News contains multiple stories (sections of information) presented with graphics and description. These are packed with information! To learn more about navigating your way around your health insights, refer to the News page.

Fitness Habits

Consistency is key when it comes to fitness, so imagine being able to track your progress towards building a healthy habit based on your own data. Well now its possible. Fitness Habits analyses your data and recommends goals to not only build healthy habits, but actually improve along the way. No other app visualises the information quite like it using News to tell the story of your fitness journey!

Fitness Habits shows information on the key metrics that matter, such as your Move/Activity; Steps and Distance. Each story allows you to get your information at a glance, but you can also tap into any part for more information.

*Note - you need at least 7 days of data for Fitness Habits to be effective!

Stay Above the White Line

To make tracking your fitness habit super simple (and fun), we have created an amazing graph at the top of the page with the simple message 'stay above the white line to make fitness a habit'. This graph is used for Move (cals or kjs), Steps and Distance (km or miles).

To create habits you need to do something consistently, well this is the beauty of the white line tracker. Not only will it recommend the appropriate targets based on your short and long term data, it will try to improve your habit over time with gradual increments. Better yet, it adapts to every fitness level, from the person who likes being in the garden to the professional athlete.

Put simply, the red line is your daily progress, while the white line is the target to gradually improve. The white line is constantly learning your habits using your recent and longer term data trends, giving you a new target every day based on your individual data. So if the red line is above the white line, you are improving your health. It's that easy. The longer you stay above the white line, the better you are going at making fitness a habit.

How Does It Work?

It's not rocket science and it certainly does not use some crazy scientific formula! It is just using your very own data in a unique way to better educate you on your fitness progress and trends.

The white line indicates your longer term average (we use 21 days worth of data), while the red line uses your shorter term average (looking at 7 days of data). We then tell the white line to analyse your data to make recommended goals, but allow it to suggest a slight improvement so we can make habits and continue to build on them. But the beauty is that the white line will only gradually build based on where your data is at, it may even down spiral in periods of inactivity or spike if you are smashing it. No longer is it the same boring old 500 calories or 10,000 steps to target every day, Fitness Habits adapts with each step or bead of sweat you make, looking at your data and displaying an accurate target to improve your longer term fitness.

Regardless if you do a 10min walk once a week or you ride your bicycle 200km each day, it tailors completely to you.

No longer is it the same boring old 500 calories or 10,000 steps to target every day, Fitness Habits adapts with each step or bead of sweat you make, looking at your data and displaying an accurate target to improve your longer term fitness.

Everyone's Fitness is Different!

We could not agree more. There are so many fitness apps that prescribe workouts, give you fake effort points or apply a training plan from an "abs of steel" instructor. Fitness Habits is nothing like those!

Fitness Habits simply uses your actuals recorded on your Apple Watch to create a full feedback loop so you understand how you are tracking. Without a doubt it is the most intuitive, easy, personalised and interactive fitness feedback we have come across for someone wearing an Apple Watch - ever!

So if you have been training well and consistently over a number of weeks, you may notice the white line start to trend up as Fitness Habits will understand you have been training more. On the opposite side, if you have been relaxing drinking cocktails on a beach for a week, you may notice the white and red lines start to go down as Fitness Habits will start to reflect your reduced activity levels and adapt the goals. Maybe you train on the exact same day or you are more like a yoyo and have big weeks and lazy weeks! Whatever you do, Fitness Habits will use that data and structure to provide insights unique to you.

See the below image where I have the red line above the white line which means I am trending in the correct direction, increasing my move/activity by 4.9% from the previous day. As I had a good day it may even give me a little buffer for tomorrow, but again it depends on my actual habits as every day and everyone is different. But the longer I can keep that red line above the white line, I'm improving my fitness and creating a habit.

Tip - In short, it all depends on your shorter and longer term activity levels, the odd day here and there will not make significant changes to the white line but it will impact your shorter term red line, consistency is key. Remember, this is all about building fitness habits long term!

Fitness Streaks

Tap on any story in Fitness Habits to open the pop-ups and see your best ever habit streaks for consecutive days staying above the white line, your current habit streak and your current goal streak. This provides that extra motivation to keep you striving. Remember you can also explore your trends with the dashboard quick links below.

Tip - Remember you might miss your goal but you can still keep your streak habit alive depending on your recent activity levels. It's all about consistency and if you do keep hitting your goals more often then not, the Fitness Habits learns and reflects this in the data.

Yesterday, Now & Forecast

As with any good news article, you want to look at yesterdays results, current events and a glimpse into the future. So we made a view for each in Fitness Habits. Just click on the top tabs and the information will reflect for that period.

Yesterday

Shows your trends, goals hit, habit rating (how many goals hit over the last 21 days) and your actuals for the previous day. A great way to recap.

Now

Check anytime and it will update to the nearest available sync, you can also do a pull down refresh of the screen. The Now tab shows how you are tracking today and remaining stats to hit your goals

At 10:00pm (Forecast)

Our forecast view uses formulas based on your unique data to estimate where you will be with your goals at 10pm that evening. It will also give an insight to tomorrows target based on where you are at.

See below a view using the 10pm forecast view, estimating where my trend will end up and tomorrows goal based on my efforts today and over time. This crystal ball like feedback shows for Move, Steps and Distance. It is very helpful and a great example of how Fitness Habits can use your data at different times of day to try foresee the future. Note that we recommend allowing until at least 10am in the morning for forecasts, but the longer the day goes the better the forecast will be as it uses your 'to-the-minute' data to forecast.

Trending Descriptions

Under each of the key sections in Fitness Habits you will see a description such as "Yesterday you were trending 11 calories per day lower. Your habit status is coasting". In this example I know my trends are a little bit below to make my habit status goal, trending 11 calories below and telling me I am 'coasting' which means Im quite steady in my fitness. Remember this is all about my trends over the short and long term, this is not telling me to get another 11 calories today. Fitness Habits looks at your data over time, it is much more focused on the bigger picture. For day to day goals, simply look at any of the multiple daily goal targets.

Monitoring on the Apple Watch

The HeartWatch Watch app lets you see your Fitness Habits progress at any time, along with the 10pm forecast view. You just need to make sure that in your Goals you have selected to 'Use recommended goal', as this will use the Fitness Habits goal tracking. Goals can be found in Settings or as a quick link in the Story panels. See below I have turned on 'use recommended goal' for Move. This also needs to be on for Steps:

Tip - while in Goals, we also recommend setting a minimum goal that acts a safety net, so if you have a minimum number of cals/kjs that you want to make sure HeartWatch keeps you above each day, enter that here.

Go into the HeartWatch Watch app, scroll down and you will see Move and Steps:

Tap the menu item to see current progress and a 10pm forecast:

Watch Face Complications

Refer to the Watch Complications page to see all the available Watch face options, there are a lot! The Activity ones are fantastic in that they show your % completed. We even added the date on one so you don't have to waste a valuable complication on the day!

Falling Behind?

It would be a tough ask to expect anyone to hit targets all year long, so we implemented a great feature to reset and start a new fitness habit. All your health data will stay exactly as is, but we will ignore your current trends and reset all the calculations behind the white line to be equal with your current activity level. This means after hitting the reset option, your goals will re-calibrate, making it easier to hit targets as you build towards your new fitness habit.

This can be great if you are starting a new fitness regime, maybe had some time off due to travel or holidays, or if life just got too busy and you needed to take a break. Whatever the reason, you can now put a line in the sand and start with a fresh goal. You can reset individually for just move, steps or distance (or all 3). For example, my Move white line is fine but I am about to start a new Steps and Distance exercise program with more walking and running, so I can just reset Steps and Distance and leave the Move as is.

It is really easy to setup, as shown below when you fall behind a pop-up will appear under the appropriate section on the 'Now' or 'At 10pm' tabs:

This will open a new screen with 2 buttons. Tap Today to open a date selector, this lets you backdate when to reset, for example you may have started a new program 2 weeks ago and want to use that specific day as your start date to reset. Once happy with the date, just tap 'Start a new fitness habit' and the reset will apply. You can clear or change this too if you made a mistake by clicking back into it.

Once you start a new fitness habit you will see your white line is now equal with date you selected as the start day. See below I selected Today and the far right steps is even with the white line. My goals will now re-calculate:

Be Realistic

Rome wasn't built in a day. The same applies for fitness. There will be times where you will not hit your goal, you will drop a streak and you just need a good plain old fashioned break. Fear not, as Fitness Habits is all about the longer term. Watch how different exercise patterns of activity or inactivity impact the white line graph, its quite fascinating to finally have an easy insight into what really makes fitness a habit.

However if you need to turn a new leaf, we implemented a reset option to start a new fitness habit as documented above. Never be afraid to use it.

Real Life Sample

Here is a snap shot of our developer who followed the Fitness Habits white line, using the Dashboard view to show his progress over 12 months. The arrows show where he has started fitness habits on 2 seperate occasions, staying above the white line every day and having a week off in between (due to a holiday). Look at the weekly averages all climbing up by following the white dotted line. Data doesn't lie!

Wear Your Watch

As with any smart Watch device based around health, the more you wear it the better health data it will capture. The Apple Watch is designed to be worn throughout the day and night, we even built a charge reminder in our AutoSleep app to help remind you when to charge it. But it goes without saying that if you do only wear the Watch for a couple hours per day or forget to wear it every second day, you won't derive the benefits of Fitness Habits.

Workout Apps

We 100% recommend using HeartWatch for any workouts, its full of features as seen here and works best with HeartWatch. However any app that writes to Apple Health will be recognised by HeartWatch and the data analysed.

Home or next topic - Wellness

Report abuse