The watchOS 11 beta slowed me down, in a good way

One thing always irked me about the Apple Watch. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health, it pushed me to close my rings. Never mind if I had covid-19, shin splints, or was mentally in a dark place. It nudged me to be a “better” version of myself, so long as better didn’t involve a day off. But with watchOS 11 — the public beta of which arrives today — it feels like my Apple Watch is finally cutting me some slack.

This is largely due to a trio of new features: the new Vitals app, Training Load feature, and the ability to pause your Activity Rings. I waxed lyrical about the latter right after WWDC, but after spending some time with the developer beta, I’m convinced these are the smartest fitness updates Apple’s rolled out in years.

The Vitals app and Training Load feature are technically two separate things, but in practice, they very much go hand in hand. The Vitals app contextualizes a set of metrics: heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. These are all recovery metrics, most commonly packaged in other apps as a readiness score, except Apple’s version doesn’t give you a single score. Rather, it shows you whether your metrics are “typical” or an “outlier.” If two or more metrics are out of range, you’ll get a notification and some possibilities as to why certain metrics are out of whack.

The Training Load feature is also straightforward. It compares and visualizes your seven-day versus 28-day exercise load. Based on that, you can see whether you’re well below, below, steady, above, or well above your usual activity levels. It breaks this down not only by overall activity but also by individual activity types (i.e., running, pilates, cycling, etc.). After a workout, you can also rate your perceived effort level. For popular workouts, like running, it’ll automatically set your effort level. (You can manually edit it if you disagree, which I occasionally did, though it’s broadly accurate.)

It’s been nice to have both of these features over the past month, though, like most of the updates in watchOS 11, they’re a bit passive. For example, I’ve not had a single Vitals notification because, well, all my vital metrics have stayed within their typical range. Yay me for being consistent! This isn’t a bad thing — you don’t want to get frequent notifications. It’s more that having the quick visual of “is everything hunky dory?” is helpful when you’re on the fence about whether to push it or take a rest day.

That’s the benefit of Training Load, too, especially for folks newer to exercise or training. I’m experienced enough to know that my current Training Load is a little skewed because I took a whole week off of training while on vacation. (Right around the time when I downloaded the beta.) Yet it is a helpful visual reminder for me when I am well above my 28-day baseline that I can take a break for a day. A rest day isn’t going to set me back.

Apple isn’t doing anything here that we haven’t seen from Garmin, Polar, Oura, Fitbit, Whoop, or any other health and fitness tracker in the past five years. Rather, Apple’s version makes these concepts easily digestible for beginners. It’s also less data overload for burnt-out athletes. Combined with the ability to pause rings or customize your goals based on the day of the week, you’ve got a much more flexible fitness tracking experience on the world’s most popular smartwatch. That’s a huge deal.

Ultimately, these features make the Apple Watch’s fitness tracking platform more personalized, which seems to be the overarching theme of watchOS 11. Instead of a blanket approach of always doing more, you can make alternative choices based on your actual day-to-day circumstances. I’m still testing a bunch of other watchOS 11 features, but as far as the marquee fitness tracking updates go, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how it’s encouraged me to be kinder to myself.

My main gripe is that Apple still doesn’t tell you to outright take a rest day. You have to infer from phrases like “recover as needed if you start feeling run down” or “you’ve been in the above or well above range for 14 days.” I also lost a couple nights’ worth of Vitals data because I had to charge my watch overnight — a reminder that battery life and charging schedules remain the Achilles’ heel of smartwatches. But overall, that’s still much more sustainable long term for most people than the previous blanket approach of “always do more.” Maybe in watchOS 12, my Apple Watch will finally bully me into putting my feet up on the couch. But for now, baby steps are still steps in the right direction.