Apple Watch, please let me rest, I have covid

By Alex Choros

Last updated 07 June 2022

Over the past few years of wearing an Apple Watch, I've built an 803-day exercise streak. I’ve managed to go 803 subsequent days where I met all my goals and closed my rings. No matter the day, I found the time to get a proper workout in. During lockdown, on holidays, even the morning after my birthday.

That 803-day streak came to an end last week when I caught covid.

Two-and-a-half years of hard work turned to digital dust because of a stupid virus that left me stuck in bed. To add insult to injury, my Watch was telling me it wasn’t too late to close my rings literally at the same time as I got the positive diagnosis text. Those are two very different kinds of positivity.

And honestly, I’m more upset about the broken streak than getting sick. It’s actually devastating.

This week, Apple unveiled the latest version of its Apple Watch operating system and I was hoping for one small change that would have made this whole situation a little easier.

As is the norm, there are plenty of new fitness and health-related improvements. There's more data for runners, custom workouts, multisport workouts for triathletes, better sleep insights, and medication tracking and scheduling. These all seem like handy features, but there's one simple request Apple hasn't added. It still won’t let me take a rest day.

The Apple Watch's fitness tracking is built around meeting your fitness goals - closing your rings - every day, and it rewards you for doing so with virtual badges, flashy animations, and the ever increasing streak. It's a heavily gamified experience. Sure, it's not the kind of thing that works for everyone, but it taps directly into the "big number go up" dopamine centres of my brain, and has rewired me into being the kind of person who runs City2Surf.

I'm more active than I've ever been, which is good. But I also have an unhealthy relationship with my Apple Watch, which is bad. I genuinely enjoy working out, but there's part of me that would feel guilty if I didn't. This has led me to pushing myself when I probably shouldn't. When self-isolating for three days last year, I took to doing over an hour of weights per day and running up and down the apartment just to appease the Watch.

A lot of this is on me and my broken brain, but the Apple Watch encourages this behaviour. It's both a wonderful motivator and a cruel taskmaster.

The problem is your Apple Watch goals are static. You're expected to burn the same amount of kilojoules each day. There's no rest or reprieve, you just need to keep grinding or kiss your streak goodbye. Even if you’ve got covid.

The simple solution is for the Watch to let you take a rest day. Rest days, as a fitness concept, are universally understood to be good, even if you’re not sick. They give your body time to recover and help prevent injury. They can also improve performance and reduce fatigue. Given how health-centric the Apple Watch is, it's odd Apple has omitted this concept entirely.

At a basic level, you could bank one rest day every seven days, and then redeem it on a day when you don't want your streak to break - from illness or otherwise. This would even be super useful when dealing with time zone changes, which were the bane of my streak's existence in The Before Times.

Alternatively, Apple could take inspiration from my latest word game obsession - Knotwords. Knotwords builds a streak for every day you play in a row, but if you break it, it lets you reclaim your old streak by building a new seven-day streak. It's less flexible than rest days you can take whenever, but fits in with the Watch's gamified vibes.

Apple could also get rid of the concept of daily goals entirely, and instead work towards a weekly goal. This would make individual days matter less than overall performance. I probably wouldn’t have even met a weekly goal last week, but it feels like a more balanced approach that takes in more of the ebbs and flows of life.

But honestly, I think Apple should go further. I think it needs to get rid of arbitrary static goals and offer dynamic challenges instead. The Apple Watch has a ridiculous amount of data on me. It probably knew I had covid before I did. There's no reason it couldn't look at the previous day's activity and how well I slept and scale my fitness goals accordingly. watchOS 9 is even introducing a cardio recovery metric, so why not actually give users more guidance?

Whoop is a wearable manufacturer that's already doing interesting work in this space. Instead of tracking steps or setting goals, it focuses on just two key metrics: strain and recovery.

Strain is your daily cardiovascular exertion, which is based on the amount of time you spend in different heart rate zones. Intense exercise adds to your daily strain. Recovery indicates how well your body is ready to take on strain. If your recovery percentage is high, the idea is you should push yourself. If it's low, you should take it a bit easier. Whoop wants you to balance strain and recovery, and each day you'll get an optimal strain target.

The Whoop is clearly designed for athletes and gym junkies who know what they're doing, but it's easy to imagine Apple finding a comfortable middle ground. “Hey, take it a bit easier today, just try and burn 1,000 kilojoules.”

I know asking a fitness tracker for permission to take a break seems dumb. So does getting upset over losing a streak that has no real meaning. But please Apple, just let me take a rest day. Change up your tracking, hell, give me a big “I’m sick” button. Or if you're not going to do that, can I at least have my 803-day streak back?

Disclosure: This author owns shares in Apple