TL;DR If you ever see your Move ring acting funny, check your recorded weight.
I am slightly obsessed with fitness tracking with my Apple Watch, so I was a little bummed yesterday when I noticed my Move ring moving at a dizzying pace.
I was around 500 calories burned after a morning run, then a couple hours later I was at 1,700. An hour later, over 2,000. By the time I figured out the cause less than two hours after that, I was over 2,400. As much as I’d like to feel that burn from sitting around the house, I don’t think so.
Turns out, I missed a decimal point when entering my weight after my run. Apparently, you can really rack up those calories burned when the Watch think you weigh 2,016 pounds!
If only I could correct my history, and give back the 400% Move Goal award, which I have only actually earned once in seven years of tracking
On a tangentially related note: Does anyone else’s watch give wildly unreasonably floor counts? I often end the day at 60 or even over 100.
I do live in a modestly hilly area – but nothing like that. (And in fact when I’ve walked the same route as someone else wearing an Apple Watch, we get radically different floor counts).
I’ve regularly been surprised by the lack of error checking in fitness devices. This is a key example - surely an upper limit should have kicked in to avoid such an input error.
It’s less of a problem now, but I remember in the early days tracking runs and - due to a GPS error - for a moment my current location would be off by some distance. As a result, the app would faithfully record I had run a couple of miles in a few seconds… and back again. A simple algorithm would filter out such obviously erroneous exceptions to the rest of the data being received.
Even now, getting in the car and forgetting to stop a run can lead to recorded run speeds in excess of 60mph. Again, a basic sanity check on the data would suggest that is unlikely.
You can edit any health data from inside the Health app. I just checked and you can edit Active Energy, Resting Energy, Stand Hours (and minutes!) Exercise Minutes, and Workouts among others.
I’m not sure if that will retroactively alter your ‘Fitness’ numbers. In theory it should. It also shows Fitness data in Health but there is no option to view the raw data.
If you’ve not done this before, in the Health app scroll to the bottom of your favourites in the Summary tab and tap “Show All Health Data”. Find the relevant category and tap into it. Scroll to the bottom and tap “Show All Data”. There you can see all the data entries (different types have different frequencies) and there is an Edit button at the top. Some types let you drill down to more detail, too.
Also on the main page for any type (before you tap “Show All Health Data”) there is an “Add Data” button if needed.
I’ve used this to fix mis-recorded sleep — apparently I was asleep for the entire 30 minutes my watch was on the charger and I was in the shower — and to add in weight measurements when I realised my Beurer scales hadn’t been doing so automatically.
UPDATE: Changing data in Health app has no effect on Fitness, there doesn’t appear to be a way to alter the Fitness data. Can’t seem to change the Move numbers or Awards, as opposed to Active Energy which can be change in the Health app as suggested by @zkarj
Great idea. I’ve edited weight and nutrition before, but didn’t think of it here.
I’m not sure on editing the Active Energy. There are hundreds of skewed entries for that day that I could remove (ugh) or it looks like I could remove the entire day and then manually re-enter it. I’ll think on it. Thanks for the suggestion!
