How to run structured workouts on Apple Watch

What the screen needs to show

Mid-repetition, total elapsed time is close to useless. What you need is which block you are in, how you are pacing inside that block, and how long is left in it. Those three numbers let you make a decision while the decision still matters.

Heart rate belongs there too, as context rather than as a target. The optical sensor lags by 20 to 30 seconds after a change of pace, so on a two minute repetition it spends most of the block catching up.

Anything else on the face is decoration. A watch screen read at 4:12 per kilometre in the rain has room for four numbers, and one of them should be the one you are being judged on.

Setting one up

Apple’s own Workout app supports custom workouts with warm-up, work, recovery and cool-down blocks, built on the iPhone and synced across. It handles alerts for pace and heart rate ranges, and for a simple session it is enough.

Where it runs out is pace targets derived from your actual fitness. You have to supply every number yourself, which means the quality of the session depends on you already knowing what your threshold pace is this month.

Samado takes the other approach: pick the session, and the targets are already computed from the runs in your Apple Health history. The blocks arrive on the watch with their paces attached.

Can you leave the phone at home?

On a cellular Apple Watch, yes, for everything that matters during the run: GPS, heart rate, block tracking and audio to paired headphones all work independently.

On a GPS-only watch you still get the workout and the audio, because the session is stored on the watch once it has synced. What you lose is anything that needs a live connection, and the Live Activity on the phone you left behind.

Battery is the practical limit rather than connectivity. GPS with continuous heart rate and audio streaming to headphones will get through a half marathon on most recent models, though not a long trail day.

Wrist sensor or chest strap?

The wrist sensor is accurate enough for steady running and for anything longer than about three minutes. It struggles with rapid changes in effort and with cold hands, where it can read 20 beats low for the first minute of a repetition.

If your training is mostly easy running and threshold work, the wrist is fine. If you run a lot of short repetitions and you want the heart rate data to mean something, a chest strap pairs to the watch over Bluetooth and settles the argument.

Frequently asked