Apple Watch For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Using the Apple Watch Activity app to meet your fitness goals

Fitness crazes never really go away. People are always looking for new ways to lose some weight and to get into better shape. Apple Watch will come in handy for health-conscious people who desire fast results but also quick feedback about how well they’re doing. Unlike many other smartwatches, Apple Watch goes above and beyond what others can do.

For example, the built-in Workout app lets you select from one of many exercises and a ton of real-time information is then calculated and presented for you.

But the Apple Watch’s core fitness-related app is Activity. As the name suggests, the Activity app keeps track of everything physical you do throughout the day — and encourages you to keep moving with gentle reminders.

The Activity app gives you a visual snapshot of your daily activity. It’s broken down into three colored rings:

• Move: The reddish-pink ring shows how many calories you’ve burned from moving.
• Exercise: The lime-green ring shows how many minutes of brisk activity you’ve completed that day.
• Stand: The baby-blue ring gives you a visual indication of how often you’ve stood up after sitting or reclining.

Your goal is to complete each ring each day by reaching the suggested amount of exercise. The more solid each ring is, the better you’re doing — and the closer you are to reaching your fitness goals.

Before you begin any activity, however, Apple Watch needs to know a few essentials about you — namely, your gender, age, height, and weight — so that its numbers, such as estimated calories burned, can be accurate. For example, an 8-year-old female burns calories at a different rate than a 65-year-old male.

The following sections offer a closer look at each Activity ring.

Move

The Activity app’s Move ring tells you how well you’re doing based on your personal active calorie burn goal for the day. For example, the default goal is 600 calories per day, which is a couple of hours of walking around a shopping mall. If that’s too easy to reach or, on the flipside, too ambitious, you can easily make necessary adjustments to suit your needs.

To access and use the Move tab in the Activity app, follow these steps:

1. Press the Digital Crown button to access your Home screen.
2. Tap the multicolored Activity app.
   Or raise your wrist and say “Hey, Siri, Activity.” Either action launches the Activity app and you should see the Activity app’s main (summary) screen.
3. Swipe up for a deeper dive.
   Move tells you how much you’ve moved during the day. The red number is your current estimated calories burned. The smaller red number underneath is the percentage of your daily goal.

   You can change your caloric goal in the Activity app by pressing on the watch screen (Digital Touch) and selecting a new goal. Press + or – to set your desired goal. You can also change your Exercise and Stand goals in the same fashion.

4. Swipe down on the screen to see a History graph with each hour of the day presented and how well you’ve done per hour (highlighted by a vertical line).
   The taller the pinkish bar, the more you moved that hour.

Exercise

Whether you want to do something active in one shot — such as jogging on the treadmill after work — or a little bit here and there, it’s recommended you do at least 30 minutes of exercise each day. What constitutes “exercise,” you ask? How is this different from mere “moving?” Any activity at the level of a brisk walk or above is considered exercise, says Apple.

To access and use the Exercise tab in the Activity app, follow these steps:

1. Press the Digital Crown button to access your Home screen.
2. Tap the Activity app.
   Or raise your wrist and say “Hey, Siri, Activity.” Either action launches the Activity app and you should see the Activity app’s main (summary) screen.
3. Swipe up to see your exercise info.
   You should see a green number in the middle of the screen. This is the total exercise time calculated for the day so far. Underneath this number is the total goal for the day (such as 30 minutes).

   You will also see a percentage of you how close you are to your overall daily goal. To change your goals, press firmly on the screen and tap + or – to set your desired goal.

4. Swipe down for your History graph, which shows your hourly activity level — measured in minutes — for when you were most active.
   As you might expect, the higher the line on the graph, the better. Even if you exercise a little here and a little there, every bit helps and goes toward your daily time goal.

Stand

Many people have jobs where they sit for a good chunk of the day. Sound familiar? Apple’s Stand ring within the Activity app will remind you to move at least once per hour so you get up and walk around. By default, you’ll be notified about 50 minutes into each hour of sitting idle.

To access and use the Stand tab in the Activity app, follow these steps:

1. Press the Digital Crown button to access your Home screen.
2. Tap the Activity app.
   Or raise your wrist and say “Hey, Siri, Activity.” Either action launches the Activity app and you should see the Activity app’s main (summary) screen.
3. Swipe up to see your Stand data.
   In blue, you’ll see how many hours you were standing (at least one minute per hour). There is also a percentage shown, in blue, of how you’re doing against your total goal hours for the day (such as 12).
4. Swipe down to access the History graph.
   You should see the day laid out chronologically and a full vertical bar for any hour you stood (for at least a minute per hour).

Getting turn-by-turn directions on your Apple Watch

Apple Maps — or simply Maps — is one of the built-in Apple Watch apps. As you might expect, it allows you to get directions from your current location to a destination of your choosing, with the app calculating the best route.

You should see — and feel — the turn-by-turn navigation instructions to guide you along the way, and you can always search for nearby businesses, such as a restaurant or a gas station, simply by asking Siri for it.

To use the Maps app on your Apple Watch, follow these steps:

1. Press the Digital Crown button to go to your Home screen.
2. Tap the Maps app. Or raise your wrist and say “Hey, Siri, Maps.” Either action opens the Maps app.
3. Tap the Search window and type out (or tap microphone to speak) the destination address. The three horizontal lines on the right side of the Search window let you select nearby points of interest, such as a gas station, restaurant, coffee shop, hotels, and more.

   After you select a business, contact or address, you see an estimate of how long it might take to get there by foot, by car, when cycling, or via transit.

4. Tap Start to map your route. After you say, type or tap a destination, follow the instructions as you make your way to your destination. If you need to turn right, you feel a steady series of a dozen taps on your wrist at the intersection you’re approaching.

   To turn left, you should feel three pairs of two taps. If you’re walking, you can also glance down at your screen for visual cues — if it’s safe to do so and not while walking across a street.