How Apple Helps with Health and Fitness!
Yes, I know this sounds crazy, but just stay with me because I promise I will make sense by the end of it.
The Apple ecosystem that relates to health consists of the Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. The main reason why it includes all these devices is because of their relatively new service, Apple Fitness+.
At the core of Apple’s ability to help you get healthier is obviously the Apple Watch. There are just so many features that the Apple Watch has to help you do this. If you sit down for too long, it will remind you to stand up. The exercise rings lets you track your active calories burned, minutes of exercise, and standing hours. These metrics can be customized by the user, for example, I have my activity ring goal set to 600 calories, exercise ring goal set to 30 minutes, and standing hours set to 10 hours.
The rings are a great way to track your progress throughout the day and even give you that competitiveness to close those rings. If you are getting back into exercising, this will be a great way to keep track of your progress and to track the consistency of your hard work. The rings give you a rewarding feeling when you close all of them, but it gets better. They also have a reward system that gives you these digital medals for each achievement such as your first workout, closing your move rings, longest streak for closing the various rings or all of the rings, etc.
If you have friends with Apple Watches, you can also share your activity with them and get notifications when they finish their exercises or close their rings. This is yet another way to keep the competitive way to keep yourself motivated to get healthier.
Although there are apps you can have for on the watch, the built in ones are great! The workouts app has an abundance of exercises that can be track that include outdoor walk, outdoor run, basketball, pool swim, etc. Depending on the workout, the watch can recognize when you are doing these without needing to manually start the workout. This feature doesn’t work perfectly or all the time, but it definitely can come in handy. Each workout tracks your active calories burned, heart rate, and the time it has taken for the workout. Depending on the type of workout, it can also give you an additional metric such as how many laps and yards for a pool swim or how many miles you have walked or ran.
Sleep plays an important role in becoming healthier and the Apple Watch can help track that as well. I use an app called SleepWatch to help track my sleep. They have a free and paid version, but I manage well without having to pay the premium subscription. It helps me track how many hours I sleep, the quality of my sleep, and my resting heart rate. There are other apps that can track your sleep as well, so take advantage of how many apps you have access to!
Lastly, the Apple Watch has features that help with your general life such as washing your hands for 20 seconds, loud noise notifications, fall detection, EKG/ECG, and blood oxygen monitoring (Series 6 and newer).
So, what about the iPhone and iPad?
The iPhone and iPad mainly tie into this conversation because of the Apple Watch. The iPhone is required to use the Apple Watch, and both the iPad and iPhone can be used with Apple Fitness+.
Now, the iPhone has features that help you track some health metrics and improve your health. You can track your steps with the Health app, or via exercise apps. If you want to track an exercise, you can do that as well by using apps that track your runs and walks using the phones GPS. You won’t get the same metrics as the watch, but you will be able to track and estimate your health metrics. There is one feature that the iPhone and Apple Watch also share: loud noise detection.
Another issue that can affect your health is something you can’t always detect yourself. These days, we are all glued to our phones and we can sometimes endlessly scroll through TikTok for hours. Well, Apple has a feature with there devices that can help you with this with Screen Time. You can track how much you use your phone, how many times you unlock your phone, and even set some limits for certain applications. These limits can also be set as parental controls for your children’s phone.
I am going to preface this next part by saying, yes I know that this won’t exactly be an iPhone only thing. With the plethora of apps that the App Store has, you can find applications that offer you something else that can benefit your health. You can search for them and even browse through the ones that are advertised from time to time. The point is, not only do these Apple products have features that benefit your health, but they also give you access to other services and apps that can elevate your experience. Yes, other phones can do this as well, but the cohesive nature of Apple’s ecosystem is just something that isn’t quite matched by the other offerings.
Overall, if I had to recommend one combination of devices to get healtier, I would choose the Apple Watch with an iPhone. It can help you become healthier!
