Completing these goals will reward you with daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, yearly, and more achievements. They are great to boost your motivation, and you will often find yourself compelled and driven to finish the full 3-ring goal daily.

The companion iPhone app called “Activity” keeps data of rings, achievements, and individual workouts on a bigger screen. It doesn’t provide any substantially critical or deal-breaking information, but is nevertheless very handy to have everything visible in one place.

The default workout app

The workout app that is built in to the system is a very simple but powerful tool. To start a workout, you just need to open the app and click on the desired one - no additional work required.

The app keeps track of calories burnt, heart rate, and workout time. The workout can have an open goal, or you can set a specific calorie count or workout time. Also, you can pause it and even add another sessions: if you want to switch from bench press to indoor bicycle, you can simply change it with two clicks.

There is a very wide palette of workouts available - including HIIT (high intensity interval training) - but there is no dedicated weightlifting option, so I have used the “Other” option for that.

It tracks the calories and heart rate based on a “brisk walk”: it is a very decent approximation for the calorie count spent during the workout, which is this watch's primary goal.

The Apple Watch shines for the heart rate sensor.

Compared to chest strap and metal bars used for measuring the heart rate on indoor bicycles, the sensor is accurate in almost all cases. If it is not, then it is off by 1 or 2 beats per minute, which is a ridiculously low offset, especially if we consider that it is rare to have this precision on your hand.

Also worth noting that this watch has GPS, accelerometer, and a couple more handy sensors that will make the whole process easier, and it will just work. That is extremely important, because you want to focus on your workout, not on your apps.