When the Apple Watch Ultra first popped up, people naturally compared it to Garmin sports watches and pointed out the shortcomings that the Apple Watch Ultra had. These shortcomings were:
- No offline maps for the Apple Watch Workout app
- No recovery and training advice
Now to be fair, these were shortcomings that the Apple Watch have always had. But they were magnified because of how the Apple Watch Ultra was marketed. Which was directly against established sport watches that had these features baked into their offerings. The good news is that you can easily add these features to not only your Apple Watch Ultra, but any Apple Watch actually to make either more “Ultra”. Let’s start with recovery advice as that is important to the Apple Watch Ultra’s target market.
For recovery and training advice, I have been using an app called Athlytic for the last couple of years on both my iPhone and Apple Watch. I’m going to use their definition of what their app does a great job of encapsulating it:
Athlytic is an app that works with both the iPhone and the Apple Watch to leverage the data in Apple Health, giving you daily, personalized insights into and coaching about your health and daily training.
More specifically, Athlytic uses the health data, collected by your Apple Watch, to help you gauge three things for the current day: how ready your body is to perform, how much cardiovascular exertion you should aim to put on your body, and how much cumulative cardiovascular exertion you’ve put on your body.
Athlytic generates three primary metrics: a Recovery score, a Target Exertion Zone, and an Exertion score.
So in short, it helps me to figure out how hard I can or more accurately should push myself when I work out or take it easy. Which in case you are wondering, I do a workout every day either on the bike outdoors, on the bike indoors via the Zwift platform, cross country skiing in the winter, and some other stuff like hiking and walking.
Let me walk you through how I use it.
When I wake up in the morning and open Athlytic, the recovery screen is the first place I go to. I’ve really been doing some hard workouts lately on Zwift, and it shows that over the last week that my body really isn’t recovering form the efforts that I have put in over the last few days. So based on this, I should be doing less intense workouts to get my body to fully recover. Athlytic goes deep into the weeds to help you understand how these numbers are calculated which you can read here. But the main metric that works into this recovery score is HRV or heart rate variability which Athlytic defines as follows:
The next screen that I go to is the sleep screen to see how well (or not so well) I slept the previous night. On this night, I had decent sleep as it was north of 7.5 hours.
I also pay attention to my sleep debt, which is a way of illustrating if you are consistently getting 7.5 or more hours of sleep consistently, which in turn pays off in terms of better recovery scores. I also pay attention to my sleep time consistency. Which is another way of illustrating if my bedtime is the same every night which helps me get a better nights sleep. Both of these are in a very good place at the moment.
I also tag what happened the day before. For example, the day before I had two cups of coffee in the morning. I do this because Athlytic can start trending recovery relative to different things that happen. Thus I can see what positively or negatively affects my recovery.
Athlytic measures a number of metrics via your Apple Watch, and presents them in this summary page. If anything is out of line, you’ll get an alert, as having any of these out of line may be in indication of fatigue or sickness.
The final screen that I look at is the trends screen which has my exertion or how hard I worked out in blue, and the recovery in grey. This illustrates that earlier this week, I was working out way harder than I should have and I am now paying for it later in the week as the blue line was way above the grey line. I got that under control later in the week. But by then my body was clearly fatigued. Thus something that I need to focus on is bringing those lines closer together as I am going to get more fitness gains by not over training.
So with that out of the way, my wife and I planned to go cross country skiing and given this recovery level, we planned to do two laps of a loop that was just over 5K. I would do the second lap by myself at my typical pace which is way faster than what my wife can do. That’s where another app called WorkOutDoors comes in:
The Apple Watch Workout app is really inadequate. It doesn’t have anywhere the level of customization that any dedicated sports watch such as a Garmin watch has. It also doesn’t support the paring of sensors like power meters on bikes for example. And more importantly, it doesn’t support offline maps which a lot of endurance athletes rely upon. WorkOutDoors solves all of that and really leverages the big screen of the Apple Watch Ultra as seen here. I can use the iPhone app to create custom screens like this one to display the information that I need to see, as well as download routes in .gpx file format to allow me to follow a route. Including in situations where I do not have cellular service which is something that the baked in Workout app cannot do. I will admit that when you first look at this app to try and customize your screens, it can be intimidating. But I encourage you to experiment with different views and try them out to see if you like them or not as it really isn’t that intimidating. One big plus of WorkOutDoors is that I can have it upload directly to the sports social networking site Strava because if your workout is not posted to Strava, it didn’t happen as far as your friends are concerned. WorkOutDoors has mostly replaced the Workout app on my Apple Watch Ultra as it is simply far more usable and functional with the exception of one thing. WorkOutDoors really needs to leverage the always on display as it doesn’t offer “live” views even when the screen is dimmed. If they fixed that, this app would be perfect.
So, after my wife and I did our laps of the route that we planned, I can go back to Althyltic and see how hard I worked.
This is the second lap of the just over 5K route that I spoke of earlier where I was pushing myself a bit harder. Athlytic can display the heart rate of my cross country ski run and then go into the weeds about what this means.
In this case, it showed me that while I was working hard, but not insanely hard. Most of my heart rate was in zone four which is good for building my VO2 Max capacity. I also note that this workout was scored as a 4.01 in terms of effort. Combined with my first run which was much easier, I got an exertion score of 5.9 which was well within my exertion range of 4.5 to 6.5 that I was aiming for. It also shows how intense the workout was. Because you can do a workout and think “wow that was hard” and it actually wasn’t. In this case, it validates that I was working hard but not going over the top.
In fact, Athlytic says so as 76% of this lap was anaerobic. This is the sort of workout that will help my cycling when the road season starts up again.
For me, the combination of these apps allows me to really focus on how I train, how I recover, as well as seeing the real time metrics that I need to work out effectively. And both have resulted in a significant gain in fitness for yours truly. Thus I consider these apps to be a must if you’re serious about using the Apple Watch to up your fitness game. Athlytic is a subscription app which costs $30.99 CDN a year. WorkOutDoors however is a one time payment app which is $8.49 CDN. However both support Family Sharing so others in your family who want to up their fitness game can do so easily and for one fee for up to six people. If you want to make your Apple Watch more “Ultra” regardless of whether you have an Apple Watch Ultra or some other Apple Watch so that you can really improve your fitness, and make up for the lack of this functionality from Apple, you should have a serious look at both of these apps.