The Apple Watch guide
The watch app is fully independent, and better with the phone around. This guide covers everything it can do.
About 5 minutes
1. Start a workout from the wrist
The watch app is a fully independent execution device for workouts, not just a remote for your phone. You can start, run, and log any workout from the watch alone, with no phone in range.
- Open Parameter on the watch. It opens on Today, listing what is planned for the day.
- Tap the workout.
- Tap Start.
Pace, heart rate, and your workout log all keep working independently. When the phone comes back into range, whatever you logged on the watch syncs back automatically.
2. Read the execution screen
The watch runs the same workout the phone does, laid out for a small screen.
Top line: total elapsed time, your heart rate with its zone, and the time of day. Then the live metrics, then the phase with its repeat position, the countdown, the targets, and what is coming next.
The dots at the bottom are pages. Swipe sideways between the segment view, the controls page, the workout summary, and the media player controls. The current workout never leaves the screen. You are moving between views of it.
3. Adjust with the digital crown
Turn the crown to change a load or a speed mid-set, without touching the screen at all, which matters when your hands are full or wet.
The value the crown is currently driving is the one with an outline around it, so you can see what you are about to change before you change it. Tap a different metric to change it instead. Once you have linked the equipment (see the equipment guide), values snap to that machine’s real increments, a treadmill’s actual speed steps for instance, so you cannot dial in a number the machine cannot produce. Without a linked machine the crown uses a sensible default step.
4. Rest between sets
On a strength routine, checking a set off starts the rest timer on the watch exactly as it does on the phone.
−15 s and +15 s buttons let you adjust the length of the rest. The next set is named while you wait, so you can set up for it before the timer runs out.
5. The haptic vocabulary
Each event has its own tap, so you can keep your eyes off your wrist. The ones worth learning:
- The 5-4-3-2-1 countdown: five short taps counting down to the end of a segment.
- Work starting, rest starting: different taps, so you know which one began without looking.
- Zone alerts: a tap up or down when your heart rate drifts out of the target zone.
- Rest over: the rest timer from a strength set just finished.
Learn these over a workout or two and you stop looking at your wrist to know what happens next. They are controlled by Heart-rate alerts in the phone’s Settings, along with the on-screen banners.
6. Complications and the Smart Stack
A watch-face complication shows today’s plan without opening anything, in four states: the workout and its length when one is pending, a checkmark once it is done, a bed on a rest day, and an empty state when nothing is scheduled.
To add it, edit your watch face the way you normally would, on the watch or in the Watch app on your iPhone, and pick Parameter for a complication slot. Which slots a face offers, and what they are called, varies by face and by watchOS version.
The Smart Stack widget carries more: the day’s workouts with their durations, so a swipe up from the face tells you the whole day.
On Apple Watch Ultra, the Action Button can start your workout directly. Assign it to Parameter in the watch’s own Settings app, under the Action Button section.
Siri works from the wrist too. “Start my workout” begins today’s plan, and “log my effort” records your effort rating without opening the app. Both phrases also work as Shortcuts if you would rather trigger them that way.
7. Rate the workout from the wrist
When you finish, you rate it on the watch rather than waiting to get back to the phone.
- Pick the status: Completed, Partial or Skipped. Parameter preselects the one that matches what you actually logged.
- Scroll down and set your effort by turning the Digital Crown.
- Add a note if anything is worth remembering.
Your AI reads the rating and the note exactly as it would if you had entered them on the phone.
8. Both devices at once
When the phone and the watch are both present, both show the same full layout, live, rather than a stripped-down watch view of a phone-first app. Check a set on the watch and the phone reflects it instantly, even with the phone locked in a gym bag. The reverse holds too.
Whichever device starts the workout owns the log, and the other rides along as a full live mirror, so either one can lead.