Fitness trends
August 19, 2025 at 5:12 PM by Dr. Drang
Last year, I complained about Apple’s way of calculating and presenting trends in the Health app. Today I’m going to complain about how it handles trends in the Fitness app. I like to spread my complaints around.
Here’s a screenshot I took this morning of the Trends section in Fitness:
It’s happy with how much I’m standing, how many Move calories I’m burning, and my (calculated) cardio fitness, but it’s disappointed in the amount of time I spend exercising and my walking distance and pace. It gives me a little pep talk for each of these.
The thing is—and Fitness should know this because it has all the data—the reason I’ve been walking less the past few months is that I’ve gotten back into biking after several years away from it. And it’s reasonable that the time I spend on my bike is time that I can’t spend walking, isn’t it? Somehow, though, the Fitness app doesn’t see it that way.
You might raise an eyebrow at the lowered walking pace and exercise minutes. Why, you might ask, would riding a bike make those go down? Well, I get my heart rate higher when biking than when walking, so I tend to spend less time riding than walking. And when I do walk, it’s often a more casual exercise. A greater percentage of my walks now are hikes in the woods or trips to and from the store, and they go at a slower pace.
There’s also my twice-a-week kayaking, but that—and I don’t understand this at all—doesn’t seem to cut down on my walking credit. I know my step count increases as I paddle, which both the Fitness and Health apps treat as a kind of walking. That doesn’t happen when I’m on my bike. Maybe it’s because my arms are moving as I paddle but are still when I’m cycling, but honestly, when I tell Fitness I’m starting a paddling workout it ought to know I’m not walking.
We all know Apple keeps its programmers compartmentalized to reduce leaks. But this nonsense makes me think that programmers working on different parts of the same app are siloed. The alternative is that they can’t conceive of anyone doing different types of exercise at different times of the year.
When the weather turns cold in a few months, I assume Fitness will be happy to see me back walking instead of biking. Its praise then will be as meaningless as its disappointment is now.