Apple Watch only records a stand hour if I wildly wave my arms around while moving

As Idris says, it is not standing.

It is moving your Apple Watch in a motion that the Apple Watch accelerator thinks is the swing of your arm while walking.

And it must swing a continuous 30-60 full cycles (forward and back) in a brief period of time, such as a minute.

If you break the cycle for a long enough interval, the count resets. So 10 cycles, then holding vegetables with the Apple Watch arm while chopping, or carrying a pan to the stove, do not invoke Apple Watch arm swinging, and can easily result in resetting the counter.

People sitting in a chair knitting got outstanding Stand and step counts. Professional Chefs on their feet all day, miss many Stand hours.

You could try moving your Apple Watch to your dominant arm, and see if things improve. Or just make sure you actually swing your Apple Watch arm 30-60 time in a 1 minute interval.

The Stand Notification is quite a useful feature for me. My legs get stiff if I sit for long periods of time, so getting up and wandering around (even when watching TV) helps a lot. And my Series 8 watch seems to recognize my action, even when I just stand up and wander around the room. And it just notified me now...

Neal

You're not understanding what we're telling you. Your watch will NOT report how long you've been on your feet. Stand is exactly as I explained above. Nothing more. It only tells you to stand if you haven't been active for the first 50 minutes of an hour and you ONLY need to be active for 1 minute. You can be active longer, but stand won't track that at all.

Stand is really a misnomer. It should be called something like "Move." That would let you know it's time to be active. But again, all you have to do is be active and move for 1 minute.

If this still isn't making sense please let us know what part you don't understand.

You can turn it off and given your frustration level with this feature, it might be good if you did turn it off.

I believe the term "Stand Hour Goal" is what is frustrating you. It does NOT, nor was it EVER designed to track the number of hours you stand. It was designed as we've explained, but that doesn't seem to be what you want.

This link (not from Apple) tells you how you can turn it off if you want to turn it off --> https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-turn-off-time-to-stand-notifications-apple-watch/

Personally, I find the stand goal very helpful. I have a desk job and often don't move for long periods of time. The stand goal, reminds me I need to get up and at least walk for a minute. That's all it's designed to do. Expecting more, when there isn't more is just frustrating you.

arborholic wrote:

I hope the rest of you continue to have it calibrated well because if not, you'll see what I'm talking about and understand the frustration of a feature not working as advertised.

It works exactly as advertised for me (and everyone else). You want it to work differently. And that's fine. But, complaining about it here won't move that goal forward. Tell Apple.

This happens to me several times a month. My work around is:

As soon as you notice that it did not record the stand hour…

-open Health app

-scroll down and tap Workouts

-tap ‘add data’

-select ‘Other’ for the exercise

-select the ‘start time’ to be the hour plus one minute. For example: 7:01 am

-select ‘end time’ to be the exact same time as start time. For example: 7:01 am

* by selecting the same start and end times you are not adding anything to your exercise/movement rings.

— when finished tap ‘add’,

exit the app, then reopen, it should be there however there may be a slight delay. Just check back a minute later. Hope this helps, works for me every time. Wish it wasn’t necessary, but I’m not going to lose out on a stand minute because the watch has a glitch! Lol

Yes we are tired of it too.

It is nearing the end of May 2024 and my third Apple watch still fails to recognise my activity. This discussion page is classed as a user forum so Apple aren’t remotely interested in intervening.