Clothing affecting Apple Watch usage

Getting to love my Apple Watch series 9 … except for those occasions when using the Exercise app while wearing either a pullover/jumper or a waterproof jacket. The sleeve of the garmets brush across the face of the Watch and interpreted as a touch. On one occasion this caused an Outdoor Walking exercise to be terminated prematurely, on another it cause segments to be marked — I don’t use that information because my walking route does not vary much day-ti-day, and on others constant raising of pausing/terminating the session.

A temporary work around is to turn over the cuff of the pullover or pull the waterpoof’s sleeve further up my arm and tighten it there.

Has anyone else encountered this problem and if so how did you solve it?

I don’t have an Apple Watch but on other smart watches with a touch screen I’ve used there has been an option to lock the screen, sometimes automatically during activities, or after a certain timeout. Does Apple Watch have this?

Interesting suggestion.

Reading through the Apple Watch documentation the locking feature is limited to use as a security feature. Invoking it turns off at least one of the metrics that I want to collect whilst out exercising!

1 Like

Put the watch in water lock and it won’t respond to touch until you come out of it again. It will try to expel the (non-existent) water from the speaker but that doesn’t do it any harm. You can even make a shortcut to put it in water lock and use Siri so not have to touch the watch at all.

8 Likes

Apple Watch is a product for warm/dry climates. Sleeves are its enemy.

I’ve never actually had clothing register as a touch, though. I just frequently require two hands to be able to see even the time during winter.

The sleeve-touch (or glove-touch) thing happens to me sometimes if I’m running in rain or wet snow and using the water lock feature (as per @chrisecurtis’s suggestion) works very well. I don’t have problems with clothing causing touch events if it’s not wet out.

I’ve had this happen in the past.

What I did was create a shortcut that would run automatically on any workout starting to enable the water lock. Meant I couldn’t swipe during the workout, but moving between screens was rarely done, so this worked for me.

As others have said, this was only when it was raining did I have issues.

2 Likes

I don’t have this problem, but I do have a problem with the Milanese strap causing my jumper sleeve ends to fray!

Thanks that worked. Now no matter whether I wear a polo shirt (my preference), a jumper, or a waterproof nothing interfers with my workout data. It doesn’t prevent the workout app prompting me to pause/stop the app though; eventually that prompt times out and the data collection continues.

1 Like