Latest news with #fitnesstracking
Android Authority
18-07-2025
- Android Authority
Pixel Watch 4 might bulk up its fitness features to help you get ripped
TL;DR A new leak suggests the Pixel Watch 4 will add a dedicated strength training experience. Users may get custom interval workouts, real-time guidance, and advanced post-workout metrics. The report also mentions improved run tracking, swim and cycling features, and dual-band GPS. If you're the kind of person who hits the gym more than the track, the upcoming Google Pixel Watch 4 may finally have something tailored specifically to your needs. According to a new report from Android Headlines, the Pixel Watch 4 will introduce an all-new strength training experience, complete with a Workout Builder for creating custom interval workouts with warm-ups and cool-downs. The watch will reportedly provide real-time guidance during these workouts and offer detailed post-session insights on your form. C. Scott Brown / Android Authority This could mark a significant upgrade for gym-goers who've found Google's smartwatch fitness tools a bit too cardio-focused in the past. Google already tracks a wide range of activities, but strength training has been chiefly lumped under general workout categories until now. The report also claims the Pixel Watch 4 will offer new AI-powered run recommendations for Fitbit Premium subscribers, along with advanced metrics like cadence, stride length, ground contact, and vertical oscillation. Other improvements are also mentioned, including enhanced swim tracking, better cycling support, and more accurate activity recognition. Android Headlines doesn't cite a source for the information, but it aligns with Google's broader fitness ambitions. Google is expected to officially unveil the Pixel Watch 4 at its Made by Google event on August 20, alongside the Pixel 10 series. We learned earlier today that that's a good chance pricing will remain unchanged from last year. Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at Email our staff at news@ . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.
Gizmodo
13-07-2025
- Health
- Gizmodo
The Whoop 5.0 Is a Massive Upgrade to Health Tracking. I Wasn't Ready.
At some point in the late 2010s, I became obsessed with my heart rate. I was at a point in my fitness life that I was training for marathons and I cared a whole lot about every process involved. I spent a certain percentage of my workday staring at my heart rate on my fitness watch and feeling smug if I kept my resting heart rate below 50 beats per minute (bpm) and wigging out if it went over 60 bpm. Heart rate was my gateway drug into health tracking, and it soon devolved into an unhinged compulsion. A couple of years in, for the sake of my mental health, I stopped tracking everything. It was liberating and freeing. Around this time, the Whoop—a fitness tracker that passively monitors heart rate, sleep, and stress, among many other things—started gaining popularity among elite and amateur athletes and other fitness enthusiasts. I tried it for a month or two, but stopped, in an attempt to remain committed to the no-fitness-tracking bit. In the meantime, Whoop has now become a fixture in the fitness space and has gone through five iterations. The latest, the Whoop 5.0 starting at $199 annually (includes a subscription), was released in May. The screenless band is a significant upgrade from earlier models, and is Whoop's most committed attempt at putting itself in the growing longevity and anti-aging space. See Whoop 5.0 at Amazon Whoop 5.0 If you are serious about health tracking, Whoop 5.0 has everything you could ever want. But for most people, it might be too much information. Pros Cons These days, I usually (but not always) use a fitness watch (either an Apple Watch or a Garmin) to track my pace or mileage when I run, but I don't wear it 24/7. I finally forced myself out of my retirement and dove head first back into the deep waters of health tracking with Whoop 5.0. I was so not ready. Historically, fitness trackers have hinged on the ability to see whatever health stat they're tracking—step count, heart rate, etc.—effortlessly on the device itself. The pedometer, the OG fitness tracker, for instance, was just one big number display. Heart rate monitors embedded in smartwatches clearly revealed accurate, up-to-date measurements. And no decent fitness watch couldn't easily display a runner's current pace and distance. Whoop takes a different approach. The hardware has no display. It contains PPG (photoplethysmography) sensors that use infrared light, which is absorbed by hemoglobin in the blood, to capture changes in blood volume and generate an incredibly accurate estimate of a person's heart rate as well as their heart rate variability (the variation in time between heartbeats). Like other fitness trackers, it also contains skin temperature sensors to detect sleep and accelerometers to capture activity. Whoop uses this tech tracking to go all in on the software side of things, and all of that is embedded in the Whoop app. And that brings up a key difference between costs when you compare a Whoop to a traditional fitness tracker like a Fitbit or Garmin watch. Often, a fitness tracker is a one-time purchase kind of deal: you buy the device, you download the accompanying (often free) app, and aside from upgrading the software from time to time, you are set. Whoop works on a membership structure, which has changed over the years, but currently, it uses tiered subscription plans. With the new Whoop 5.0, $199 gets you the band and a Whoop One subscription, which provides sleep, strain, and recovery insights, personalized coaching, VO2 Max and heart rate zones, and women's hormonal insights. The Whoop Peak plan, at $239 per year, adds healthspan and pace of aging, health monitor with health alerts, and real-time stress monitoring. Finally, Whoop Life, at $359 per year, has its own band—the Whoop Peak (different from the Whoop 5.0)—which allows for monitoring blood pressure, though this is still in beta testing, as well as electrocardiogram (ECG) readings and irregular heart rhythm notifications. The key aspect of a Whoop is that in order to unlock all of the benefits listed above, you must wear it 24/7. Literally. You cannot take it off. Not even for a shower. In fact, if you do deign to take a break, the Whoop app will send consistent and persistent notifications that you are slacking off, and it won't be able to obtain the most accurate results it can without you wearing it. See Whoop 5.0 at Amazon I found this aspect difficult, especially in the first week. I didn't love having to wear it all the time, especially after a hot, humid summer workout. And in general, I don't find the Whoop 5.0 band to be all that comfortable. Getting the band on is also not intuitive. You have to lift the metal buckle up, then slide it onto your wrist. If you don't, from experience, it will be almost impossible to wrangle it onto your wrist—to the point where you probably won't want to ever take it off. I remember all of these issues from a few years ago when I tried the Whoop 2.0, which felt completely too large for my tiny wrist. Sometimes I would find it so uncomfortable in the middle of the night that, in a sleep stupor, I would take it off without even realizing I was doing so. (While I am not the majority here, I am also not the only person to find the Whoop band uncomfortable.) Technically, you can wear the band on your bicep, too, and it still provides accurate measurements, but I didn't find that to be all that comfortable either, and a bicep fitness band isn't the vibe I personally always want to be going for (though never ever any judgment, of course). Wearing it did get easier as the days went on, and compared to the earlier version of Whoop I tried and the 4.0, the 5.0 sensor is smaller. The smaller size did seem to make it more comfortable. Without a screen of any kind, the battery life is amazing; my Whoop 5.0 lasted a full 12 days of continued use (and it only takes a couple hours to recharge). There are two ways to charge the Whoop 5.0. A basic charger that plugs right into a USB-C will juice up the device in 152 minutes, while a wireless power pack attaches to the device on your wrist and will charge the device in 110 minutes (according to Whoop) without needing to actually take the Whoop off (they really do want you to keep it on forever). If you wear the Whoop 5.0 all the time as prescribed, the device does give you a cool window into your health. But it takes time. During the first couple of days to weeks, it is in a kind of calibration mode where it needs time to gather more and more data about your body. But by two weeks in, it gives you a more detailed sleep analysis as well as a strain, sleep, and recovery score. By three weeks in, if you have the Peak Plan, you'll access healthspan, which gives you a biological age score, among other things. To be honest, I found a lot of this information both over and underwhelming. The sheer amount of it all can feel very daunting to look at, especially if you don't have a lot of time carved out in the day to devote to digesting it all. Additionally, as I alluded to earlier, having come from a solid break from health tracking, I found I wasn't sure I needed or wanted all of this information again. For example, when it comes to sleep analysis, I pretty much knew, without having to look at the Whoop app, if I had a good night of sleep or not. Perhaps Whoop's biggest selling point, especially from a fitness perspective, is its strain score, which uses a variety of factors, including your exertion and recovery, to give you a daily number, which varies from 1 to 21. Each day's score will not only reflect the amount of physical activity you did, but also how much sleep, for example, you got the night before. That is perhaps the part that I did find most fun and addicting. And I would surmise if I were training for something like a marathon or starting or maintaining a weight-lifting program—and was serious about it—that's where the Whoop 5.0 would come in most handy. The premise of Whoop is that you should continue to wear the sensor 24/7 and, in doing so, you continue to know your body better and better over time AND are able to use the data to live a healthier life. And there are plenty of devoted Whoop users who do this. But how that translates into better health is far murkier. Very few studies have been done that investigated a connection between wearing the Whoop and gaining better health or fitness metrics. And the ones that have been done—including this study, published in April in the journal Sensors, which found that wearing the Whoop consistently was associated with a lower resting heart rate and a higher heart rate variability as well as better sleep and activity metrics—were funded by Whoop itself. 'These findings provide compelling initial evidence that consistent engagement with Whoop is linked to physiological and behavioral benefits,' the study authors concluded. The results were based on long-term data from more than 10,000 users. This brings up another inherent difficulty in studying these devices, and that's that the population of people who choose to use a device like Whoop are typically those who are already heavily invested in improving their health. That makes it difficult to tease apart which improvements were from wearing the Whoop consistently and which ones were from being a health-conscious person who will choose a lifestyle that is good for their health. That aside, there is something to be said for wearing a device that passively tracks numerous health metrics without having to think about them every time you look down at your wrist. And you can't really get that on any other fitness device. Even if you don't utilize all of the health metrics Whoop offers, it could still be worth it to get insight into your health without having your heart rate staring at you in your face every time you look at your wrist. See Whoop 5.0 at Amazon
Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
I discovered 11 hidden Apple Watch and AirPods features to track my health – you should use them too
Over the last few years, health gadgets like smartwatches and fitness trackers have become significantly more advanced. Not only are they capable of tracking your daily activities, steps and the stages of your sleep, but many now offer advanced features such as the ability to detect conditions like sleep apnoea and atrial fibrillation. What you might already know is that the latest Apple Watches, such as the Apple Watch Series 10, for example, now collect an entire library of data, synchronising with the Apple Health app on your iPhone, providing a more holistic view of your overall health. As friendly as this data is presented, however, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with all of this health information and you might even miss some of the key features on offer. With that in mind, I've highlighted 11 of the best Apple Health features that initially passed me by. I also sat down with three healthcare professionals and discussed how these can be important for tracking your long-term health and fitness. 1. Tracking your cardio fitness levels Cardio fitness is thought to be a strong indicator of your overall physical health, as well as your long-term health, such as how manageable you might find walking up a flight of stairs as you get older. This is measured using a metric called VO₂ Max, which is essentially the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Many wearables offer this feature, including Garmin running watches and devices like the Oura Ring 4 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 7. If you have an Apple Watch, you can get an estimate of your cardio fitness levels by recording an outdoor walk, outdoor run or hiking workout. Through the Apple Health app, you can then see if your cardio fitness levels are low or high for your age and sex by tapping on the browse tab, followed by heart and then cardio fitness. If you aren't an athlete training for the Olympics, you might think that assessing your cardio fitness levels isn't hugely important. However, as Dr Nikhil Ahluwalia, cardiologist at Barts Health NHS Trust, told us: 'It's a very good test of your fitness and how you are going to do later in life. What we know is that when you're 80, your VO₂ Max is going to be able to dictate how active and fit you are.' He added: 'We know that your VO₂ Max drops off over age, so for me as an individual, now I actually have a reason to look and see what my VO₂ Max should be because I want to be hitting certain targets today. So, when I am 80, I can hit the targets that I would want to, in order to have things that I would consider to be a good quality of life.' 2. Checking for signs of atrial fibrillation Most smartwatches now offer notifications for signs of atrial fibrillation, or AF, as it is commonly referred to in the UK. This condition was explained to us by Dr Nikhil Ahluwalia as 'when the atria (the top of the heart) fibrillates, which is vibrating rather than beating'. It's possible to enable notifications within the heart rate app on Apple Watch to alert you if you are experiencing particularly high or low heart rates, as well as irregular heart rate rhythms. If you have been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, you can set up a feature within the Apple Health app that will allow a connected Apple Watch to help you understand how often your heart is beating irregularly. Tap on the browse tab in Apple Health, then heart and scroll down to AF history, where you can set this feature up. 3. Privately sharing your data with a partner or doctor It's possible to share any data that is collected within the Apple Health app with up to five people, whether that's your doctor, partner or perhaps your children. Sharing your data means that if there are any changes to your health, the people you choose to share this with can also receive notifications to alert them of those changes, whether that's detection of sleep apnoea or signs of atrial fibrillation, for example. When you choose to share your data, you can control what you want them to see. You can decide to untick loud noise exposure and cardio fitness if you wish, but tick irregular heart rhythm, low heart rate and walking steadiness data, for example. To share data in the health app, tap on the sharing tab and select share with someone to choose the person or people you want to share your data with. The only annoying thing with this is that the recipient will need to own an Apple device to view your data. It would be great to see them open this up to more devices, like Android smartphones, in the future. 4. Taking a hearing test with AirPods Apple's AirPods Pro 2 (USB-C) wireless headphones were updated at the end of 2024 with the ability to offer a hearing test. You can now identify if you are showing signs of hearing loss, as well as determine your hearing ability at various frequencies without the need to leave your home and see a specialist. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) previously recommended that you should take a hearing test every year or two, with Crystal Rolfe, director of strategy, suggesting the two years was predominantly down to people unlikely to go out to the high street to do something like a hearing test. With the hearing test on AirPods Pro 2, however, Crystal told us: 'Now you've got something right in your pocket, I can't see why you wouldn't do it once a year.' The AirPods Pro 2 hearing test takes around five minutes and the results can be found in the Apple Health app under the browse tab, followed by hearing. Within this section, you will also find data on your exposure to sound levels in your environment if you have an Apple Watch, and headphone audio levels if you wear AirPods. 5. Using AirPods as a hearing aid If the AirPods Pro 2 (USB-C) detects hearing loss, it's also possible to set these wireless headphones up as hearing aids. You can either use the hearing test results or audiogram data from a hearing healthcare professional to set up the AirPods Pro 2 for your specific requirements. Crystal Rolfe told us that 'at the moment, there are about two million hearing aid users in the UK, but we think about eight million could benefit from one, so there's a gap of six million people in the UK alone with undiagnosed hearing loss and not using anything'. The hearing aid feature is only designed to help those with mild to moderate hearing loss. If this is detected during the test, you will be prompted to set up the hearing aid in the Health App, with a button appearing under the hearing test result. There's also a feature called media assist, which may appear instead of hearing aid. This adjusts audio levels based on your results. When the hearing aid is set up, the AirPods Pro 2 helps boost external conversations and situations, as well as adjusts everything from FaceTime calls to music, in accordance with your hearing requirements. 6. Taking an ECG It's been possible to take an ECG (electrocardiogram) using an Apple Watch since the Apple Watch Series 4 was released in 2018 and you can do this on other smartwatches, too, including Samsung Galaxy watches, Garmin and Fitbits. None are as accurate as having an ECG test in a hospital, in that it's simply the equivalent of a single-lead electrocardiogram, rather than a multi-lead version that has a better view of different angles of your heart, but they can still check for signs of an irregular heart rhythm. If you wanted to take an ECG on Apple Watch, specifically, you just need to place your finger on the Digital Crown on the right side of the screen, sit still, and the built-in electrodes will read and record the electrical heart signals from your fingertip and wrist. The results appear on the Apple Watch itself, as well as in the Apple Health iPhone app under heart in the browse tab, where you can share a PDF with your doctor, should you want to. It's important to note that when performing an ECG on an Apple Watch (or any smartwatch), it specifies that it can't detect signs of a heart attack. Dr Nikhil Ahluwalia explained why that was the case: 'A heart attack is not a rhythm-related problem. It's a problem where there is a blockage in one of the arteries of the heart. The ECG measures the electrics and many decades ago, a very clever cardiologist figured out that the electrics change when there is a blockage. 'If there is a blockage in the front of the heart, some of the leads on the ECG will change, and if it's on the side, the other ones will. [The Apple Watch ECG] is only giving you an overall summary view from one angle, so it's not looking at all the different areas. It's, therefore, really tricky from looking at one angle for people to say there's nothing going on in the front or the back,' he added. 7. Tracking your walking Using the motion sensors in your iPhone and Apple Watch, a number of mobility metrics can be tracked, from walking speed and step length to walking asymmetry and stair speed. All the data is available in the Apple Health app and you can see how each metric within the mobility section has changed over time, with day, week, month, six-month and yearly views. To track your walking performance and see how you're doing on a mobility front, tap on the browse tab, followed by mobility. From here, you can dive into each metric, with detailed information on your performance and what you should be aiming for. 8. Decide what data should be prioritised You might have various health devices recording data into the Apple Health app, or another health app like Samsung Health or Google's Health Connect. I have an Apple Watch Series 10, Oura Ring 4 and the EightSleep Pod 4 tracking my sleep, for example. You can choose to prioritise which devices or apps are used for the data presented in Apple Health, which you might want to do if you think one device is more accurate than another. You may decide, for instance, that you want to use the sleep data from Oura instead of your Apple Watch and you can do the same for other metrics like heart rate or physical activity. To prioritise a third-party device on Apple Health specifically, tap on browse in the Health app, and select the metric you want to adjust, such as sleep. From here, scroll down to data sources and access, and press edit in the top-right corner. You can then move the data sources into the priority order you want by pressing and holding on the three lines to the right of each. 9. Detecting signs of sleep apnoea Sleep apnoea is thought to affect one billion people globally and is a respiratory condition where you experience repeated disruptions in your breathing while you sleep. Both Apple and Samsung added the ability to detect signs of sleep apnoea using their smartwatches in 2024. In the case of the Apple Watch I use, if you turn on the sleep apnoea notifications feature, it will look for breathing disturbances while you're sleeping and alert you if it detects consistent signs of moderate to severe sleep apnoea over 30 days. Apple clinician, Dr Asha Chesnutt, explained to us that the sleep apnoea detection feature 'looks over a 30-day period, but you only need ten nights of data for it to report out. If you have ten nights, you need 50 per cent of 10. If you sleep for 20 nights, you need 50 per cent of 20 to trigger the notification,' she said. You can view the previous month, six months or a year of your breathing disturbances data if you have slept with Apple Watch in the Apple Health app. You just need to tap on the browse tab, followed by respiratory and then breathing disturbances. 10. Keeping an eye on your vitals Apple announced an app called Vitals for Apple Watch in 2024, which monitors your heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and sleep duration overnight. The idea is to give you a better understanding of your daily health status by establishing a typical range for each of those five health metrics while you sleep and notifying you if any are out of your normal range, be it high or low. It's a slightly different way of doing things than other smartwatches that give you a daily score based on similar data, with Samsung offering an energy score, Garmin offering a helpful feature called body battery, and Fitbit, Pixel and Oura using a daily readiness score, all of which are simpler in their approach. Outliers in your vitals can be an early indicator of sickness, but they can also be affected by factors like alcohol consumption, increased exercise, too much caffeine and recent travel. From a sickness point of view, Dr Asha Chesnutt explained to us why looking at the Vitals data can be important for your health: 'There's a pre-symptomatic phase where any respiratory virus is replicating in our body before you might have a sore throat, runny nose or whatever symptoms you are going to have'. She added that a lot of the time, you'll see subtle changes to heart rate and respiratory rate changes the night before you end up getting sick or a respiratory virus comes on. The Vitals data then acts as a good indicator to alert you to these small changes. In the Apple Health app, you can see an overview of your vitals, as well as view by day, week, month or even six months if you have been wearing an Apple Watch at night for that long. Tap on the browse tab in Apple Health, followed by vitals, to see an overview of the metrics. 11. Tracking your menstrual cycle without a subscription Many female health tracking apps require you to pay a subscription fee for more advanced data surrounding your menstrual cycle, but the Apple Health app offers some basic tracking without the need to pay any monthly costs. It isn't as comprehensive as the likes of Natural Cycles or Clue, but you can log flow, as well as plenty of other data like symptoms, sexual activity and basal body temperature. The Apple Health app will then give you information about your cycle history, which you can export as a PDF if you want to share it with your doctor, as well as flag any cycle deviations that may have appeared. Primary care physician, Dr Raj Aurora, explained to us that cycle deviations are important as they can expedite what a doctor does with this information, such as if your heart rate is higher than normal or you've been bleeding for longer than your usual cycle length. She said that 'though it might seem scary because it's giving you what the deviation is, you can act on it quite frankly'. Through Apple Health, cycle tracking can also provide a fertile window estimate based on the data you put in. If you wear an Apple Watch Series 8 or newer, the Health app is able to use your wrist temperature data to improve your period predictions and estimate the date of ovulation after it occurs. To find cycle tracking data, tap on the browse tab and head to cycle tracking.
