WatchOS 11 – sports updates for 2024

Today Apple announced major upcoming changes to its latest software. Developers get these today but most of us will see the final versions in our Apple Watches in September, probably coinciding with new Apple Watch models.

This post focuses on the new software features that impact sports & fitness. I’ll also touch on some wellness aspects which impact general recovery and well-being. All the new features will likely work on older Watches if the hardware supports them.

One final thing before we start, we will probably see a few more new software features materialise in September with the new Watch range perhaps linked to new hardware. Watch this space.

iOS – An important Change

Apple Maps gets a new feature to create your hikes. Maps also receive topo (contour) maps and official hiking routes in US national parks. These can be saved to Apple Watch with turn-by-turn guidance, even without an iPhone.

Walking routes can also be created and saved within the Maps app on iPhone and later navigated with Apple Watch.

Edit: July 2024 sees Apple Maps available through browsers. Inevitably this will lead to richer route creation and sharing.

Apple Fitness+  on Apple TV

The presentation briefly mentioned that Fitness+ will experience a slight redesign to work better on the big screen of a TV.

Training Load

A big change here is the addition of Training Load.

This is a longstanding and well-known feature in general sports science dating back to the 1960’s. Apple being Apple, has tweaked it for popular cardio-based sports like cycling and running.

Training Load would be referred to by Whoop as STRAIN, whereas a physicist might refer to it as WORK DONE. However you want to understand it, Apple looks at your heart rate (not power), pace, and elevation in the context of your basic personal biometrics like age sex and weight. The standard models create a numeric training load score for each workout based on heart rate zones, disproportionately rewarding you for spending more time at a higher heart rate. Apple keeps this basic method but tweaks it by accounting for your perceived effort (a new, manual input from 1-9) and allows further manual adjustment for sports like Strength training where an estimate is not provided.

The result is a Training Load score ranging from 1 to 9. With 9 being all-out.

Training Load also appears on your iPhone with a deeper understanding of progress and trends.  The third image above shows progressively increasing load, coupled with rest periods – perfect training!

Note: This is a slightly novel interpretation of training load. Apple attempts to account for the muscular strain aspect of training load by your manually inputted perception. I don’t think it will work! but it might. It all depends on how good and how honest you are at determining your true exertion level. TRIMP is broadly correct, there is decent science behind TRIMP and RPE-TRIMP, however raw TRIMP (based on HR or POWER) can NOT account for muscular strain. All other vendors (except Whoop, kinda) fail here. TRIMP also fails when trying to assess efforts well outside your normal training durations ie it will correctly account for an 8-hour walk if you often do such walks, if your walk is mountainous it introduces unusual muscular strain…again TRIMP won’t account for that. Tip: don’t change the default calculation for normal endurance workouts, just use Apple’s manual adjustment for the outlier cases.

Apple Vitals

When planning training you need to consider your historic load as well as the reaction of your body to the stressors. Apple Vitals is a surprising but welcome addition, including aspects of what leading sports apps like Athlytic and Training Today already show.

Apple Vitals uses heart rate, respiration, wrist temperature,  and other data to give an understanding of your body’s response. Perhaps more frequent polling of HRV data will also be added, it certainly would make sense to do that but it’s not included now.

Apple Workout changes

The Workout app adds new sports to leverage distance covered (via GPS) including Soccer, American Football, Australian Football, Outdoor Hockey, Lacrosse, Downhill Skiing, Cross Country Skiing, Snowboarding, Golf, Outdoor Rowing, and more.

Route maps are allowed for more workout types.

Hiking

Not highlighted in the presentation were TBT instructions for hiking. These are added.

Swim workouts

Also not mentioned were custom swim workouts. These are also added and allow users to customise interval-based workouts with support for sets of work and recovery, and haptics to signal it is time to move on to the next interval.

A new Up Next workout view shows what remains in the current interval and provides a snapshot of the upcoming interval.

Personalise the Fitness App

Fitness users can change how FITNESS appears with a revamped DASHBOARD.

Contrast this to the awful-looking attempt that Garmin recently made to improve the home page of Connect. the visual difference is immense. Apple has a vastly superior UI and UX to Garmin.

More: A new Garmin Connect Experience

Enhanced Widget Smart Stack

The recently added smart widget stack will be expanded and automated. For example, a precipitation (wind?) widget or a translate widget will be automatically added as needed.

Apple Check-In

Also added is an “I got back home” feature. Great for family members when travelling, going out, socialising or returning from exercise. Your loved ones get to know you’re safe.

Apple Live Activities

The new ‘Live Activities’ feature wasn’t explained but probably is a form of in-exercise tracking for 3rd parties, probably with a more granular level of positional detail than currently provided by Find My. Probably also Live Activity location can be shared with people not in your Find My circle.

Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence is not added to watchOS. However, features created by AI on the iPhone can be sent to the Watch via notification.

Apple Intelligence is grounded in your personal context, hopefully, Siri will now become the product it was always intended to be. It will run on-device. So for Watch X/10 to have this, it may need a new processor, or at least the one from 2023. Eventually, maybe as soon as September, the revamped Siri/AI will find its way to Watch X/10.

The presentation showed an example of using the new Siri to get a weather forecast and then contextually understand a subsequent request to plan a hike at that location without naming the location a second time.

Old Siri is a bit rubbish. Hopefully, the new Siri will be as good as it looks.

Take Out

Overall I was very impressed with what Apple is doing to its ecosystem. The company has some big changes here, but not too many in the realm of sports and adventures.

That said, the TRAINING LOAD feature is a great step forward for athletes and the new VITALs app offers great wellness features for everyone, with specific benefits for athletes.

I get the feeling that Apple is still working to improve routes for hiking and sports. September might see links added to 3rd party route platforms like RwGPS, Strava and Komoot. Even if not, you might be able to manually add an external GPX route in Maps on your iPhone, and then follow it on your Watch.

Apple has gone into Artificial Intelligence big time. Firstly in the personal context of your data and Siri but secondly linking to external data with ChatGPT. It seems only a matter of time until we see Whoop-like additions to your sports performances, your responses and all contextualised to Sports Science insights from the web.

Apple shares fell 2% today.