Track Sports Supplements, Vitamins & Medications On Your Apple Watch
Apple’s new Medication Logger is also a neat & quick way for athletes to manage vitamins and supplements.
TL;DR – Your Apple Watch or iPhone reminds you to take your supplements even if you have a complex schedule. It’s great for indicating precise doses with a visual cue. Turning off or re-enabling supplements is easy and can handle changing requirements, for example, when you taper.
At a push, you could even use it during a race to remind you about fuelling and hydration. You can even share your compliance with a coach.
Setting It Up
iPhone> Health App> Browse Tab (bottom right)> Medications
Whilst some critical medications can be chosen from a predefined list in the USA, the process for adding supplements is manual for everyone, everywhere. Simply add the name dosage, and schedule. There are nice visual touches that enable you to add the colour and format of the supplement – for example a purple drink or a yellow pill.
Viewing Your Schedule
iPhone> Health App> Browse Tab (bottom right)> Medications
The medications app on the Watch is also good to use. It shows your active medications and today’s schedule including those you have already logged as taken.
Reminders
Perhaps the most useful element of all of this is the reminder feature which gives timely prompts on either the watch or iPhone. The reminder taps through to the consumption details and loggin features.
Archive & Re-Instating Supplements
It takes a minute or so to set up each supplement. Which is mildly annoying but essential. However, once you’ve done that once you can ‘retire’ the supplement when not needed and then instantly reinstate it at a later date.
I thought this could be useful for me when I’m tapering over 3 weeks or so leading up to a race. I take some quite weird and wonderful things and, the last time I did that, I ended up using an elderly family member’s dosette box to plan and organise my consumption. It worked…but it made me feel old 😉
Thoughts
The feature has a few more twists and turns than I’ve described here but that overview should be enough to let you know, or not if you can fit the Medications feature into your sporty lifestyle.
I do have a need to be reminded to take ‘stuff’. I’m just not sure I’ll use this Apple app. As an alternative, you can easily set up regular reminders or alarms in iOS/watchOS and that’s fine if your consumption patterns are relatively simple.
Of course, if you take ‘proper’ medications then this feature is specifically designed to cover you. So if you intend to use it for Mediations then when not augment your usage to cover supplements as well?
Other tangential uses of this feature could be to share the supplements you’ve taken with your coach or even to prompt you to take a gel during a race or workout…however, I’m pretty sure there are better ways of doing the latter!
Other Watch features can be adopted into your fitness regime. For example, Watch owners can use the accessibility options to configure watch actions with gesture control. For example a fist clench could take a lap…that’s actually a superior method compared to pressing a button or tapping a screen. At least it is if it works properly!
Important(ish) Development – New Running Feature – why & how to use gesture control to take a lap !
The features on this new #AppleWatch are WILD. pic.twitter.com/akzyavQ1Xp
— Real Time with Bill Maher (@RealTimers) September 15, 2022
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Good stuff, but I do not see a way to add supplements Manually to the Apple Health app.
not possible AFAIK. you’d have to use an app