One thing has always bugged me about the Apple Watch. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health it has driven me to close my rings. It doesn’t matter if I had covid-19, shin splints, or was in a dark place mentally. It pushed me to be a “better” version of myself, as long as the better didn’t include a day off. But with watchOS 11 — the public beta of which arrives today — I feel like my Apple Watch is finally letting me down.
This is largely due to a trio of new features: the new Vitals app, the Training Load feature and the ability to pause your activity rings. I waxed lyrical about the latter right after WWDC, but after spending some time with the developer beta, I’m convinced these are the smartest fitness updates Apple has released in years.
The Vitals app and the Training Load feature are technically two separate things, but in practice they go hand in hand. The Vitals app contextualizes a range of metrics: heart rate, breathing rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and sleep duration. These are all the recovery metrics most commonly packaged in other apps as a readiness score, except Apple’s version doesn’t give you a single score. Rather, it shows you whether your metrics are “typical” or “outliers.” If two or more metrics are out of range, you’ll get a notification and some options about it why certain metrics are wrong.
The Training Load feature is also simple. It compares and visualizes your seven-day versus 28-day physical activity. Based on this, you can see if you are well below, below, stable, above or well above your usual activity levels. It breaks this down not only by overall activity, but also by individual types of activity (ie running, pilates, cycling, etc.). After a workout, you can also rate your perceived level of exertion. For popular workouts like running, it will automatically set your effort level. (You can manually edit it if you disagree, which I occasionally did, though it’s generally accurate.)
It’s been nice to have both of these features for the past month, but like most of the updates in watchOS 11, they’re a bit passive. For example, I haven’t received a single vital sign notification because, well, all my vitals have stayed within their normal range. Well done for the consistency! That’s not a bad thing – you don’t want to receive frequent notifications. It’s more than just having a quick visual of “is everything too expensive?” it’s helpful when you’re debating whether to continue or take a day off.
This is also the benefit of training load, especially for people who are more advanced in exercise or training. I have enough experience to know that my current training load is a little skewed because I took a whole week off from training while I was on vacation. (Right around the time I downloaded the beta.) And yet is a helpful visual reminder to me when I’m well over my 28 day baseline that I can take a day off. A day off won’t set me back.
Apple isn’t doing anything here that we haven’t seen from Garmin, Polar, Oura, Fitbit, Whoop, or any other health and fitness tracker in the past five years. Rather, Apple’s version makes these concepts easily digestible for beginners. It’s also less data overload for burned-out athletes. Combined with the ability to pause rings or customize your goals based on the day of the week, you have a much more flexible fitness tracking experience on the world’s most popular smartwatch. This is a huge deal.
Ultimately, these features make Apple Watch’s fitness tracking platform more personalized, which seems to be the main theme of watchOS 11. Instead of a blanket approach of always doing more, you can make alternative choices based on your actual day-to-day circumstances. I’m still testing out a bunch of other watchOS 11 features, but as far as fitness tracking updates go in the marquee, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how it’s encouraged me to be kinder to myself.
My main complaint is that Apple still doesn’t tell you to take a day off. You should infer phrases like “recover as needed if you start to feel run down” or “you’ve been at or well above the range for 14 days.” I also lost vital data for several nights because I had to charge my watch overnight—a reminder that battery life and charging schedules remain the Achilles’ heel of smartwatches. But overall, this is still much more sustainable in the long run for most people than the previous general approach of “always do more”. Maybe in watchOS 12, my Apple Watch will finally make me put my feet up on the couch. But for now, baby steps are still steps in the right direction.
