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No way to manually add steps/minutes of exercise??

redman042

redman042

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jun 13, 2008
3,063
1,657
I've searched for answers on this and the result appears to be "NO", but haven't found any posts on the topic newer than a year old... so I'll post the question in case there's been any new developments either in the latest OS's or via third party apps.

Is there any way to manually add exercise minutes, steps, and/or calories into the Activity app on the watch/phone?

An example of where this is needed is that my wife cannot wear her watch while sparring in Tae Kwon Do, but she would like to manually add minutes of exercise to reflect this activity.

From what I've seen online, you can enter some of these parameters in the Health app, but the entries won't push back to Activities. I found one third party app that claims to be able to enter data into Activities, but it only has three reviews and two of them say it doesn't work right.
 
redman042 said:
I've searched for answers on this and the result appears to be "NO", but haven't found any posts on the topic newer than a year old... so I'll post the question in case there's been any new developments either in the latest OS's or via third party apps.

Is there any way to manually add exercise minutes, steps, and/or calories into the Activity app on the watch/phone?

An example of where this is needed is that my wife cannot wear her watch while sparring in Tae Kwon Do, but she would like to manually add minutes of exercise to reflect this activity.

From what I've seen online, you can enter some of these parameters in the Health app, but the entries won't push back to Activities. I found one third party app that claims to be able to enter data into Activities, but it only has three reviews and two of them say it doesn't work right.
Click to expand...

No. At the moment you just can't. Maybe next version of OS.
I read that you can, however, deleting one you want to in Health app though. Not sure if it's true or not.
 
Thanks.

I get the feeling Apple really doesn't want anyone tampering with that data. Given that you can share your progress with friends and form sort of a competition, perhaps they don't want anyone cheating.

But there are some situations where one can't wear their watch while exercising, and there's also the issue of exercise minutes being counted inconsistently.
 
I believe that is true of 3rd party apps as well, where you cannot edit the data. It would make any kind of challenge format difficult if people were able to edit as they please. It would definitely have to be an honor system type challenge.
 
The problem is that some people (my wife and a friend of hers for example) get pretty obsessed with tracking all their exercise (it's a great form of motivation), so when the watch doesn't pick it up accurately or for some reason they can't wear the watch, it's pretty upsetting to them that they can't record something manually. The FitBit allows this, and even though (IMO) the Apple Watch provides many advantages over the FitBit, this one limitation makes converts pretty frustrated.

Something for Apple to think about...
 
redman042 said:
Something for Apple to think about...
Click to expand...

One idea for OP is you could try to find Tae Kwan Do iPhone app that allows you to manually input exercise and if it is able to write Active Energy and Workout to Health app your data will get added to Health and in the process get added to Move ring. I used to use swimming app to do exactly this before there is Series 2 which has built-in swimming workout. At that time I couldn't wear my OG watch on the pool so I had to manually enter everything after but it would get add to Health.
I believe many Weight Trainging iPhone app also works this way.
 
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