One Month

I did it. I closed all three rings on my Apple Watch for a month! I’ve had other streaks before but never all three rings for a month!

• Stand goal remained at 12 hours
• Exercise goal remained at 12 hours
• What I changed was my Move goal
  • I changed it weekly; 620, 630, 640, & 680

So what did I learn, feel, think? I enjoyed it, there were only a few times I had to push to close the Exercise ring; a few star jumps at 23:56!

The background 🤔

As much as I tried during 2020 to get more active, it was only in spurts and never more than a week. 2020 was hard for everyone and I could feel my health slipping. I’m fairly healthy overall but I need I wanted to be “healthier”.

I started CouchTo2K last year but it didn’t last for long. I enjoyed it but like many, my mental health took over and it became just a day or day thing. No motivation to get out and do it.

January is always such a slog and this year was no different, but as I got to the end, something flipped and I thought “I want to start closing my Activity rings”. No reason, I just wanted to do it. The other thing was focusing on weekends, they’re usually lazier than weekdays and I wanted to move that a touch.

As the month went on, I wanted to make sure I was giving myself a baseline. No ridiculous changes, just closing each ring. And as I went on, I realised it didn’t take too much.

Stand

This was the “easiest”, I’m at 95% of closure on a rolling 365 days. I’m going to push it by an hour each month from now I think. I also need to focus on minutes per hour. It has dropped from 7 to 6.

Move

Once I got going, this one was solid. I often hit my goal previously but I wanted to put exercise behind that number. My goal has been ~620 for some time so I increased it each week. Using the analytics in the Fitness app really make me realise how much progress doing a “small” amount of exercise returns. January really destroyed that 90 day trend. Like the past month, I’ll be increasing the goal each week.

Exercise

Ah, the green ring, Exercise. My nemesis. There have been days before that I’ve hit the Stand and Move without much effort but Exercise each day seemed like pipe dream. So what did I do? I tracked my evening dog walk as a Workout using my Apple Watch! I did 27/28 days with at least one Workout each. That single day? A snow day!

The odd part in that last chart is 38 minutes solid but that’s due to the swings I had during the better part of 2020. Because November and December averaged 40/50mins, this meant even hitting the 30 mins wouldn’t make it. I didn’t focus on that metric so keeping it level was a nice surprise.

Wrap up

The more data, the better insights but currently I’m not using Gyroscope but if this continues, I may look at getting that again to get better data.

Onto #MarchMove