The Most Useful Smartwatch Widget For The Gym Is Not One You'd Expect
I struggle with using smartwatches and gyms. These are great tools for gathering metrics for all types of endurance exercise, from detailed running and cycling metrics to stroke count while swimming. GPS positioning takes the worry out of training in the wild and makes trail running a pleasure. But the gym is a different ball game.
Even the best smartwatches go out of their way to stay useful when you're doing something other than weight lifting, yoga, stretching, or high-intensity cardiovascular training. Of course, some of the best Garmin watches offer strength training profiles, and most smartwatches offer yoga training profiles, as this is always a popular choice. But they cannot speak the language of this exercise the way they can translate their countless tools into running or cycling.
For example, the best running watch can tell you how your last 5K of running compares to your previous results, fully automatically. You can view it in terms of heart rate to see if your fitness has improved, or you can view it in terms of cadence to see if you're increasing your speed.
But no smartwatch can tell you how much you're lifting or whether you're touching the ground with your heels when the dog goes down without manual input. That's why one of the best apps to use at the gym is the humble note-taking app.
But there's one handy feature that weightlifters and other gym goers have been using since before the advent of smartwatches: the humble stopwatch. A stopwatch was used to determine how long it would take an athlete to complete a particular exercise, whether it was a 100-yard sprint or a 50-yard weight sled ride.
Almost all smartwatches these days have stopwatch and timer functionality built into the UX of all flashy gadgets, and trust me when I say these are my two most popular and most used sports gadgets.
I use the stopwatch or timer feature on my best Apple Watch to take breaks between sets during strength training. Set it to 90 seconds, click on it when you're done, and when you hear a beep, it's time to start again. The information about the number of sets, repetitions and weight goes directly into my Notes app, as I struggle to enter this information directly into my smartwatch.
I use a stopwatch so often that I've now incorporated isometric moves like the plank into my workouts to replace crunches (which can be bad for your back). I use a stopwatch when doing yoga poses or stretches, which I'm trying to improve. Sometimes I go completely off the grid and use a small notebook and pencil to write down sets and reps, and during breaks I use my favorite Casio F-91W stopwatch.
This may not look like new information. For most gym goers, this is incredibly easy to do, and the idea of timing isn't revolutionary at all. But I use the stopwatch or timer function on my watch about 16 times in a one-hour gym session, so if I go to the gym three times, that's at least 40 times a week. This makes it one of my most used smartwatch features, and I always set the timer and stopwatch features on my smartwatch for easy access.
Smartwatches can't automatically detect the weight we're carrying or our stretching progress in the same way that they can track our power output while cycling or while running, but don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Sometimes the old stopwatch feature is all you need to make it better.
