Apple Health, Fitness, and Watch – the trifecta of health

In my last post I reviewed an app called Actifit. Actifit is a pedometer app that tracks your steps and rewards you for those steps with a crypto token called AFIT. While I love this app I’m not trying to track just steps. I’m not in it for the whole 10,000 steps lie the Japanese inflicted on the world.

I’ve tried numerous apps but most are nothing more than pedometers, although MyFitnessPal does allow you to manually add other metrics for measuring body shape etc. This is a nice feature.

Apple has a great set of apps that are built into iOS called Health and Fitness. Paired with an Apple Watch these apps shine for how I’m trying to measure my progress and this post explains all of this. I do have one other app that I’m using but that’s going to be a separate app because it is very much a different style of app.

Apple Health:

Apple Health is the app that stores all health data for the HealthKit APIs. Any health app (including Actifit) can read this data and write to it if they have permission by the user to do so.

There are so many metrics that Apple has allowed us to track and it really is the best way to see all information in one place without going into a million different apps.

Apple Health is very easy to use but you can narrow this down in the Summary screen by choosing your favourite metrics. I have the following:

• Body Fat Percentage
• Body Mass Index
• Heart Rate
• Height (technically shouldn’t change until you get older if you’re an adult)
• Lean Body Mass
• Sleep
• State of Mind
• Steps
• Waist Circumference
• Walking Asymmetry
• Walking Speed
• Weight
• Workouts

These all give me quite a good representation of what my body is doing any given day.

Health can also allow you to track nutrition but we all know how I feel about that. It is interesting to see the minerals going into your body though if it is available on the food label.

All in all the Health app is a wealth of knowledge that allows you to make informed decisions with regards to your body.

Fitness:

The Fitness app ties into the Health app but is more about tracking your movements. Paired with an Apple Watch you get the best view of how you are moving throughout the day.

The thing I love about Fitness is that it tracks ALL movement and not just steps. So for fitness tracking it’s far more rounded than Actifit, MyFitnessPal, or every other fitness app on the market. For this reason I only look at this data because we do more each day than just walking so tracking that data is a must. Step tracking is good but as we’ve already discussed, ALL movement is muscle use and therefore fat burning. Why limit ourselves to just steps? Seems dumb.

Fitness also gives you a great rundown of the workouts you’ve done including maps, heart rates, distances, Kilojoules (or calories if you use that).

Also as part of the Fitness app you have access to Fitness+ if it is available in your country. This is a paid service that gives you access to all sorts of trainer led exercises. I’m not quite ready to use this service just yet but I’ve had plays and they’re pretty good, especially when tied to an Apple Music account.

You can get monthly rewards for completing goals set at the start of the month and you can share your data and compete with friends if you so desire.

Fitness is another very important tool that should not be overlooked for those wanting to keep track of their health.

Apple Watch:

I have a Series 3. I’d love to go for a more modern watch and get some of the features found in them but I can’t afford to do so at the moment. If you want to help with that then feel free to support my with the Ko-Fi link below. Okay, shameless call over.

I love my Apple Watch. It is always a part of me except for my morning shower when I put it on charge from the previous day. I get an entire day of tracking with my watch which is pretty good. Obviously if I’m doing workouts it’s going to hammer the battery as the sensors remain on, but I still get an entire day out of it.

I wear my watch on my right wrist as that’s normally where I wear my watches but also because it’s my dominant hand. This is important because Apple Watch tracks movement not steps like most other watches. Given that my dominant hand is the one doing the most work, it makes sense to use that to track my movement. Like I said, movement is fat loss.

The Series 3 has what would be considered the basic features of an Apple Watch today. I would like to have oxygen sensors to get that metric but that’s not available to me. But I do well with it.

I use the Apple Watch to record my walks and I use it to track when I play in the swimming pool with Little Wookie. I don’t do swimming laps but it’s important to track this as a workout because once again it’s movement and movement is fat loss. It’s also a workout because Little Wookie uses flippers the cheat little bugger.

There are a lot of cool workouts and one I’m starting to use more often is Play. If I’m playing Hide and Seek with Little Wookie or even if I’m just driving down the road, I use Play because it records how my body is moving.

All this data is then synched into Fitness on my iPhone and then imported into Health.

Conclusion:

These three systems combined are like Defensor from Transformers. Separate they’re great, together they form a fat burning robot that destroys those pesky carbohydrates building up in the machine that is my body.

Knowledge is power and together these three systems tell me what my body is doing. I love how even mental health is being tracked which plays a massive role in our fitness.

Yes there are numerous systems out there that do the same but there are none that do it so integrated as in Apple’s ecosystem. I’ve had Fitbits and they’re great but they’re glorified pedometers and don’t track my entire health like Health, Fitness, and Apple Watch do. Plus, my Fitbits died whereas my Apple Watch is now how old(?) and still going great. I had a Fitbit Aria scale as well but it’s now died but before that I couldn’t get it connected to our new router because it was stuck supporting only 802.11bg.

Now that Health is available on iPad and macOS their use is even greater, only I don’t have an iPad or Mac that supports it. But you could change that if you support my… god that feels dirty saying that bollocks.