I’m a long-term Apple Watch user. So far, it has been good for building health awareness and tracking workouts. It has definitely improved my fitness, or at least my awareness of my fitness. But the Apple Watch Activity app has problematic assumptions about working out every day. There’s no concept of rest days, which could potentially lead to overtraining. You can set daily goals, but you have to do it manually every day. Without a coach or a training plan, I really don’t know what goals to set and when to set them. This led to a situation where I set a very average goal and tried to train every day. This meant that I would start a workout even if I was going for a walk or biking to friends across town. By starting a workout whenever possible, I was trying to meet my Activity app goals.
The Apple Watch’s activity coaching feature won’t help you avoid overtraining, either. If you train hard on a Saturday, it will probably try to motivate you to beat that result on Sunday. I have no personal experience with overtraining, so I don’t know how this would affect me. But I doubt that any real coach would recommend that the average, mostly untrained hobbyist like me beat one day’s results the next day. Some third-party applications offer calculations based on the TSB model that can provide some guidance on how to avoid overtraining.
Another shortcoming of using the Apple Watch activity coaching system is that there are no suggestions for specific workout types. A key metric for improving overall fitness seems to be maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max). The Apple Watch tracks this and puts it in the Health app. But there’s nothing in the coaching model that responds to changes in this metric.
Enter the age of AI-powered personal coaching: I’m currently testing a third-party training app that monitors my workouts.
It actively tries to avoid overtraining by scheduling rest days and endurance improvement workouts.
For example, today’s endurance workout was 40 minutes of cycling with a target heart rate of 120-140 bpm.
My goal is to improve my VO2 max by following the suggested workouts, which also include interval training.
I was surprised to see that this third-party app offers to export its suggested workouts to the Apple Watch Workout app because Apple now offers an API for that.
In summary, I’m now trying to train with intention.
I can now stop worrying about how to close the rings in the Apple Watch Activity app.
Instead, I’ll try to work out on the days that my third-party training app tells me to.
It would be nice if Apple also provided an API for third-party apps to set daily activity goals.
For now, I’ve disabled all Apple activity reminders.
