I was incredibly blessed for my last birthday by the gift of an Apple Watch. I never understood the hype around Apple until I started using their products and, oh my goodness, I’m a complete convert!
One aspect of my watch is that it has an ‘activity’ feature. This tracks not only my daily steps but also my activity calories (movement), my exercise, the number of hours I stand over the course of a day, flights of stairs, mindfulness and breathing exercises I do and workouts.
You get to set your own goals each day.
Of course, I set mine really low to begin with.
My average steps pre-watch was about 4000, so I upped it to 5000. I set my activity calories to 500, my exercise to 20 minutes and my standing hours to eight.
Over the past eight months, I have been gradually increasing them. My goals, as they stand right now, are as follows:
- Steps – 10, 000
- Activity Calories – 700 cals
- Exercise – 50 minutes
- Standing – 14 hours
When I meet a goal, its circle on my watch closes and I get a notification to the fact. The goal is to close each circle, each day.
I reassess each week. If I am consistently closing the circles I increase them. If I have missed even one, I leave it to the next week.
Slowly, slowly.
My general activity is a far cry from the sedentary life I used to live, and I feel like I am getting stronger every day.
Best of all, my son has an Apple Watch also, and we have each others Activity accounts linked. This means he gets to see everything I achieve and visa versa.
We can cheer each other on! For example, I managed to close my rings twice the other day and he sent me a text congratulating me and telling me I’d knocked it out of the park!
I love being able to share snippets of our day like this, especially since he lives independently now.
Of course, an Apple Watch is just one tool in my armour of things which are helping me to improve my health. It was a very expensive one at that, but with every member of our immediate family donating some money towards it, I was blessed to be able to get myself one. It is by far the best tool I use in terms of keeping me accountable and active.
What are your favourite tools which help you to improve your health?
My husband and two of my older children have smartwatches (only my son’s one is an Apple Watch!) but I haven’t got one myself yet. At the moment I log my food and exercise on the Balance menopause app and the Zero app (which is ok for motivation, but I have to remember to do it!) and if I exercise outdoors I put it on Strava, where I have ‘followers’ from my immediate family! I used to have a pedometer, but I didn’t find it very accurate, so an Apple Watch seems like it would be good to save up for!
I really love my Apple Watch, especially because I have an Apple everything else which means they are all in sync with each other. But it sounds like you’ve done well finding an array of apps which do they same kind of thing!