Previously I’ve done a post all about the Apple watch activity rings and how they motivate you to stay active in life. This week I thought I would visit a different feature of the Apple watch activity app that doesn’t get all up in your face as much. What is the Trends section all about?
In 2019 Apple released “Trends” on the Activity app as part of iOS 13. It’s a great way to see your progress with your fitness goals or activity rings over time. It likes an extension for the rings, extended the three initial figures you would look at to motivate you to 8. How do the “Trends” work? To talk about this were going to use the “Move” goal trend as our example. The move goal is the number of calories burned doing things, often called Active calories which your see when working out. The trends page looks at how many active calories you have burned on each day in a 90-day period. It then compares these to your last 365 days.
Above is a screenshot of my personal move trends. As you can see my Move goal trend arrow is up. If, however I had been doing less in my past 90 days it would be down. Another good example to look at is my current “Stand” goal trend. This is one taken from the Stand ring on your Apple watch. You can see that yes it is above, but where I have been at home more recently it is slowly going below the “13” average and you can even see that the activity app notices it with the small message below the 13hrs/day telling me I’m standing less and less.
Activity Rings the DLC As well as using your three rings the trends app has an additional 5 goals for you to look at. Let’s take a look at each of these: Stand Minutes: As well as your Stand Hour Ring, you’ve now got your average number of minutes stood and moving around each hour. Distance: This one is the total distance you are walking or running around each day. Takes its data from the Steps / Miles for each day in the Activity app. Cardio Fitness: This one is a little more complicated to explain. This Is what it says in the Activity app: “Cardio fitness is a predicted VO2 Max value, which is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise” To simplify it the higher the number the fitter you are. Running / Walking Pace: It gets this figure from your workouts; it doesn’t have to be done using the workouts app it can get its data from Strava as long as you let Strava write to the health app. As you get faster over time you should see this arrow stay up. Running and walking are actually two separate trend categories’ but are similar. Personally I don’t start recording workout’s when I am walking so It doesn’t have enough data for me but it’s a good example of what it looks like when it doesn’t have enough as for Trends to work properly it needs to have 90 days’ worth of data.
It would be cool if…
Notifications, There isn’t any. For people who don’t go on the activity app much (Or not at all) they might not realise the features of Trends are even there. It would be pretty cool if we could get a notification when are trends are heading down. It may even motivate you more to get your rings closed. This could be implemented as part of the “Daily Training” feature or even a separate section which could switched on or off.
Hopefully you know a little more about the Trend features now, It can be quite insightful for people who have had their Apple Watch a long time. If you have any questions about it still, Tweet me @kylewilkinson46 I’ll do my best to answer any questions you might have.
Check out my other post about the Activity rings here: https://www.kylewilkinsononline.com/post/the-apple-watch-activity-challenges
Thanks for reading,
Kyle Wilkinson
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