I broke my toe and can’t work out much and am not moving around great. Of course, my Apple Watch and Apple Health keep telling me my steps are trending down and all sorts of stuff. Frankly it annoys me and I’m already vexed about not being able to play tennis and workout. Any way to report an injury to Apple Health so it can get off my back? This is an obvious need in the Apple Fitness ecosystem; athletes get injured and they need rear days. Why aren’t these kinds of muting features built in?
Thank you for listening to this cranky broken toed Apple user.
I broke my ankle back in 2019, a surgery was necessary. I felt similar like you are doing now regarding Apple Health.
It is one thing to track data - and yes, it is ok to track the decline of activity, training, standing hours and what not. What annoyed me, too, was what you are mentioning: why is it not possible to enter an injury so that those not helpful reminders are automatically muted for a while. It would be nice, if Apple Health or Apple Fitness were able to accompany the recovery with helpful encouragement instead of nagging reminders that are of no help at all. Maybe even with the possibility to cheat a bit in a situation like that when it comes to Activity streaks and so on.
Then again, it is just an app and the best thing you can do with an app that is not working the way you want it to may be to just shut it down. That’s what I did: I disabled Apple Fitness reminders and enabled them again after my recovery (with a lowered activity goal at the beginning).
You can dial down the Steps, Calories and Trainingminutes you need, to close the ring to a minimum.
If you still could move around a little bit, this could at least get the rings closed.
This is what’s fundamentally wrong with Apple Watch fitness tracking. Gamifying it with no recourse to adjust it to a varying lifestyle is actually counterproductive.
Which is why I turned it all off over a year ago. I might still start a workout on the watch if I fancy looking at some data, but the daily grind of the rings is no longer part of my life. I’ve not gained weight, and do roughly the same amount of exercise (not enough, but the same amount) and I don’t ever fret about “missing” any goals.
I have added other data into my life to help me quantify myself, but none of it is gamified.
