Stay Motivated: How to Track Workouts on Your iPhone Without an Apple Watch

Apple’s fitness app has always needed an Apple Watch to monitor, track, and view your workouts and fitness routines. Your watch tracks calories you burn (exercise), length of your workout (exercise), and how many hours you spend standing (standing) as rings. With the jump to iOS 16, your iPhone can now monitor your workouts without needing the watch.

With its own built-in motion sensors, iPhone tracks your physical activity throughout the day, as well as any workouts you do through supported third-party apps. Your phone can then display your calories burned, steps taken, stairs climbed, and total distance traveled for the current day and previous days, weeks, and months.

While this feature is good news for iPhone users who don’t own an Apple Watch, there are some limitations when it comes to tracking your workouts, namely that the iPhone lacks the sensors to track workout length and stand time, so the only ring that it can handle is the one for Move.

The Apple Fitness+ subscription is also not supported on your iPhone as you would need an Apple Watch to track your activity.

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Set up Apple Fitness

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To use the fitness app on your iPhone, you must first be running iOS 16, which is currently in public beta. Next, open the Fitness app on your phone. If you’ve never used the app, you’ll be prompted to enter certain key information, such as date of birth, gender, height, and weight. Beat Finished and then Continue.

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You can then set how active you want to be each day – light, moderate or vigorous – or use the Plus (+) and Minus (-) buttons to set a specific number of calories you want to burn. Beat Set the movement target to finalize.

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The app will then ask you to turn on notifications for the app, explaining that this will help you close your rings, see your trends, and cheer on your friends. Beat Continuethen To allow for the fitness app to send you notifications. You will then be taken to the summary screen.

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view metrics

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Now, when you’re working hard all day, just leave your iPhone in your pocket and it’ll track your activity. To view today’s metrics, open the Fitness app on your phone. The Activity section of the Summary screen shows the following:

• Move: The number of calories you have burned from the number of calories you want to burn as a daily goal.

• Steps: The pedometer shows the number of steps taken so far.

• Distance: The distance counter shows how far you walked that day.

Tap the activity area to scroll down and see the movement ring with a graph showing how much you’ve accomplished for the day relative to your overall goal. The numbers below the graphic show the steps, distances and flights climbed so far.

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Tap the change movement target Link if you want to change the number of calories you want to burn each day. From there you can also travel back in time to view your stats for days gone by. Swipe right on the screen to go back one day. You can also tap a specific date at the top to view the results for that day, or click the calendar icon at the top to select a specific date.

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show trends

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If you need extra motivation to close your ring each day, click Getting started under the Trends section of the Summary screen. Beat OK, and once you’ve generated 180 days of activity, you’ll receive notifications of your trends. The goal is to see how you do over the long term so you can be proud of the progress you’ve made or strive to do better.

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As trends begin to fill in, you should see data for various rings and activities. Tap on a specific trend, e.g. B. the one for movement, distance, walking speed or running speed. The app displays a chart of daily average results so you can determine your progress in that activity.

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view awards

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When you meet (or exceed) your fitness goals, the app presents you with various awards to recognize your accomplishments. In the Awards section, tap a specific award to view it. Tap the show more Link to see all awards you have received.

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share activity

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You can share your activities with others and invite them to join you on your fitness journey. Tap the Split icon below and then tap Getting started. Tap the persons icon at the top of the next screen and then tap pls (+) Icon to add a contact. You can enter the name, phone number, or email address of the person you want to invite. Beat Send to send the invitation.

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The invited person will then receive a notification in the fitness app. You need to select the notification and then tap Accept to accept your invitation. From that point on, fitness stats and results will appear on the share screen for both you and the other person.

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Change settings

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You can also tweak all app settings if you open the summary screen and tap the person icon in the top right corner. From your account screen, you can change your health details, change your Move calorie goal, switch units of measurement between US and metric, and turn notifications on or off.