unfortunately there isn’t any way to transfer tracks from popular streaming services like Spotify for offline play on the Watch.
The Watch does offer plenty of encouragement to reach your daily move, exercise and stand goals with reminders and progress updates that chime in throughout the day along with achievement badges for when you crack milestones and personal bests.
If you’re buying the Apple Watch primarily for fitness tracking, then there are more capable options on the market.
The Garmin Vivoactive and Fitbit Surge, for instance, offer built-in GPS, sleep tracking, week-long battery life and is substantially cheaper than the $499 starting price of the Apple Watch. The Garmin is waterproof as well so you can track your swims. Seasoned runners should take a look at the Mio Alpha 2 which offers an EKG level heart rate monitor with an indicator light that flashes different colours to tell you at a glance your current heart rate zone.
It is the ability to pair the Apple Watch with other sensors along with a rapidly growing app library that will soon run native in the upcoming Watch OS 2 that gives the Apple Watch the potential to become a very powerful fitness tracker. If you’re not a regular gym goer and are looking for a smartwatch first and an exercise motivator second, then the Apple Watch is a better choice over the legion of Android Wear powered smartwatches on the market, but it isn’t yet ready to replace your dedicated fitness band — at least not for now.
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