Apple Watch Features for Walking

Keep Your Phone in Your Pack

Wearing the Apple Watch on a typical walking day, you will see many of the advantages. For one, you can keep your iPhone safely secured in your pocket or pack while you walk, while still using apps and staying connected to friends and social media.

Activity App

The Activity app on the Apple Watch automatically cues you to achieve three key fitness goals—moving, exercising and reducing long periods of sitting. It also tracks your total daily steps and distance.

• Move: This is a goal to burn calories through activity, beyond the resting calories that your body burns when you're not moving to keep all of your organs functioning. The default setting is 500 active calories. Roughly speaking, that's about what you burn by walking 10,000 steps per day. You can see your step count number as well.
• Exercise: Moderate-to-vigorous exercise minutes are counted, with a default goal of 30 minutes per day. This matches the exercise recommendations to reduce health risks.
• Stand: This goal helps you reduce the health risks of sitting too much. The default goal is to stand for at least one minute each hour, 12 hours of the day. The watch will give you an alert tap and message to remind you to get up if you've been sitting most of the hour. Once you stand for a minute, it congratulates you and marks the hour as achieved.

You can see your progress in the little target ring icon in several of the watch faces. View more details on the watch app and the iPhone app, including graphs and achievement badges.

Workout App

The Apple Watch Workout app can track a variety of workouts, including Outdoor Walk and Indoor Walk. It uses the LED heart rate sensor on the back of the watch to gauge your exercise intensity and calories burned.

You can set a calorie goal, time goal or distance goal for walking and running workouts, or just track an open-ended workout. During the walking workouts you can see elapsed time, distance, pace, heart rate, active calories burned and time of day. You can pause the workout.

It gives you a tap at each mile. The Workout app will work in the background if you want to switch to another watch function.

View the workout summary on the iPhone app to see active and resting calories burned, time, distance, average pace and average heart rate for the workout. It is a simplified workout app. If you want more details, you can use the Nike Running or MapMyWalk app instead.

Music Control

Music control can be found on many wearable fitness trackers, but the Apple Watch can control audiobooks and podcasts well. When passing traffic or leaf blowers drown out the podcast you're listening to, you can back up a few seconds and review what you may have missed. You can do that with a tap on the Apple Watch. You can easily adjust the volume.

This feature lets you keep your phone secure in your pocket or pack rather than having to juggle it while you are walking.

Notifications and Messaging

Ask an Apple Watch owner what they love most and the answer is likely to be Notifications. You can set which types of notifications you receive on the Apple Watch so you aren't getting alerts from every app on your phone.

You can make and reply to text messages using voice dictation, prepared responses or emojis. It is extremely convenient.

Contacts and Phone Calls

You can take and make phone calls and listen to voicemail on your Apple Watch. You can initiate calls and messages to people on your Contacts list.

You can do this without getting your phone out of your pack. At home, you don't have to carry your phone around the house with you. While other fitness trackers can notify you of calls and texts, this one lets you make and answer calls.

Map and Directions

The Map display is nice, but unfortunately, the text is too small for aging eyes. But the directions and navigation function make up for that weakness.

Enter a destination and it will give you turn by turn instructions, including how many feet until the next turn. It gives you tap to let you know to be ready for a turn. Directions and navigation are provided for walking and for vehicles. If you're lost, you can always pop it open or ask Siri, "Where am I?" to get an address.

Heart Rate

The LED heart rate sensors on the back of the Apple Watch read your heart rate on demand. It also senses it regularly throughout the day so you can see what it was several minutes previously. When using the Workout app, it reads your heart rate continuously and you can see it on the display.

If you want to know your heart rate zone or percentage of max heart rate, you'll want to download an app that is compatible with the watch. There are several available, such as Zones for Training.

The sensors don't work as well on dark or tattooed skin. It won't replace your dedicated heart rate monitor chest strap if you need more accuracy and heart rate zone indications and alerts.

Apple Watch Siri

You can activate Siri by pressing the button or you say, "Hey, Siri." You can do this to quickly activate directions to a walking destination, find out when a store or restaurant will be open, send a message or make a call. You don't have to get your phone out of its secure pocket.

Timer and Stopwatch

If you like to time laps or intervals, you'll enjoy the Timer and Stopwatch features on the Apple Watch. They are very easy to use.

You can only set a single interval timing and you have to press Start each time you want to use it. If you want more complicated intervals such as 3 minute/1 minute, you'll need to find another app. The timer is great to use for cooking as well, especially if you wander far from the kitchen.

Schedule

Having your calendar events front and center on the Modular watch face is very convenient. When you tap an event to drill down, you can press on an address to start navigation and directions.

Apple Pay and Passbook

The plan is that you can leave your cards and cash at home and use Apple Pay when you are out walking and need a latte. It is nice to have Passbook handy on the watch when you want to use a coupon, are traveling or going to events.

Weather

The Weather app is good, but the Dark Sky app is great. The Weather app shows hourly conditions (sunny, cloudy, etc.), temperatures, and the chance of rain. It also shows a quick 10-day forecast of conditions, high and low temperatures. That can help you decide when to go for a walk.

Camera Remote

Whether you want to snap selfies or scenery, it's great to have access to a camera remote for your iPhone. You can set it for a three-second delay or take a photo instantly. You can review the photos you have taken.