Health benefits of the Apple Watch Series 3
When it comes to health and fitness tracking, the Apple Watch Series 3 is so impressive at catering to the needs of the user that we felt it deserved a whole blog about it, in recognition of its awesomeness.
Jam-packed with useful gadgetry to help you achieve optimum levels of health and fitness, the Apple Watch Series 3 has come on leaps and bounds when it comes to day to day activity tracking, thanks to numerous upgrades since its inception.
It features 3 activity rings - move, exercise and stand – with a daily target set for each. The categorisation is very user friendly, making you are aware of your activity progress throughout the day and motivating you to “close the rings”, i.e. complete the daily quota for each of the 3 activities. The dedicated activity based watch face enables you to track your progress with just a quick glance, or alternatively, you can peruse the Activity app at your leisure.
Call me needy, but I really appreciate positive affirmation and the carrot and stick approach to motivate and encourage me to power through the day, 3pm energy slumps and all. So, I found the prompts this smartwatch delivers throughout the day were exactly what I needed. By giving you reminders and notifications of your performance on previous days, your awareness of improvements to be made or achievements to be repeated is heightened, making you really strive to hit the same target as yesterday, or even go one better. In this way, you’re essentially motivated to compete with yourself and gently pushed to achieve your personal best each day. However, I would stress the gentle approach of the prompts. This isn’t a cruel smartwatch, it doesn’t mock or demotivate you by encouraging you to try to achieve the unachievable. To use the carrot and stick analogy, the carrot offered up looks suitably tempting and the stick is short and manageable, so you’re much less likely to give up when it comes to hitting your targets and munching on that carrot.
The Breathe app is a lovely touch. After working towards all those activity targets, it’s a welcome change of pace to be encouraged to take some time out for some relaxing breathing exercises. It’s well done and effective, helping you to time and regulate your breathing without having to scrutinise the screen for information (which would detract from the calming effect). Plus, when it comes to sleep, there are some great sleep-tracking apps available to help you maximise your beauty sleep.
The Workout app is excellent, with superb support for high intensity interval training. It also gives you the ability to add different forms of exercise to one continuous workout, so it’s perfect for triathletes who want to create one seamless tracking experience.
When it comes to heart health, the Heart Rate app provides pretty much the whole kit and caboodle. It allows you to view heart rate data throughout the day with the aid of a graph. Plus, it gives detailed and important data such as your resting heart rate, heart rhythm and walking average. You can also use the Apple Health and Activity apps to review your heart rate variability (i.e. the variation in the time interval between heart beats) and heart rate recovery respectively. The information is spread about a bit across the different apps, but it’s all there if you know where to find it. You can even set elevated heart rate warnings, so you can be notified by an alarm if your resting heart rate exceeds a set level. In this way, it can be used as a medical tool to detect heart conditions which can so often go undetected. Teamed with the built-in GPS, the heart rate data gives you an accurate and useful collection of information from throughout the duration of your run or cycling trip.
Other useful health and fitness features include VO2 max measurements to track your maximum rate of oxygen consumption and an altimeter with elevation data for you to monitor uphill exercise and track your elevated steps, making it perfect for uphill runners or climbers. Swimmers won’t be disappointed either. This smartwatch is swim-proof, can recognise all the different types of strokes and accurately records them for your reviewing pleasure.
So, whatever your exercise of choice, or if you’re simply seeking to improve your overall health and wellbeing, the Apple Watch Series 3 has plenty to offer. And at such an affordable price, it would be rude not to!