How to Start, Pause and Stop a Workout on Apple Watch

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The Apple Watch offers a multitude of features, including heart rate and step tracking, noise detection, fall detection, ECG detection and more. However many users do not know how to start a workout on the Apple Watch and instead just anticipate that the Watch will start recording activity by itself. In this guide, we’ll cover how to start, pause and stop a workout and how to get a detailed analysis of a workout.

How to Start a Workout

1. On your Apple Watch, press the Digital Crown button to open up the app screen.

2. Open up the Workout app. You’ll find a list of different exercises.

3. Select the workout you’re about to perform. This will automatically start recording the workout. Depending on the type, the Watch may measure the distance covered, heart rate, calories burned, etc. Note that any distance covered will only be recorded if Location Services is enabled.

How to Pause a Workout

If you ever need to take a break between a workout, it’s advised you pause the workout. Otherwise, the gap will reflect on your workout and may affect the total stats. It is also possible to end a workout completely and start a new one, but pausing the workout is less of a hassle.

To pause a workout:

1. Swipe right on the workout screen on your Apple Watch.

2. Tap on Pause.

To resume a workout, similarly swipe right and tap on the Resume button.

Here, if you tap on the “New” button, you’ll be able to add another type of activity to your workout. It’s specifically helpful if you’re doing circuit training, such as including running, cycling, and strength training all in the same workout. After tapping “New,” select the new activity, and the time starts over at 0. If you want to add a third activity, repeat this process.

How to End a Workout

To end a workout, simply swipe right from the Workout screen and tap on “End”. This will end the workout and will present you a brief summary of your workout. All activities will be presented here if you did more than one. Additonally, the total time will include all activities together.

To view a full summary of your workout:

1. Navigate to the Activity app on your iPhone.

2. From the bottom tabs, select “Workouts.”

3. Select the workout you want to view. This will give you an in-detail analysis of your workout.

How to Change Workout Metrics

By default, you’ll only get to view only five metrics during a workout on your Apple Watch. However you can customize these according to your liking. To customize the viewable workout metrics:

1. Open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone.

2. Tap the “My Watch” tab, then “Workout -> Workout View.”

3. Tap “Multiple Metric” or “Single Metric.” If you choose Multiple Metric, you can choose up to five metrics to view on each workout.

4. Select the workout you’d like to edit. Tap on Edit in the top right corner, and add/remove metrics to your liking.

Using the tips above, you can use your Apple watch properly for workouts. You can also choose to generate reports of your Apple Watch activity at the end of every month.

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Shujaa Imran

Shujaa Imran is MakeTechEasier’s resident Mac tutorial writer. He’s currently training to follow his other passion become a commercial pilot. You can check his content out on Youtube

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