The Apple Watch has been on the market for quite a few years now. They are a common accessory for the average gym-goer and fitness enthusiast. They can be used to track your training schedule & of course, display an estimate of how much energy is expended throughout your workout and during the day. These estimates have actually been shown to be lacking in accuracy – read more here (https://mhealth.jmir.org/2018/4/e94)!
It’s important for our training and daily routine to focus on other aspects of our health and wellbeing rather than just our energy output. And you can use your watch to track some of these with good accuracy!
Did you know about all of the other helpful features you can use on your watch?
Sleep Feature
Your watch can estimate the time you spent in each sleep stage (REM, Core and Deep sleep) as well as when you may have woken during the night. You can use your watch to create a sleep schedule to meet your individual needs and use vibrating alarms rather than waking to an alarm sound!
Heart Rate
Particularly for running and pregnancy, the heart rate measurements can be helpful in tracking which percentage zone of your max HR you are in during your training, also useful for conditioning.
Running Pace and Cadence
Also for our runners, Apple Watch can be used to track running distance as well as split pace and even split cadence.
Mindfulness
With the Mindfulness feature, receive prompts throughout the day to complete short breathing and reflecting exercises. Good for the mind!
Heart Health
Your apple watch tracks your heart rate and electrical activity and notifies you of abnormalities. There is also other useful health data such as blood oxygen and VO2 max estimates available here!
We can sometimes fall into patterns of tracking our watch data so closely that it starts to impact our mental health and our opinion of ourselves – maybe we feel we can only call it a productive day if we’ve closed our watch rings. But we know & can assure ourselves that rest is important for all aspects of our health (read more here – Amy’s blog), and that it’s important to listen to our body and what we are needing each day!
We are absolutely more than our watch rings.
