What counts as "exercise" for the green ring??

The only time the watch uses GPS/HR sensors is when you specifically choose a Workout from the Workout app -- and I assume only an outdoor one for GPS. Otherwise, its only using the accelerometer and gyroscope to detect your motion and acceleration. Its similar to how the M7/M8 coprocessors and CoreMotion track your steps only calibrated to a swinging wrist.

A good way to understand this stuff to read about the CoreMotion framework. It describes how the sensors can be used to track your movement. My guess would be outdoor run vs walk is calibrated differently to assess your stride length which would be shorter in a walk...and I am sure other complex calculations. If you can pre-limit the exercise for the watch, it probably helps it make it more accurate since it can more finitely determine the measurements if it can cut out the noise. It doesn't surprise me run would give you more as i am guessing the baseline calculations may start from a higher point. Perhaps just choose Other as that will not preset it. Then see how it attempts to figure out your exercise...

While it should be clarified, the exercise ring is kind of pointless. Its really just a measure of exertion and that will show up in a higher rate of calorie burn. The Move ring is the best measure of your activity. Getting 30 mins of exercise according to the AW but missing your Move by 100 cals is prob not as beneficial as going over your Move by 100 and hitting only 10 on the exercise.

When walking with the stroller, do you have both hands on the handle, or just one? If just one, maybe switching the watch to the free wrist will help?

The other possibility is that the watch just isn't measuring correctly - maybe a call to support?

The watch only has 3 ways to find out if you're exercising:

- Your heart rate is up

- There's a stepping kind of movement in your wrist

- GPS

Thank goodness for this support blog. I am going balmy. Using the treadmill for 70 mins seeing my heartbeat going to 120 most of the time. Then it says one minute of exercise or two minutes and no more. I walk at 6 km an hour which is brisk. I put 6 on elevation but nufink!! It is depressing. Also having had a heart problem and being 67 my max heart rate is 153 and 70% of that is 107 so really anything over 107 is exercising my heart and 120 is 80% of the maximum my heart should be doing.

IN my case Apple could be encouraging dangerous exercise if expecting anything more than 137 to register. My recent controlled cardio test was stopped at 142.

I think the rest of us need an exercise rate medically determined which is part of the Apple control settings. By the way I am now going to try telling the watch I am running outside whilst on the treadmill and see if that does make a difference. Re the arm-swinging that does go against treadmill instructions which say always hold on.

It seems to be solved. In Workout instead of using INDOOR WALK I used OTHER and every minute of walking over about 107 - my 70% of maximum heart beat for my age was entered. I got a tick of 30 minutes of exercise and felt good about what I had done. So it's Other from now on - hope this helps others!!

NIck101 tells me that Exercise is only recorded as part of a Workout, so for tennis I need to to do an 'Other' Workout. He stress the need to do the calibration exercise with your watch.

I was wondering the same thing. The watch "congratulated" me the other day for a "personal best" of 9 minutes of exercise! I am going to try using "other" instead of "outdoor walk" and see if it works for me too.

I have the same experience. I rushed to the doctors for a stress test.... very stressful (!!!!) and felt my heart pounding a little and the measure on the watch was 130 BPM then a couple of minutes later Exercise had increased by 2 minutes!!. If I use OTHER in WORKOUT I get about the time of the exercise minus 1 or 2 minutes which I take to be the warm up time before my heart starts pumping enough to register with the exercise monitor. So I feel it is solved but would like Apple to add a specific TREADMILL to WORKOUT to allow for holding onto the handles and not swinging the arms - the measures in INSIDE WALK include more monitors than OTHER.

I think the configuration is only suited to outdoor walking and running but will try that soon.

I am trying to make sense of the amount of exercise recorded in the workout app both in minutes and calories. I have tried the app twice with bicycling, twice with an elliptical, and once with an outdoor walk to calibrate the watch to my stride. The watch records about 55% of the calories logged in other sources, e.g. a Precor elliptical machine, the Bi.cycle app on the Iphone. Exercise machines are notorious for being generous in their calorie estimates but I have checked this Precor against my Polar heart rate monitor many times. It always came within 10 calories of the 700 or so my Polar said I burned in an hour. The Apple Watch came up with 425 calories! Another disconcerting result was being credited for 8 minutes of exercise for a 50 minute bike ride in a hilly area.

I wonder if when Apple tested the watch on its employees there were none at my age (68). Maybe the threshold for heart rate is set so high that when I am doing what I feel is equivalent to a "brisk walk" (say 120 bpm) it doesn't count as exercise minutes. Apple seems to be treating the heart-rate-threshold equivalency of a brisk walk as a trade secret. Since one of the key functions of the watch is fitness Apple should be crystal clear about what is counted as the watch records exercise minutes and calories burned.

I am not bothered that the watch's heart run function is less responsive than a chest strap to changes in heart speed. The person with a heart condition who wrote on this forum that he needs to know when he is reaching his safety threshold ought to buy a chest strap. If he gets a bluetooth strap the watch can record his heart rate and keep all of his data in the health app. For users without a heart problem the delay in recording the heart rate peak shouldn't affect the estimated calories or minutes of exercise.

I am not even bothered by what appears to be the underestimate of the calories. For my purposes any consistent measure of calories burned will help me gauge my progress. I am, however, bothered by the obscurity of Apple's information on what gets counted.

My 65 year old husband has a VERY low resting heart rate which hovers around 48-53 bpm. When we go out for a brisk walk, his heart rate gets up into the 70's or 80's which is plenty high for him, yet he gets zero minutes credited towards the green exercise ring. I wonder if it's calibrated to a person who's resting heart rate is around 72 and is young enough to need to get above 140 bpm to be considered "brisk". Polar has an app where it measures your resting heart rate so you get a more accurate picture of what 70% of Max HR. Apple, tell me you don't have a "one size fits all" code in your Watch.

Does this suggest that your husband needs to do the callibration exercise https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204516 which will teach his watch how his heart responds to particular distance as measured by the GPS, and and it then uses this information to measure his 'exercies' fro then on?