Best features to try on the new Apple Watch

If you just unboxed your new Apple Watch this holiday season, we have a variety of tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your new wearable. Read guidance on your favorite Apple Watch features for health, activity, customization, and more.

Set up your Apple Watch activity ring

For many people, the Apple Watch is first and foremost a fitness-focused wearable. The key to this are three rings, each represented by a different color. Red is movement, green is movement, and blue is stand.

By default, the green exercise ring closes when you log 30 minutes of intense activity, the blue stand or roll ring closes when you move around for at least 1 minute in a 12-hour period, and the red move ring closes when you reach a personal goal. Measures active calories consumed per day.

Apple also includes the ability to customize your exercises to reach your goals. Maybe you’re recovering from an injury and your body can’t handle 12 hours of stand time combined with 30 minutes of exercise. There have also been calls for Apple to include rest days in the Apple Watch’s ringtone system, a feature that would at least give users more control over their goals.

Here’s how to change your Go, Exercise, and Stand goals on Apple Watch.

1. Open the Activity app on your Apple Watch.
2. Scroll to the bottom and look for the “Change Goal” button.
3. Adjust your goal using the + or – buttons or use the Digital Crown.
4. Tap OK to confirm your changes.

The exercise ring can be lowered and raised in 5 increments for as little as 10 minutes and as long as 60 minutes. Stand goals can be changed in hourly intervals, from a minimum of 6 hours to a maximum of 16 hours.

Plus, you can create custom schedules in your fitness app to help you live the healthiest lifestyle possible. This includes the ability to schedule a rest day or completely pause your Apple Watch’s ringer.

Customize your watch face

The heart of the Apple Watch is the watch face. You can add information called complications to your watch face, such as weather, activity data, and heart rate information. The easiest way to create a watch face for your Apple Watch is to use the Apple Watch app on your iPhone.

You can find the entire library of watch faces in the app’s Face Gallery tab, and add faces to your personal collection as you create your watch face. Once you’ve created multiple watch faces, you can swipe between them from your Apple Watch, making it easy to adjust them on the fly for different scenarios.

Apple Watch App Store

Apps built specifically for Apple Watch can be found in the watchOS App Store. Just press the Digital Crown on your Apple Watch and look for the App Store icon. Here you can easily find and install dedicated Apple Watch applications without using your iPhone at all.

Share your activity

One of my favorite ways to stay motivated with my Apple Watch is to share my activity data with friends and family. When you do this, you can see when your friends have completed their workouts, how much progress they’ve made toward their goals, and when they’ve won new awards.

To share your Apple Watch activity data with others, follow these steps:

1. Open the Fitness app on your iPhone.
2. Tap the share icon in the bottom right corner.
3. Tap the “+” button in the top corner.
4. Start typing a name and tap the name you want to add. If the person has an Apple Watch, their name will be red.
5. Tap the (Send) button and wait until your friend accepts your activity request. Once approved, you’ll receive a notification on your Apple Watch.

This is one of my favorite features of the Apple Watch, plus there’s support for starting weekly one-on-one competitions with friends.

Set up health monitoring functionality

Apple Watch helps you intentionally track your fitness progress as well as passively monitor it in the background.

Fall detection

One such feature is called fall detection, which uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to detect if you’ve fallen and, more importantly, if you’ve fallen and can’t get back up. By default, fall detection is disabled for users under 65, but you can enable it manually by following these steps:

1. Open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone.
2. Tap “Emergency SOS”.
3. Look for the fall detection toggle
   • Apple warns that physically active users may trigger fall detection even if they haven’t fallen. This is due to high-impact activities and may manifest as a fall.
4. Tap “Confirm”.

heart

The Apple Watch app on your iPhone also lets you enable a series of features to help your Apple Watch take care of your heart. Just open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone and look for the Hearts category. This section allows you to enable the following features:

• Install the ECG app to get an electrocardiogram from your Apple Watch (Series 4 or later).
• Set your cardio fitness level and notifications as a powerful indicator of your overall health.
• Irregular rhythm notifications: Receive a notification when Apple Watch identifies multiple heart rhythms that may indicate atrial fibrillation.
• High heart rate notifications: Receive a notification when your Apple Watch detects an elevated heart rate to a certain level when you appear inactive.
• Low heart rate notifications: Receive a notification when your Apple Watch detects a heart rate below 50 bpm for 10 minutes.

Collision detection

Crash Detection is designed to detect severe motor vehicle collisions, including frontal collisions, side collisions, rear-end collisions, and rollovers involving sedans, minivans, SUVs, pickup trucks, and other passenger vehicles.

If a serious car accident is detected:

• Apple Watch chimes and taps your wrist to check in with you on the screen. If you only have a watch, you’ll see an emergency call slider on your screen. If you have a watch with cellular capabilities, or if your watch is connected to Wi-Fi, you can call emergency services.
• If you have an iPhone and Apple Watch, the emergency call slider will only appear on your watch, the call will connect, and the call audio will play from your watch.
• If possible, you can choose to call emergency services or ignore the warning.
• If you are unable to respond, your device will automatically call emergency services after 20 seconds.
• If you’ve added emergency contacts, your device will send a message to share your location and let you know if you’ve been in a serious car accident.
• If you have a Medical ID set up, a Medical ID slider will appear on your device to allow emergency responders to access your medical information.

Suppress notifications

Apple Watch makes it incredibly easy to stay on top of your notifications. Tap your wrist to hear a sound whenever an app sends a push notification. However, for many people this may actually be overwhelming and unnecessary.

To manage notifications on your Apple Watch, open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone and select the (Notifications) category. Here you can view the list of applications and manage notifications according to your needs. We recommend limiting notifications on your Apple Watch as much as possible. Otherwise, you may feel overwhelmed.

Check out Apple Fitness+

Apple Fitness+ provides access to a library of hundreds of on-demand workouts across popular categories like running, cycling, HIIT, rowing, yoga, and more.

Apple Fitness+ features deep integration with Apple Watch, displaying live data from your Apple Watch on-screen during your workout. Additionally, if you recently purchased a new Apple Watch, you’ll probably get three months of free access to the service.

Apple Fitness+ can be found in the Fitness app on your iPhone or Apple TV. It’s also available on iPad, and you can download it from the iPadOS App Store to get started.

Apple Watch accessories

Finally, you may want to complement your new Apple Watch with accessories like a charging dock or watch band. Here are some of our favorites.

Best Apple Watch charging docks:

Best Apple Watch bands: