Watch not tracking exercise. Honestly I have tried all the suggestions in here and for indoor walks this watch just does not work right. Most of the time the only fix is to reboot the watch! Doesn’t that strike anyone as a bug? Shouldn’t engineering be looking into this problem because it seems to be common?
Apple Watch Series 10, watchOS 26
rjsqxxx wrote:
I think tried leaving feedback in the past. Here is another aspect of the problem that seems consistent. Even after rebooting the watch, it’s doing a poor job tracking my distance. My treadmill will record nearly 2 miles but the watch will record 1.30 miles. That is a significant difference. It’s almost like the pedometer does not work right.
There are different types of indoor walks. If I told you to measure the distance someone goes on a treadmill with just a sensor on their wrist, how would you go about accomplishing that. It is exceptionally difficult. How can a watch on someone's wrist determine how far a treadmill has gone. The answer: it measures your arm moving back and forth with an accelerometer as you "stride" and tries to (a) determine how many strides you took, and (b) determines the "distance" by trying to determine how far each stride represents based on your height and weight. Item (a) is often wrong because different people move their arms differently when they walk or jog so the watch has to use some sort of mean value calculation; item (b) is also imprecise because the stride calculated from height and weight can vary for different people and body types. Also, the accelerometers have biases and drifts which cause some level of errors, this is just an engineering reality. It is commonly reported online that watch type sensors (of all makes and manufacturers) underestimate indoor walks because some walkers move their arms differently or even don't move them as much on treadmills as in natural walking.
It is one thing to complain about the indoor walk or treadmill distance being not as precise as one would like, but it seems to me that it is a real stretch to expect a watch on one's wrist to determine how far one goes on a treadmill very precisely. Perhaps there are ways to calibrate one's stride and input that into the watch settings (see link below), I don't know as I use mine only for outdoor workouts. GPS is almost always available for outdoors activities and mine get recorded quite accurately (compared to what, say, my phone records or what I have measured on the route independently), but GPS might be detectable for some indoor walks, e.g. on a track (to GPS, a person on a treadmill is stationary and doesn't go anywhere, so GPS can't be used for treadmills).
Apple does offer a method to calibrate the distances so it can better determine indoor distance from what it can measure: Calibrate your Apple Watch for improved Workout and Activity accuracy - Apple Support
rjsqxxx wrote:
I think tried leaving feedback in the past. Here is another aspect of the problem that seems consistent. Even after rebooting the watch, it’s doing a poor job tracking my distance. My treadmill will record nearly 2 miles but the watch will record 1.30 miles. That is a significant difference. It’s almost like the pedometer does not work right.
There are different types of indoor walks. If I told you to measure the distance someone goes on a treadmill with just a sensor on their wrist, how would you go about accomplishing that. It is exceptionally difficult. How can a watch on someone's wrist determine how far a treadmill has gone. The answer: it measures your arm moving back and forth with an accelerometer as you "stride" and tries to (a) determine how many strides you took, and (b) determines the "distance" by trying to determine how far each stride represents based on your height and weight. Item (a) is often wrong because different people move their arms differently when they walk or jog so the watch has to use some sort of mean value calculation; item (b) is also imprecise because the stride calculated from height and weight can vary for different people and body types. Also, the accelerometers have biases and drifts which cause some level of errors, this is just an engineering reality. It is commonly reported online that watch type sensors (of all makes and manufacturers) underestimate indoor walks because some walkers move their arms differently or even don't move them as much on treadmills as in natural walking.
It is one thing to complain about the indoor walk or treadmill distance being not as precise as one would like, but it seems to me that it is a real stretch to expect a watch on one's wrist to determine how far one goes on a treadmill very precisely. Perhaps there are ways to calibrate one's stride and input that into the watch settings (see link below), I don't know as I use mine only for outdoor workouts. GPS is almost always available for outdoors activities and mine get recorded quite accurately (compared to what, say, my phone records or what I have measured on the route independently), but GPS might be detectable for some indoor walks, e.g. on a track (to GPS, a person on a treadmill is stationary and doesn't go anywhere, so GPS can't be used for treadmills).
Apple does offer a method to calibrate the distances so it can better determine indoor distance from what it can measure: Calibrate your Apple Watch for improved Workout and Activity accuracy - Apple Support
have you given them the info as feedback in their feedback channels? Product Feedback - Apple
writing it here is just for the benefit of us
I think tried leaving feedback in the past. Here is another aspect of the problem that seems consistent. Even after rebooting the watch, it’s doing a poor job tracking my distance. My treadmill will record nearly 2 miles but the watch will record 1.30 miles. That is a significant difference. It’s almost like the pedometer does not work right.
How ridiculous! How about just an option to measure my exercise according to the amount of time I am doing in the workout rather than trying to guess how much exercise I am doing. I assure you that for me I am sweating bullets! Apple needs to get its act together and stop making excuses for something that is not satisfactory to a customer.
“How about just an option to measure my exercise according to the amount of time I am doing in the workout rather than trying to guess how much exercise I am doing”
That makes no sense and would just result in more customer complaints. Two individuals exercising on a treadmill for 1 hour one at 5mph the other at 10mph are getting the same exercise? There is also the incline of the treadmill to factor in. I don’t think a watch is well suited to treadmills although they can provide a rough approximation but expecting more than that is unrealistic. You can’t fight physics …
It makes perfect sense to me to let the user track the exercise the way they want to track it. Otherwise what the heck good is the watch’. I did say an option. The default could be the screwy buggy arbitrary way it is working now.
do something about it Apple. I am so ****** off about how poorly this works I won’t be buying another Apple watch.
Watch not tracking time for indoor walks correctly
