When I had covid I was miserable, pounding my lungs and bedridden for a few days with terrible brain fog. I don’t remember much from that time. However, I remember waking up bleary-eyed and feverish to an Apple Watch notification. It said I hadn’t made much progress with my rings. I need to take a brisk 27 minute walk. “You can still do it,” it said. No, I couldn’t.
It wasn’t my fault I got sick, but my 85 day streak was broken anyway. Since then, I’ve had nasty shin splints, migraines, and multiple cross-country flights that make it difficult to meet exercise goals—all excellent reasons to prioritize rest or build extra flexibility into my schedule. Even though I knew better, I still felt frustrated every time I listened to my body and prioritized rest over a random streak.
So when Apple announced that the holidays are finally coming to watchOS 11, I almost cried with joy. And I know I’m not the only one. People have been asking for this feature for a really, really long time.
With watchOS 11, Apple is introducing a number of features that finally create a place for rest and recovery. The two I’m most excited about are the ability to pause Activity Rings and possibility to adjust the goals according to the day of the week.
This is long overdue. The rest of the industry has been steadily moving away from gamification to recovery over the past few years. And with reason.
As motivating as stripes are, they can inadvertently teach you to ignore your body’s cues. When I was sick, I told the Apple Watch to fill it. I’ve had several friends over the years tell me they’ve gotten out of hospital beds just to keep the streak going. Others said they had lowered their goals but felt guilty about “cheating”. I get the impulse – breaking a streak can feel like you’ve fallen off the horse. (This is blatantly untrue, but stripes have a strange, addictive power that sometimes trumps logic.) But the ultimate goal of a fitness tracker is to help you improve your health. Feeling like you I can not resting due to a random streak is the opposite of improving your health.
Not only that, but rest is actually a requirement for any competent fitness plan. Runners who don’t include rest days in their training plan get injured. If you want to build muscle, skipping rest is a pretty bad plan because rest is when new muscles are built. It’s no coincidence that elite athletes are flocking to trackers like Oura Ring or Whoop that prioritize recovery and sleep above all else.
For these reasons, ring blocking is an excellent idea. In watchOS 11, you’ll be able to pause ringtones for a day, week, month, or whatever period of time you need without it affecting your streak. It takes away the feeling of failure. It recognizes that maybe when you’re on vacation, it’s okay if you want to hang out by the pool and be present with your family instead of worrying about when you’re going to squeeze in a workout. That you’re actually allowed to take breaks—and that it can help you stay motivated in the long run.
Likewise, adjusting your goals based on your schedule makes it easier for beginners to stick to an actual plan. If it makes it easier to stick to the plan by lowering your movement goal on the days you go to the office and then increasing them on the weekends, why not do it? And while you could technically do this manually before watchOS 11, automating it makes it feel intentional. It’s a simple shift in perception, but one that can erase any irrational cheating guilt from the equation.
Apple is far from the first company to implement such features. But that’s not the point. When you try to do hard things—and improve your health is hard thing – it helps tremendously when you are given the grace to be imperfect. You too will be imperfect. It’s not a matter of if you will get sick or your life will break the streaks. A matter of when. When I broke my longest streak to date, it was because something traumatic happened in my life. After a day of ugly crying, I woke up the next morning with a broken streak. I knew it was trivial in the grand scheme of things. However, I felt like I was being kicked while I was down. It took me two months to get my head back in the game.
Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if everything would have been easier if I had the ability to hit pause from the start. Some fitness enthusiasts may scoff and say that I and others like me lack discipline or mental strength and that these characteristics are a crutch. Maybe so. But I’m all about making fitness a part of your life – not building your whole life around fitness. This is a much needed step in that direction.
