Refining Apple Watch for Fitness/Outdoors?

[A3GIS]

Hello!

I’ve been using Apple Watches for years, however more recently my focus has changed from the general usage of the watch to fitness and outdoor usage.

Overall this worked fine for the past year, and I got into much better shape between Fitness+, my own workouts, and a new obsession with outdoor cycling/mountain biking. However, as I moved from “enthusiast” to a hard focus on fitness and athleticism, I started to feel a lot more disappointment with the Apple Watch’s tracking abilities. Because of this, I picked up a Garmin Fenix 6 Pro, which overall I’ve been mostly happy with for fitness and sleep tracking, but on the other hand, it’s massively disappointing on the notifications and smartwatch front. Because of this, I’m hoping someone can chime in with options to make the Apple Watch suit my needs more so that I can go back to it.

The features I’m really looking to correct or gain are below:

- Accurate and consistent heart rate monitoring during workouts
- Accurate V02 Max
- Sleep Tracking and reporting
- Live GPS mapping for hiking/mountain biking
- Features similar to Garmin’s Stress monitoring and Body Battery if possible?
- More full fledged biking stats than the workout app provides

Consistently I’ve run into issues with my Apple Watch not tracking my heart rate, or not tracking it accurately - IE, getting stuck on a super low bpm (47bpm while I know my heart rate is 160+bpm, for example). This extends to V02 Max readings as my Apple Watch has consistently shown me with a very low V02 Max, however when measured by other means (including the Fenix) I’m in the excellent range.

Overall I’m looking to move back to the Apple Watch, however I want it to handle the fitness needs I have, rather than needing to swap out to the Fenix when focusing on fitness. Any advice, app suggestions, calibration tips, or similar would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Monkswhiskers]

Try WorkOutDoors for maps and Training Today for body battery type readings.
AW wrist based HR is best in class so try restarting or unpairing. And make sure it is snug enough during workouts.
Vo2 max is an estimate using HR and an algorithm so will never be perfect unless you do the lab test. I think apple underestimates and Garmin overestimates from what I understand.
Not sure about biking stats, do you mean cadence/power etc?

 

[A3GIS]

Try WorkOutDoors for maps and Training Today for body battery type readings.
AW wrist based HR is best in class so try restarting or unpairing. And make sure it is snug enough during workouts.
Vo2 max is an estimate using HR and an algorithm so will never be perfect unless you do the lab test. I think apple underestimates and Garmin overestimates from what I understand.
Not sure about biking stats, do you mean cadence/power etc?

The heart rate issue was fairly regular for me. I had tried resets, but not unpairing or recalibrating. My band was always very snug, so I don’t think looseness was the issue. On some occasions it would be significant gaps in a workout (usually cycling, strength training, or yoga/barre, I expect gaps in HIIT or kickboxing due to the amount of movement), on a few occasions it was a complete lack of tracking on a workout entirely. This then translated to skewed caloric readings - sometimes a couple hundred calories off.

On cycling, I’d just prefer a more accurate reading on calories and intensity. I don’t do much road biking, but rather much more mountain biking or intense gravel biking. My usual “fun loop” is 20-25mi with about 4000’ of elevation climb on old logging roads and some more worn in game trails if I’m feeling like adding distance and some more intensity/technical riding. The workout app’s cycling setting seems to strictly be based on road biking on pavement, and because of that stats are skewed quite a bit lower. Via the Fenix, I tend to be consistently higher on active calories for cycling outdoors via the more appropriate mountain biking workout. It’s mostly just a more accurate calorie count I’m after, as that’s a primary metric I focus on. Being off 100-200 active calories per hour can add up significantly, especially on long rides or day trips.

Perhaps the Garmin overestimates, perhaps the Apple Watch will always underestimate. My goal is mainly to get accurate numbers on heart rate, recovery, active calorie burn, and have useful GPS mapping for when I’m hiking or biking in remote areas where there’s potential to get turned around easily. My preference would be to get that out of the Apple Watch if possible, as I don’t spend 24/7 training/focusing on fitness. It’s a bit of every day, but a smaller bit than the general usage of the smartwatch that’s pretty constant.

 

[PatrickNSF]

>> Accurate and consistent heart rate monitoring during workouts <<

In general I find that as long as I get a HR lock at the beginning of a workout (e.g., walking at the beginning of a run until I see the HR lock) it's generally pretty accurate. That being said, I often wear a separate optical strap (a Polar) during most workouts.

>> Features similar to Garmin’s Stress monitoring and Body Battery if possible? <<

Give this a look – https://apps.apple.com/us/app/athlytic/id1543571755

 

[akash.nu]

I’ve been using  watch since years to track my workout and have never had issues with heart rate monitoring. As mentioned before, apple’s implementation is best in class and almost on par with chest strap based sensors.

If you continue to have issues tracking you may want to check with apple if you have any potential hardware issue.