Exercise ring isn't updating.

I honestly don't care what the ring does anymore, because it isn't measuring what's important to me. Yesterday I carried my golf bag in 90° heat & 70% humidity for 6 1/2 miles. I registered about 16k steps over 4 hours, but the exercise ring (I did an "open" outdoor walk) only gave me credit for 30 minutes. When carrying 40 pounds of gear up and down hills my heart rate rises, but when swinging the club the goal is to be relaxed (which takes a deliberate effort I might add). So while I barely filled a ring, I weighed 4.5 pounds less when I got home after the round then I did when I woke up (yes I know it's mostly water weight). If that's what the geniuses at Apple call 30 minutes of exercise, that says more about them and the quality of their analytics than the effort I exerted.

That's little more than 1 ½ mile an hour, perspiring a lot because it's warm and humid isn't exercise.

Actually, the Oxford dictionary defines Exercise as, "Activity requiring physical effort, carried out especially to sustain or improve health and fitness:exercise improves your heart and lung power."

Since February I've lost 35 pounds, reduced my body fat percentage by 15 points, improved my blood pressure, and lowered my resting heart rate mainly by carrying my bag and eating healthier. Carrying a golf bag does require physical effort & I choose it over riding in a cart to improve my health. Sorry, it's exercise – maybe not stylized Cupertino exercise like Cross Fit, Insanity Workout, PX90, or whatever else is trendy in Silicon Valley this week – but it is exercise.

The reason you have lost weight is because you have used more calories than you have consumed.

Thank you for the remarkable insight Winston. What would the communities do without you?!? 😁

Sarcasm won't change the matter, your watch is telling you something, you seem to want to believe it's wrong.

I think you are missing the point here Winston and, to be fair, I got sucked into replying to your troll response so I didn't help the matter (my bad, I know better). The very first sentence of my post was, "I honestly don't care what the ring does anymore, because it isn't measuring what's important to me." The Exercise metric associated with the ring is ill-defined and doesn't correlate to the real-life experience of many of the users (there are dozens of posts on the Apple communities and Internet on this topic). I understand the Activity measure (Calories) as it is well defined and makes sense in the context of activity. The Exercise measure (Minutes) meets neither of those criteria. Some "Minutes" are included & some are not, which would not necessarily be a problem except for 2 issues: They are not explicit about what minutes are & are not included; and, many users report the metric increments when they aren't doing something they consider exercise (e.g. in this thread smm160 claims to get more minutes watering plants than exercising). Most definitions of "Exercise" have 2 criteria: activity with physical effort; and intent to improve overall health. If you do both and the metric doesn't increment, or you do only one or neither and it does increment, the metric is not meeting user expectations (which is the goal of most products). Additionally, people are reporting the same activity is logging a different Exercise metric after a software change, but the release notes don't say what changed (algorithm, sensors, sample frequency, etc.). Anyone who is the technology business knows this is far from a best practice, but Apple does it regularly.

So, for clarity's sake, let me explicitly state the point of my post, because it somehow turned into you explaining to me why I'm not exercising: The point of my post was for people to take the exercise metric with a grain of salt. All I'm suggesting is that if all other measures of exercise efficacy (Weight, BMI, Blood Pressure, Resting Heart Rate, steps/day, active/resting calories, etc.) are improving, but the Exercise circle isn't full and you're not getting an iPhone "award/badge", maybe the metric needs to change and not your behavior. The metric is new, I'm aware of no validation of it's efficacy in any medical/fitness journals, and it is likely to change because nobody seems to understand it and/or it was derived with an expectation of sensor accuracy that is outside the current capabilities of the hardware. If the metric is driving people to leave/change exercise activities that have been beneficial in the past to make the Apple Watch "happy", that has a potentially serious negative health consequence.

I do agree with much that you say, it isn't well documented (if indeed it's documented at all) what exactly qualifies as exercise for the exercise ring in the activity app. However it strikes me that people should (and I believe can) be able to make a judgement about what counts based on common sense.

If I go for a walk on my own I generally average close to 4 mph and will get credit for all but a few minutes of my walk (on outdoor walk), for example I'll get 26 minutes for a walk that took 30 minutes. I find this acceptable because it takes a couple of minutes to get going and I will have a few roads to cross which I tend to take slowly if not stop on occasions. On the other hand if I got out for 90 minutes with the dog I often get no minutes credit. Again this seems quite acceptable to me since the dog wants to stop and sniff every tree and my average rate is around 2 mph, which IMO isn't enough exertion to count as healthy exercise

I get similar logical and explainable readings while I'm out cycling, I can cycle for 300 minutes and get 288 minutes credit for example, I do pause the app if I stop at a pub, but not at a junction in the road, which logically (to me) shouldn't count as exercise)

So for me the watch works in exactly the way I would expect it to work, even though I don't know the exact criteria of what a minute of exercise is. All I was saying is that based on those expectations I wouldn't expect a lot of credit for carrying a golf bag around the golf course and I'm not so sure that many others would either. That being said though I agree that results should be taken with a grain of salt, or perhaps more accurately they should be viewed on a comparative basis rather than an as gospel basis, but that being said also I believe most fitness equipment readings should be taken that way too.

I take your point to some extent about what is important to you, but I think you are likely in a minority and catering for what you want would likely remove the simplicity of recording exercises, which would result in few people actually using it. To include walking at 1 ½ mph as exercise would need the user to set various parameters before exercising since (I believe) that very few people would want exercise recorded at those levels of exertion, I don't think many people would want to be bothered with such set up routines.

I also think there are quite a few people who for whatever reason don't get things to work properly (perhaps it's there skin, perhaps the watch isn't tight enough), I think people in this thread are mixing such issues up with more general complaints about what is deemed to be exercise.

Well said.

Clearly, at least to you and me, Apple needs to document and clarify their measurement methodology. Also, there is no doubt that the app needs some tweaking (e.g., my resting calories are absurdly high). And, various enhancements would be very beneficial (more 'workouts,' pausing during stops, etc.).

I still find it useful in its v1 form and think there is great potential in the future.

George

Fair points. I agree that the workout/activity/exercise app should be simple and not get into all the various forms of exercise possible. I accept it will never be an accurate measure for my activity/exercise so I don't get emotionally hijacked over missing Exercise minutes. Since the Activity measure is calories, it is a measure of work which takes into consideration mass, time, and distance. My hunch is that Exercise is a measure of Power, which is a measure of work over time. If that's the case, the watch would determine if the user does a sufficient amount of work per minute and, if so, an Exercise minute increments - but that's just my hunch.

A much more elegant solution would be an API into the Activity app that allows sport/activity specific apps to "write" to the Activity & Exercise measures. The watch isn't directly calculating Calories (heat required to raise 1 gram of water from 14.5°C to 15.5C at sea level with an ambient temp of 0°C). It is likely calculating Joules using mass, time and distance and converting that to calories (1 calorie is roughly 4 Joules). If they could clearly define and publish the exercise metric/algorithm, a conversion would be possible. For example, I use the Golfshot app and it has recently added "Fitness Data" to each round. The one thing Golfshot doesn't ask (but it should), is if you are riding in a cart, walking with your bag on a push cart, or carrying your bag (plus weight of the bag). If they did this, they should be able to generate a convertible metric. Weight is the critical variable here. My golf bag increases my weight (it does ask for my weight) by over 20% and that is a critical element in calculating calories, so even that app is under reporting calories. Another example is when I use Road Bike by Runatastic with a speed & cadence sensor for cycling. It correlates speed & cadence to terrain for a much better work/calorie measure than time/distance alone (and it would be even better if it integrated the heart rate info from Apple Watch). In a perfect world, these apps would log activity/exercise metric, not the workout and/or activity apps. Until this happens, I'll just trust the activity specific application data and if the Exercise circle matches I will consider it a happy coincidence.

It never occurred to me that Apple would have one definition of 'exercise' in the Workout app and a different one in the Activity app. I don't care why they did it. It's counterintuitive and a surprisingly bad interface decision (or more likely a non-decision they're stuck with for now).

Every other day I exercise with a stationary recumbent bike. Then every other other day I exercise with a stationary arm bike. I always keep my pulse above the 70% level while I exercise. Half an hour on the arm bike brings my exercise ring full cycle and then some. Half an hour on the recumbent bike (same pulse and breathing rate) shows no exercise performed unless I put my arms on my legs where I get an exercise reading of maybe a third of what I see on the arm bike. Furthermore, when I use the treadmill I see not much exercise performed unless I take my hands off the side rail and swing them as I would on a brisk walk outside.

In other words, Apple may say that the exercise ring is strictly driven by heart rate but I'm not buying it. There is no doubt in my mind that the accelerometer does play a part in the exercise calculation and nobody's going to convince me otherwise.

Were you running a 'workout' app during either of your exercises?

BTW, I dont think Apple has said that "the exercise ring is strictly driven by heart rate." In fact, some exercise (like walking) is not.

George

KenJr wrote:

In other words, Apple may say that the exercise ring is strictly driven by heart rate but I'm not buying it. There is no doubt in my mind that the accelerometer does play a part in the exercise calculation and nobody's going to convince me otherwise.

Yes, I've said this many times, I can induce credit by relaxing in a chair and shaking the watch back and forward in my hand (not on wrist, no heart rate measurements)

I can induce credit by relaxing in a chair and shaking the watch back and forward in my hand (not on wrist, no heart rate measurements)

In power saving saving mode the heart rate sensors will be turned off for outdoor activities, so there is not any way even to measure the heart rate. It cannot be the sole criterium for the briskness of an exercise. https://help.apple.com/watch/#/apd36e57e00c

Conserve power during a long workout. You can save power by disabling the heart rate sensor during long walking and running workouts. Your calorie burn estimates might not be as accurate. Open the Apple Watch app on iPhone, tap My Watch, then turn on Workout > Power Saving Mode.