Opinion: How Not to Work Out with Apple Watch

hi there, I'd just like to point out, that much of what you have said, stands as much for any activity tracker. some of them, of course, can help to track food intake as well as outgoing energy, but never the less, this requires you making sure you record *everything* you eat. and I do mean, every little thing. on the other hand, doing so, helps you to learn what you are doing, and where you are going wrong. even if you only do a food log for a couple weeks outside of an app, as a notebook or digital file, it helps you to understand just what you're doing. some people though, find that hard, or they think they are logging everything, when they actually don't. so far, I've managed to keep myself probably about 90 to 95% logged. I don't always log everything, specially if something is super low. like snacking on some raw green beans or something, where in 1 or 2 beans is pretty much nothing.
anyway, another point here, is a mistake a lot of people make. and it's partly to do with how these sorts of devices are marketed. they are, actually activity trackers, not *fitness* trackers. and that is a very, very important point. they are actually hopelessly bad at tracking fitness. they are good, at giving you an idea of how much you're moving every day though, and sometimes, this is actually more important then so called fitness. as we are finding out these days, fitness, IE working out with weights for 30 / 60 mins a day, and taking a walk, either outside or on a treadmill, for lets say 30 mins, is all well and good. but, this is pointless if you then go home, and say that's it. my day is done, now I can relax for the rest of the day and watch netflix. ... uh oh. suddenly, you've burned plenty of calories for an hour or 2, and for the final 22 hours, you sit down or lay down or what ever. so the important thing an activity tracker can do for you, is help to get you up and moving around more. and here is an interesting point. standing for hours, is actually no better then sitting for hours. sure, there is a very slight increase of your caloric burn from supporting muscles helping you to stay on your feet, but nothing much really. the tip here, is something I'm sure a lot of mothers are going to hate. LOL. I don't know how many times I got told, stop pacing. .. no, don't do that. in fact, keep doing it. as much as you can. because, as it happens, our bodies are designed to move a lot. they are built to move all day.
and as a handy point, pacing around all day, or at least for several hours, burns through your so called 10000 step per day count. in fact, yesterday, I blew past it, to nearly 19000. LOL. and that was without even attempting to do so.
of course, this doesn't mean that exercise isn't important. as it is. how ever, we are learning now that it only plays a part. it isn't the end all and be all of how you stay fit / active.
in my case, I work out 3 to 4 days a week in the gym. working weights for about 45 to 60 mins, going through the hole lot in one day. then, I break for a day, then work out again. and so on. so I currently have workouts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. then the weekend off. I also walk / pace around the house a lot when I can, when my mother isn't here. :P
on top of that, if I am listening to a podcast, or youtube videos or something, or anything really that doesn't require me to be actually typing / interacting with my computer, I am now trying to get myself to get up and pace around my room. sure, it's not a walk in the sense of going some place, but it's movement.
and yes, I too have experienced the pants thing. ... excepting, the other way around. in about febuary of 2015, I started to think about controlling my intake of sugar through coke / pepsi. so I moved to pepsi max. and yes, I know I'm going to get some people saying, "get off that, it's not much better than the sugar." how ever, it has so far worked for me. I will be working on getting off even the diet drinks, but at the moment, I'm doing ok.
at that time, I was, around 168 cm tall, IE 5 feet 6 inches for those Americans unable to convert on the fly, I weighed in at about 86.5 kg, 190 pounds, and my waist was bulging out to about 92 to 95cm, 36.2 inches to 37.4 inches. as you can imagine, if you have researched such things, I wasn't happy with where I was. I was aiming straight towards metabolic syndrome / diabetes type 2. if I wasn't there already. I thought, not doing this. can't do this. I have to stop and do something here.
so that's when I moved to pepsi max, and started to *sort of* control my diet. I didn't take it too far at that point, but I wanted to see what happened. well, what happened, is I dropped from 86.5 kg, to 72, inside 3 to 4 months. that's 190 pounds, down to 158 pounds. wow, I thought, ok, this is going good. how ever, I got a little stuck at this point, my body didn't seem to want to go lower. so I started to focus on dieting more. at this point, I really had no way of working out, so I left that alone. anyway, I dropped down another 7 or so kilos in the next year and a half or so I guess.
then, in august last year, I got the chance to get into a gym that had opened up locally. this meant that I was now able to work out regularly, as long as the tropical rains we get here don't try washing me down the street. :P
so I have now been working out for a good 3 or 4 months. the reason I say 3 or 4 months, and not closer to 5 or 6, is because I went away travelling at the end of September, and I couldn't find a way to get into a gym to do my normal weighted workouts. mind you, I didn't put on weight either. I maintained my controlled, calorie restricted diet, and kept my then current 62 kg weight pretty much level.
I have now been home for about a month and 2 or 3 weeks, and have been continuing to work out with weights, and get as much movement as I can. as well as messing with my diet to find a way to keep the weight off in that regard as well. my weigh lifting has maintained a continual increase in weight lifting ability, and my walking is now getting to the point where I can walk for hours sometimes, and don't notice much.
my breathing doesn't even increase much, unless I push myself to maximum walking speed, which for me used to be about 4 to 5 km/h. but now, is up around the 6.8 km/h mark. so I can walk very fast now. but if I maintain about a 5 to 6 km/h speed, I can do it for ages.
where am I now in terms of weight / measurements? well, my height hasn't increased or decreased, * as far as I know* :P
how ever, my weight is now, as of this morning, 60.3 kg, 132.9 pounds. so that's a loss of 26.2 kg, or 57 pounds! and my waist has shrunk down from 92 to 95 cm, 36.2 inches to 37.4 inches, to 75 cm, 29.5 inches!
As for my clothing, I had to replace my shorts and shirts about 6 months ago, as the ones I had at the time, were baggy after losing weight and toning up. ... uh, one problem. I now find myself having to do so again, as in the last month or 2, I've shrunk even more, and now the clothes I purchase barely 6 months ago, are falling off me!
and I found myself fitting into clothes I hadn't been able to wear in years.
at this point, I don't have an apple watch, though I have been thinking about getting one. I've got a fitbit charge HR, and find it very very good at tracking steps and walking and such things, how ever, I'm not happy with the caloric burn it's giving me for exercising, as it seems to be giving me totally wrong data. IE, a walk of 10 mins giving me a burn of about 40 cals. I wish! try closer to 20 to 25. anyway, outside that, I've found it handy to give me an idea of what I'm doing. or, not doing.
I'd really like to get hold of an apple watch, so I as I can run it through some tests to see how accurate it's caloric burns and tracking is.
I'll leave you with this. I could go on for ages about these devices, as I find them to be very good at helping some people, but unfortunately, they do have that side effect of throwing people off and making them think they can eat more and so on, destroying any progress they have made. if you have the information and can control yourself, then you can keep yourself from doing that, and they are then quite handy tools. but if not, I'd actually think you'd be better off without one, or at least not using the apple watch for fitness / activity tracking. as the information it gives can be miss leading.
I'm going to be doing a DEXA scan next week, to see where I am in body composition. unfortunately, I didn't do one before I started all of this, as I'd like to be able to compare them. but never the less, I'll be interested to see where I am now, and just how much good this set up of exercise / movement / dieting / tracking has done for me.
and of course, as said before, don't take this as a statement of how everybody needs to do things. as everybody works differently, and doing things this way might actually not work so well for you. it's just how I do things at the moment. and that's of course another point. you actually find that quite a lot, you need to change how you do things as your body changes. what works for us now, won't necessarily work in a years time, or in 5 years.

Hello mehgcap,
Thanks for the great blog post! As always, a well balanced approach. I love it! I am inspired. :-)
This may be a bit OT... Any apps you might suggest for someone who only has an iPhone, but no watch? I am also mostly home-bound from light sensitivity, but have floor mats and some stationary exercise equipment, plus some hand-weights.
Thanks again for the great post!

Fantastic post. I, too, got an Apple Watch to be more active and track my fitness. I also got it to be lazier about taking my phone out of my pocket so often. So far, I've found it pretty decent at accomplishing both tasks. I've only had my watch for a week, though, so we'll see as time goes on.

I go to the gym 5 days a week. I am a heavy lifter/olympic style lifter. I have a good program in place to make sure I can maintain this level of activity without overdoing it. I've been going strong for 6 months, now. I have to admit, my self-control when it comes to eating, isn't very good. I burn a ton of calories, I eat a ton of calories. In some ways, this has actually helped. I eat a lot of bad stuff, but eating poorly also means I get loads of protein which has equaled a great deal of muscle gain. I know food logging helps, but, particularly when it comes to home-cooked meals, using something like MyFitnessPal is tedious in the extreme. An app I'm trying now is Streaks, which lets you track six goals at once for developing into positive habits.

It's an odd feeling to have your body visibly changing shape, yet to have your core, i.e., my gut, stay close to the same. I started this mess with a 44 inch waistline, and now I'm down to a 41 inch waistline--not as drastic a change as the person above after six months. In short, I, too, am struggling, and I'm hoping the watch will help me stay on track better. For cardio, targeting heart rates is far more effective than targeting distances. A long time ago, when I was in much better shape, I wanted to be a runner, and a friend who is a fantastic runner gave me that advice, and it worked. I targeted 160 bpm for 30 to 45 minutes per run, and as time went by, I had to work harder and harder to get to 160 bpm.

Anyway! Goodluck, and thanks for the great post.

I do not have an Apple Watch. I do use my iPhone to track exercise and food. For food logging, I use My Fitness Pal, and for exercise, SWorkit.

At first, as noted above, logging everything into My Fitness Pal can be tedious, but since it logs your food history, adding food becomes easier as time goes on. It can create frequently paired foods, recipes and common meals to make things even more efficient. It interfaces with the Health app to track work outs and steps. For me it is now,, after almost two years of continuous use, just a part of my daily routine.

SWorkit is not fully accessible, but, it is usable. I work with the stretching, strength, and Fitness Plan options to keep myself moving and motivated.

In nice weather, I use Run Keeper when walking to keep me mindful of my distance and pace.

All this has added up to almost 150 pounds lost in two years, and I am successfully maintaining my weight loss.

I am intrigued by fitness trackers, and while I think a Fit Bit of some flavour would be useful, I have so far avoided the purchase as I feel I am getting enough information from my self monitoring, and, I'd really rather have an Apple Watch, but don't feel I need to buy yet another device.

Good luck to all on your personal fitness journeys.

hiya, here's an interesting point to those considering getting an activity tracker. i've actually noticed myself, and read a lot of reviews and reports that show the same, that having the activity tracker, can actually go the other way. what happens is, the information it's working with is offen wrong to start with. on top of that, sensing heart rate, unless done by a chest strap, is so way out it's not even funny. plus, with each one having their own slightly different ways of calculating caloric burn for the exercise you do, they don't even all match up. now, throw that on top of a human problem. and that human problem is this. we have a tendency to want to balance. IE, ok, lets say your bmr is about 2000 KCAL for the day. your activity tracker says you've burned about an extra 500 in dayly NEAT, and or exercise. ok, so now you say to yourself, i have 2500 calories i can eat today! ... ahh, but do you? firstly, how right was the device / software at calculating your caloric burn. we are, after all, different, and our muscles are different. so where as a person my size with very very little muscle mass, loads of fat mass, and very little toning will take perhaps, larger amounts of over all energy to perform a task, I, on the other hand, would perform said task a lot easier. IE, the caloric burn, is different. how ever, these sorts of systems don't really take any of that into account.
so suddenly you'll find yourself over eating, even without knowing it, simply cause you're following the info the device has given you. i've seen this in myself, and ended up having to correct for it.
It's for this reason, and many other reasons, why some people, thinking that they are going to get a device that will help them to drop the weight / fat, and tone up, end up ... gaining weight / fat. it's not all bad, if you can learn to stick to your diet, your set caloric burn for an average day, and not shift from it, you'll do ok. then just count those days when you happen to burn 500 calories extra, as an extra weight loss day and a bonis. but very few of us do so. specially when there is a lovely pizza in front of us, or that super creamy chocolate ice cream, ... or name your poison. i've actually been thinking about ditching the activity tracker, and see how i go.
I don't know. perhaps an apple watch would do things a little better in some regards. in that it's more focused on movement, then exercise, which is quite right to do. but i still think it will face the same problem of helping people to over estimate how much they can eat. because again, these aren't medical devices, they aren't calabrated to you properly, only on a very basic level, and they can only give you so much information as a result. what i would love to see, is things like the apple watch be able to analyze your blood glucose, insulin count, although i think that one's a ways off, and other such bio markers. as they can actually give you really good info about how your body is performing.
but i dout that we'll see such things just yet. soon i think, but not yet.
I really would like to test an apple watch fully, to see how it does things in the newer OS, and how it compares to things like fitbit.

hiya Sam, yeah, there is that. not sure about the beer, but the chocolate, yummyy! lol. yeah it's always a matter of we know what we should / shouldn't be doing, but maintaining that, is often where things fall apart. but yes, this is what makes weight loss, or should I define that better. fat loss, as you don't want to lose muscles, is sometimes so hard. it's a matter of us being the problem more often then not, not the tech. I do wish we had advanced to the stage where in I could order up a replicater produced, perfectly set meal. IE x amount of fat, x amount of carbs, and x amount of protein. that would be totally awesome. as it is, if you're not a good cook, or not one that wants to do it all the time, you end up falling back to highly processed meals, which we all know, aren't good for us. but right now, they are more likely then not to be what we pull out of the fridge / freezer.
bring on the day when I can tell siri via my watch to order me up a particular meal. :P
or, better yet, have meal services / take away that's actually, *gasp* healthy!
I do love myfitness pal, it works really well, and isn't that much of a problem. I use the camera to scan in bar codes of foods when I can, so I don't have to enter things manually. and if I tend to have certain things regularly together, I put them in a meal so I can add just one thing to add 2 or 3 items. also, if it's a home cooked meal, I have started to put the ingredients in to recipes, thus making it a lot easier to track things. and that also adds it as one item, rather then every vegetable, scrap of meat, and so on as a separate entry. it's not very easy to set up recipes on the web, I've had trouble with that. but on iOS, it works well.
I did try the very first apple watch, and wasn't to happy with it. partly that was because of me, {my arm wasn't used to having something on it,} and partly it was how slow the interface was. but now that a lot of that second thing has been fixed, or at least as best as they can for now, I'd really like to get one and run it through it's paces. pun intended. just haven't got the money for it at the moment, they aren't cheap over here in Australia. they want $579 for the 42 mm, which is the only one I'd consider for a couple of reasons. that's $438 US dollars right now. compare that to in the US apple store, where the exact same watch is $399. ug. apple, stop charging us so much more then Americans. it all comes from china, after all. anyways, when I have enough money aside I'll be looking at getting one, and give it a second going over. hopefully this time I'll be able to stick with it, and find it more useful.
I do hope that apples continues to work on it, as they are making great inroads into the activity tracking world.
Also, as a side note, actually, apparently the heart rate tracking on the apple watch is fairly good. not too far off a chest strap. and chest straps are within 1 or 2 beats of an ecg much of the time. so that's actually doing really well. let's hope they don't mess that up. fitbit on the other hand ... uh. bad. just bad. rofl. checked my blood pressure this morning, which showed me a heart rate of 33, {resting rate, hadn't moved from bed yet.] I used an app on my phone to run a secondary test with the iPhone's camera, which showed 34. damn I thought, that's good. the camera is showing the same as a bp monitor. then from curiosity, I checked what my fitbit charge HR was showing, which took a bit, as it didn't seem to even want to see my heart rate. then after a little bit, it showed me a result, .... 60? uh! so I ran a bp test again and camera heart rate check, as well as a manual check by hand, all of which showed my rate to now be 35 or so. 35 on both machines, around the same by my hand estimation. so yeah. fitbit's is just wacky. I will be very interested to see what apple makes of my heart rate. as long as it don't get confused thinking it can't find my pulse when it knows it's on me, and starts locking me out all the time, or even calling the emergency services as the watch can now do! lucky they haven't configured it that way, as I'd for ever be ending up with a watch calling an ambulance for me. ahaha
and that is actually one other reason i do like the idea of the watch now, it means it can now actually provide a very handy service to people, in that if you're in trouble, you're no more then an arm raise away from calling for help.

As always peeps it is just a device that records stats
It is the user who decides how to use the device it you might assist in motivating you to lose weight and even helping you count calories but
All of it is in your hands
Whatever your goal is, you need to want to achieve it. Choose to use the device or not but ultimately you are the one accountable.
I love my Apple Watch and think it has motivated me in a way, but along the way I learned that it is just a device to give me stats and ultimately it’s my job to count calories/learn about different exercises and what’s best for my body etc
Good article friend, thank you