How the iPhone and Apple Watch Will Help You Manage and Achieve Your Personal Fitness Goals

Health and fitness are concepts that go hand-in-hand, fitting together like birds of a feather. However, personal fitness isn’t just about hitting the gym and pumping iron, eating clean, or running for miles on end — but rather, our personal journey to ideal health and fitness is the culmination of every movement and every activity we partake of in any given day.

And fortunately, it’s with that sentiment in mind — at least, to some extent — that Apple created the Apple Watch: so we could keep track of our daily activity, performance, and physiological output like never before.

Using an Apple Watch — in combination with iOS 9’s new Health app for iPhone — is a great way to keep track of your daily activity. And Apple Watch is capable of tracking everything, even the slightest of movements — from walking the dog, traversing flights of stairs, and even standing up from and sitting down in your favorite chair. Best of all, though, all these seemingly insignificant movements add up, day in and day out, and, in conjunction with Apple’s Health application, culminate to provide us with a comprehensive snapshot of our personal progress, which hopefully will encourage us, all the more, to keep on keeping on.

Apple Watch displays a simple, yet comprehensive, “three-ring” graph, which thoroughly documents our every move, every calorie burned, and how many minutes of brisk activity we partake of each day. Utilizing an array of biometric sensors, Apple Watch intelligently monitors our every move; and, better yet, with so many apps making their way into the watchOS app store, we can even monitor other important variables — like sleep patterns, track our personal progress, calories burned, and even create our own, personal yoga routine to help us channel our inner yen between all the hustle and bustle of the day.

Yet even with all that Apple Watch can do, it’s still lacking in a few key areas. For instance, most exercise gurus know that one of the most integral components of a safe and effective workout is a proper warm-up and cool down stage. This is actually quite imperative, especially since — at the gym and on the run — we want to make sure we’re not putting unnecessary strain on our heart, or abruptly elevating our blood pressure, right?

Unfortunately, even despite all the cool workout apps in the watchOS app store, the selection of warm-up and cool down apps are relatively limited. A great one among the few, however, is an app called RunnerStretch. RunnerStretch is a fantastic app that provides you with a series of warm-up exercises, displays them on the screen, graphs your progress, and helps guide you through the process of elevating your heart rate the safe and healthy way before you dive head-first into your daily exercise routine.

While the app is by no means perfect, however, it is free to download and use, so it’s certainly still a nice way to get going on a good routine — at least until the app store’s options expand to include more alternatives.

As equally important as the warm-up stage of your workout is the cool down stage — referred to as such, because you’re essential goal is to slowly but steadily decrease your blood pressure, ensuring that an excess of blood flow doesn’t accumulate in your legs.

During a workout, your heart obviously pumps blood much faster than it would when you’re at rest, so you definitely want to ease off of the activity to prevent excessive muscle contractions and stress on your heart.

Of course, the Apple Watch is far from a dedicated professional personal training assistant — even when you factor in all the apps and hardware sensors that aim to help you reach your personal goals. To that end, some even argue that the Apple Watch is precisely geared towards beginners in the fitness realm but that’s not to say that Apple Watch falls short of delivering on its promises — but only that we’re hoping for future updates to watchOS will address these issues to make the Apple Watch an even better training assistant.

Learn More: How to Set Up and Use Apple Pay on iPhone and Apple Watch

How do you use Apple Watch to keep track of your daily exercise routine?