Introduction - Get Fit with Apple Watch: Using the Apple Watch for Health and Fitness (2015)

Get Fit with Apple Watch: Using the Apple Watch for Health and Fitness (2015)

Introduction

If you are like me, you are willing to put in some time and effort to maintain good health and even increase your level of fitness. However, it’s hard to maintain the discipline to take the necessary actions day in and day out, over the long haul. It’s too easy to fill up the day with necessary activities such that when evening rolls around it’s too late to fit in the exercise that you know you should do.

Fitness trackers can help to keep you motivated for a while, but when the novelty wears off, most of them find themselves in the back of a drawer. To be a consistent aid to maintaining fitness, a wearable device must be more than just a fitness tracker. This is where the Apple Watch really shows its value. Yes, it is a fitness tracker, but it is also much more than that. It is an elegant premium timepiece and a supremely convenient communication device. It also has some unique features that you cannot get with any other device, wearable or not.

In the first several short chapters of this book I will provide a brief introduction to the general features of the Apple Watch and how to use them. I will then move into the real subject area of the book: how to use the Apple Watch to help you to maintain good health and improve your physical fitness, day in and day out, over a period of months and years. The Apple Watch is an appropriate accessory at the opera or ballet just as much as it is at the gym or out on the trail.

The Apple Watch contains a comprehensive suite of built-in applications that perform many of the functions that people are accustomed to performing on their smartphones. The Apple Watch serves as an extension of a person’s iPhone that eliminates the need to rummage around in a purse or reach into a pocket to pull it out and then unlock. In addition to the built-in apps, the Apple Watch is supported by several thousand third-party apps that run on your iPhone and are ported via either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi directly to your watch. A number of these apps deal with health and fitness, enabling watch wearers to tailor their daily, weekly, and monthly exercise programs to their own individual needs.

The Apple Watch sounds the opening bell to a new era, when wearable technology truly enters the mainstream. There may be no better way to appreciate where the future is flowing to than to experience the Apple Watch for yourself.