Using Workouts

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Workouts are exactly that, your recorded gym sessions, walks, runs, rides, swims, anytime you use your Apple Watch to capture an exercise session, it will appear in HeartWatch Workouts. Refer to Watch Use - Workouts for information on starting and recording a new workout.

Workout Summary

A complete day of all workouts combined into the one graph can be viewed under the Workouts section. This lets you combine one or more workouts to see how much time you are spending in each heart rate zone for the entire day. So if I completed 4 workouts in one day, the Workout Summary would add them all together for a complete picture. How good is that!

Heart rate zones are automatically calculated based on your Maximum Heart Rate which is setup in Settings. The zone ranges from most intense including Extreme; High Intensity; Building Fitness; Fat Burn; Warmup/Health and Resting. Remember all exercise is good exercise, but the Workout Summary is great to see where your heart rate is spending time in different zones.

Tap on the Workouts Summary to drill into the list view of all your workouts, or Press and Hold the summary to be directed to the Dashboard graphs with the Workouts tab pre-loaded.

Tip - Below the Summary pie chart you will see your Avg HR which is your average across all your workouts, plus you will see your Max HR which is the highest your heart rate reached acrossed all the combined activities.

Workout Breakdown

A 6 week breakdown view can be viewed under the Workouts section. This lets you see where you are spending the most energy, time or training load on your activities. The bigger the piece of pie, the more of that activity you are completing!

The pie chart will show your top 5 activities by name, then group any remaining into 'other'. You can change the pie chart metric by tapping either Cals/Kjs, Time or Load (Training Load). See below.

Breakdowns - List View

Tap the Workouts Breakdown pie chart and you will open the list view showing all your previous 6 weeks of activities. Tap any workout from the list to be directed straight to that workout.

From the workouts list view, you can also filter the activities by tapping the 'All' link in the top right corner. This will show all the activities you have completed. In the example below, I can select one, multiple or all activities. Here I am selecting 'Running - Indoor' which will filter the list view on the previous screen to only 'Running - Indoor' activities. Remember to tap on 'Done' to apply the new filter.

Tip - depending on the pie chart metric you had selected (Cals/Kjs, Time or Load) back on the front Workouts Breakdown pie chart, the filter option shown above is also very handy in that it displays a bar graph with the weighted value for those activities. In this example you can see 'Running - Indoor' has used the most calories of 4284, hence it has a longer bar. The same bar graphs will apply for Time or Load if these were selected on the pie chart. Brillant!

Breakdowns - Dashboard View

Touch and hold (or long press) the Workouts Breakdown pie chart and you will be directed to the Dashboards view, pre-loading all your workouts. We strongly recommend reviewing the Dashboards instructions to see how these amazing insights all work.

Workout Tiles

We think HeartWatch Workouts is the best app available for capturing your sessions, but as an added bonus, keep in mind that HeartWatch will also show sessions from any other workout apps that connects to your iPhones Health app (for example, an Eclipse app session will appear). The more workouts you do in any one day, the more tiles that appear.

See below 3 workout tiles for 3 different workout sessions recorded on the one day. The tile shows a summary of the workout, but you can also also swipe the tile to see additional information. You can then select the tile to see your workout in finer detail.

Load & RPE

Ever heard of the phrase "Load Management" with athletes? Its used by lots of professional sporting organisations the world over to monitor fitness and fatigue, but is a great indicator for anyone who exercises a little or a lot.

A new metric added to HeartWatch is Internal Training Load, referred to as Load for short. Load represents your response to exercising, quantified by the intensity and duration of each workout you perform. You will notice when you end a HeartWatch workout now, a new question called RPE appears which is a value from 0 (resting) to 10 (max effort). This stands for 'Rate of Perceived Exertion', which in layman's terms is asking you how hard the session felt. There is no right or wrong, it's unique to you, as some training days you feel great and others not so. The only rule is try be honest, you may also find its quite satisfying validating the intensity of your workouts. Refer to the Watch Use section for entering an RPE after a workout.

This validated formula uses the RPE score x Duration (mins) to give you Load, so a 30min run with an RPE of 2 would be 60 load units. Refer to the below RPE table that provides some guidance on the values. We recommend using HeartWatch for all your workouts so you can assign an RPE and get an exact Load, using a 3rd party workout apps will apply a model to estimate the Load.

Tip - track your load in the Dashboards view under the Workouts - Load tab with a 7 day and 21 day trend line to see if your intensity and duration is going up, down or maintaining. The 21 day trend in particular can be used as a great fitness indicator.

Viewing Workouts

Once you drill into a Workout tile, your entry will appear in detail. All the key details of your session will appear, such as heart rate zone breakups, graphs, maps, durations, recovery, distance, average, maximum and minimum heart rates to name but a few. Scroll down the screen to view more information.

Distance & Pace

While on the workouts screen, you will notice that you can drill into Distance. This lets you select the whatever pace metric you like, great for users you are looking to track shorter (eg. 200m splits) or longer (5km splits) intervals. You can even select km/h or mph!

Workout Heartbeat

A fantastic graph of your exercising heart rate appears at the bottom of the workout screen. Simply scroll down or tap any part of the graph to go to that time in the workout. The horizontal bars show your heart rate and your max heart rate % with the corresponding heart rate zone colour, its a great way to easily see the results of your session.

Recovery Heartbeat

Following a workout, you can utilise the 2min Recovery feature on the Watch app (highly recommended), the recovery session will be highlighted in a light grey on the workout graph (see below). You can see how it now displays your recovery heartbeat, counting the 2min time period and showing you precisely how much your heartrate has dropped at that point in time. Note your heartrate has to be slightly elevated to perform a 2min recovery reading, your watch will notify you if too low to record a measurement.

Recovery Ratings

A rating of one to five stars will show on your Watch and iPhone workout summary following the 2 minute recovery, to provide some context around the recovery bpm. The more stars, the better your heart rate recovery. This rating is based on your gender and age, as seen in the below table to rate your heart recovery.

Edit a Workout

It happens to the best of us, sometimes you forgot to stop a workout and need to edit it. You can do this in HeartWatch by going into the specific workout entry you wish to edit, and tapping on the 'Edit' link in the top right corner. This allows you to update the start time, end time and effort (RPE). Note you can only Edit entries that were originally created by HeartWatch, we unfortunately have no edit control for sources from other apps (so we suggest using HeartWatch - nudge nudge). See below how to Edit. Remember to tap 'Update' once you are happy with any changes.

Deleting a Workout

Only use this if absolutely essential, but again its a very handy option to have. When in the above Edit view, you will notice a rubbish bin icon in the top right corner. Tapping this will ask you to confirm the removal of the workout. Tapping Yes will delete the workout. Tapping No will cancel and keep the workout. As above, this option is only available on workouts originally created in HeartWatch, this is Apple policy.

If you created the workout using a different 3rd party app, you can manually remove the entry via the Health app, but be careful as once the record is removed, it is erased for good. Here are the steps:


1. Go into Apple Health app. It has a white icon with picture of a red heart on it.

2. Touch Browse tab.

3. Select Activity

4. Find workouts in the list and select it.

5. Scroll to the bottom and choose Show All Data.

6. You can now find the problem workout and delete it. This will let you identify the problem app.


Now you go back into HeartWatch, select the day you wanted the workout removed, then pull to refresh and you will be ok.

GPS Maps

If you use one of the following workout activities - Outdoor Run, Outdoor Walk, Outdoor Cycle or Outdoor Hiking, a GPS activation will show on your Watch when you start the workout using HeartWatch. Wait for the GPS to lock and then select Go. A location map will be available to view from your Workout record in the iPhone app. This is selected by tapping the Location which will open a maps view (see below).

Maps has a vast arrange of functionality when you press the (i) icon that appears in the top right corner, where you can change to satellite or flyover views, you can overlap your pace, distance or heart rate. You can even do a playback by selecting a pop-up and tapping the play button. It really is a fantastic GPS maps view to explore. More details below on using the GPS viewer, or refer to the Watch Use - Workouts section for starting a GPS enabled workout.

Using GPS Viewer

Once in the GPS viewer you move around the map by using your finger to touch and slide, or using two fingers to pinch in/out to zoom. Your recorded GPS track will be outlined. Tap the info (i) icon in the top right corner to open the GPS controls which will appear at the bottom of the screen. Select a map visualisation from the standard Map, Hybrid, Satellite or Flyover (this one is especially cool).

GPS Markers

Different markers will show on the outlined GPS track, you can update the sample size of the markers to show from 1 minute (default) to 15 seconds for additional readings, or switch to just the MinMax depending on the metric you are viewing. For example, if Im looking at the BPM metric, the MinMax will show where I hit my highest BPM and also my lowest BPM. You can also tap on any marker on the map which will highlight it and enlarge the metric.

GPS Metrics

Changing your metrics is great way to view different overlays on the one map. You have the option to view your pace, distance, bpm, zone (heartrate %) or alt (altitude). When you tap on a metric the markers will update, but it will also open the Metric Controls that lets you view all metrics for that one GPS reading. Tap on any of the metrics and the markers again will update. See below how tapping each metric updates the markers..

GPS Playback

For something a little different, you can also play back your GPS session and watch all your metrics update automatically. At the bottom of the Metric Control panel you will see little Play/Back/Forward controls. A small yellow dot will follow your GPS course, showing where you were at, what your heart rate was, your pace and so on. Tap on the Play to automatically play/stop and watch the dot (which is you), make your way around the track, or use the back and forward controls to manually view your progress. Its quite addictive viewing!

Workouts Video

Try the following video which shows the basics for using the Workout Tiles and GPS view:

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