If you’re wondering how to close your Apple Watch rings, or what the different activity rings represent, you’ve come to the right place. The colorful rings are one of the best Apple Watch features for reaching your daily fitness goals and tracking workouts with Apple Fitness Plus.
Whether you have the new Apple Watch 7, Apple Watch 3 or any of the wearables on our best Apple Watch list, you can use the Apple Watch rings to track how active you are every day. There are three individual rings — Move, Exercise and Stand — and each are closed through different kinds of activity.
When you close your rings every day, you have a better chance at earning badges and winning challenges against your friends. You can also try to keep streaks for perfect week or perfect month awards. Either way, Apple Watch rings provide visual cues for getting active on a daily basis, even if it’s just stretching your legs for a couple of minutes every hour.
Here’s what all three Apple Watch rings mean, and what you need to do to close them. Be sure to check out our guide on how to use the Apple Watch for more tips and tricks to make the most of your smartwatch.
How to close your Apple Watch Move ring
The outer Apple Watch ring, the red ring, is your Move ring. Your Move ring indicates your active calories burned throughout the day. Unlike the calories your body uses for basic functions, active calories are burned when you walk around, climb flights of stairs, do housework and, of course, exercise.
Depending on your Move goal, you might be able to close your Move ring just going about your daily motions. But if you’ve set your Move goal higher, you’ll want to introduce intentional exercise, whether it’s using your Apple Watch as one of the best running watches or trying out cardio exercises that burn more calories than running.
The Apple Watch can track dozens of different workout types from yoga and HIIT to hiking and paddleboarding. If you play sports or dance all night at a concert, the Apple Watch will credit your calories burned to your Move ring progress, too.
How to close your Apple Watch Exercise ring
The middle Apple Watch ring, the green ring, is your Exercise ring. Your Exercise ring counts the minutes of activity at or above a brisk walk. The default Apple Watch Exercise ring goal is 30 minutes per day, and it usually requires some intentional exercise, though a flight of stairs or dog walk could chip away at the count.
Looking to get more active and close your Apple Watch Exercise ring? Try out the best workout apps or best home gym equipment. Apple Watch owners can also test Apple Fitness Plus, a subscription service designed for the Apple Watch and other Apple devices. The $9.99-per-month service offers guided workouts and cool down sessions led by a diverse team of coaches.
How to close your Apple Watch Stand ring
The inner Apple Watch ring, the blue ring, is your Stand ring. Your Stand ring shows how many hours of the day you stood for at least one minute, with the goal of moving in at least 12 different hours. Many of the best smartwatches and best fitness trackers encourage you to stretch your legs when you’ve been idle for a while, but the Apple Watch actually tracks your stand progress throughout the day. Unless you choose otherwise, your Apple Watch will also send you a notification when there’s 10 minutes left in the hour and you haven’t earned a stand minute yet.
The Stand ring is the most fickle of the Apple Watch rings. Sometimes, even when you’re standing, your smartwatch might not count it towards your goal. You’ll want to make sure you’re actually moving around for the minute or more you’re on your feet. To ensure you close your Apple Watch Stand ring, swing the arm your Apple Watch is while you’re standing.
How to change your Apple Watch activity ring goals
When you set up your Apple Watch’s Activity app, you’ll be prompted to set Move, Exercise and Stand goals. The default provides a solid baseline, though you might find you’re not coming close to closing your rings or you’re closing them too easily.
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- Everything you need to know about the Apple Watch and its fitness features
- Rings, Workouts and Challenges explained
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(Pocket-lint) - The Apple Watch is a great device to help you improve your fitness, whilst also offering smartphone notifications. Whether you're hoping to get fit through running, cycling, swimming or various machines at the gym, or whether you are just trying to motivate yourself to get off the sofa, Apple's wearable does plenty more than alert you to a new message or email.
This feature covers everything you need to know about the Apple Watch and its fitness features, from making sure you select the right workout and changing your Move, Exercise and Stand goals, to competing with friends and using third-party fitness apps with it.
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How to track your exercise with Apple Watch
Apple Watch fitness is primarily centred around three rings: Move, Exercise and Stand. The target is to complete each ring every day. Complete all three and you complete the day, get seven in a row and you get a perfect week. Complete a Ring and you'll get a spinning Catherine's wheel firework indicating you've done well, while at the end of the week you'll also get notifications if you've had a "perfect week" or for other achivements.
All you have to do is put the Apple Watch on and it will start tracking you.
There are a number of ways of keeping track of your rings throughout the day. You can opt for dedicated Activity watch faces, or you can choose an Apple Watch Complication if you want to be a little more subtle.
What are the Apple Watch fitness targets and how do you set them?
All three of the Apple Watch rings are customisable - though this wasn't always the case. The Exercise Ring (green) is set at 30 minutes a day by default, while Stand (blue) is set at 12 times by default.
Exercise doesn't need to be running, swimming, or a HIIT session though. It can be as simple as walking quickly, but you'll need to be walking briskly to complete the exercise ring if you choose walking as your activity.
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There are virtual awards for completing set tasks, such as completing a new "Move Record" or a "Perfect Week" and there are also monthly challenges that award you further badges for doing certain activities.
The monthly challenges are typically multi-event tasks to encourage to you stay active across the month. Previous Challenges set by Apple have included performing a set number of workouts, doubling your move goal a specific number of times, or doing a certain number of workouts for a set time across the month.
How to manage your alerts
The Apple Watch delivers various daily notifications from reminding you to stand up in a given hour or telling you to take brisk walk for a number of minutes in order to complete a Ring, to messages of encouragement.
The alerts are designed to trigger you to move and therefore complete your Rings, but being told a brisk 14-minute walk is all you need to complete a Ring at 11PM on a rainy Wednesday can be irritating.
How you respond to these notifications is up to you. They can be dismissed or turned off completely if you find them annoying. Head to the Apple Watch companion app on your iPhone > Scroll down to Activity > Set your notification preferences.
Share performance with friends
You can agree to share your Rings with your friends and family so you can see how you are doing compared to them - devices like Fitbit also offer this kind of feature. It won't work for everyone, but a bit of friendly competition never hurt anyone in our book.
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It's possible to add multiple friends and choose whether or not to get alerts when they complete Rings or do exercise. To start sharing your activity, open the Activity app on your Apple Watch and swipe right to left to get to the sharing page. Scroll down and tap on Invite a Friend and follow the instructions. You can also setup sharing in the Fitness app from your iPhone by tapping on the Sharing tab in the bottom right and tapping on the person icon with the "+" in the top right.
TIP: Choosing to share your activity with friend may sound harmless but we've been able to determine when people we've shared data with are on holiday (a different time zone means different activity patterns), when they've overslept, and when they've stayed out partying. So, think twice before you accept or invite people to share your Watch data.
How to challenge a friend to a Competition
For those needing a little more of a push, there are Competitions. You can opt to compete with a friend or family member over a seven-day period to see who is most active. You'll earn a set number of points, up to a maximum of 600 points per day. The person with the highest score at the end of the week wins the badge. Warning: There's a Total Wins section so if you lose, you'll be constantly reminded.
Competitions can only be one-on-one, but you can have multiple competitions running at the same time with different people. From our experience, winning is all about stealth exercise. If you want to catch the other person out, waiting until 10pm to put in that 10km run is normally a good winning tactic.
Set up: Open Fitness app on iPhone > Go to the Sharing tab in the bottom right > Tap on person icon in top right > Select contact to compete with > Press Compete with [contact name]. The challenge starts the next full day.
How to pick the right Apple Watch Workout
Apple Watch offers a bunch of preset workout options including Outdoor Walk, Elliptical, Stair Stepper, Pool Swim, Open Water Swim, HIIT Workout, Outdoor Cycling, Indoor Cycling, Rowing, Hiking, Yoga, Cross Training, Cooldown, Outdoor Run, Indoor Walk, Traditional Strength Training, Core Training, Mixed Cardio, Functional Strength Training, Indoor Run, Dance, Pilates, Tai Chi, and plenty of others. Picking the right one is vital to the Apple Watch understanding what you are doing.
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Workouts are all available via the Workout app on the Apple Watch, which can be accessed as a Complication or via the app screen. The Apple Watch will also recognise you're doing a workout after 10 minutes of activity and automatically suggest starting a workout for you, though it isn't flawless.
There is also no backtrack option, as there is with devices like Fitbit, so if the Apple Watch fails to recognise your Workout, you won't be rewarded. We've also made the mistake of selecting Outdoor Cycle instead of Indoor Cycle only to do 30 minutes of exercise and get no closer to our Move target so pick right. If you use Apple Fitness+ or apps like Fiit, the workout type is automatically selected for you, depending on what you're doing.
Tracking Workouts: Open, Calories, Distance, Time
The Apple Watch orders the workout list in the Workout app based on what you do and each workout option features further settings to help you sculpt what you are doing. For example, you can set the pool length when using the Pool Swim workout.
Depending on the Workout you select, you can choose an Open Goal, or you can choose to work towards a specific goal by tapping the three dots on the Workout card you're choosing. The specific goals include Calories, Distance and Time, but Distance isn't available as a goal for an Indoor Cycle or Elliptical, for example.
Set your target and the countdown begins. The Apple Watch delivers different stats for different workouts, though in most cases, you'll get time, active calories, BPM, average speed, and distance travelled. In workouts like Yoga, you'll simply get active and total calories, along with your heart rate, while in workouts like swimming, your stroke will be automatically recognised based on your hand movements.
Open the Apple Watch companion app > Scroll down to Workout > Select Workout View. From here you can customise the type and order of metrics shown for each workout.
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HELPFUL TIPS: Swipe left to right on your Apple Watch to end or pause a workout (although Apple Watch will also auto-pause if you stop to cross the road for example). Swipe right to left to access Apple Music. When swimming, turn the Digital Crown to unlock the display and pause or resume your swim workout by pressing the Digital Crown and side button together.
Tracking heart rate with Apple Watch
Within the Apple Watch companion app on your iPhone, you can opt in or out of the Apple Watch tracking your heartbeat within the Privacy section. If you opt in, the Apple Watch will track your current heart rate and monitor for issues, but it will also feedback data on how it's changing as you are doing exercise.
You can also access your heart rate data with the dedicated Heart Rate app on the Apple Watch. It will allow you to take your heart rate reading at any time, but also works in the background to monitor your resting heart rate and walking average. The Apple Health app on the iPhone allows you to delve deeper into the data.
Using the ECG feature
On Series 4, 5, 6 and 7 Apple Watches there's also an ECG feature that can take electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) readings. Apple's ECG app can tell whether your heart rhythm has atrial fibrillation (an irregular heart rhythm) or a normal sinus rhythm.
Getting a reading is as simple as placing a finger on the Digital Crown of the watch and waiting 30 seconds. ECG data will then be collected from the Watch electrodes and displayed in the Health app, which in turn can be shared via a PDF report with your doctor. Apple claims the test is 99 per cent accurate.
Fitness app on your iPhone
The Fitness app on your iPhone is where all your Apple Watch fitness data ends up. It is also where you'll find Fitness+, which you can read all about in our separate feature. You'll find your daily performance, historical performance data, all your workouts (which can be filtered by specific workout too), your sharing status and find all badges you've earned. There are three tabs to navigate: Summary, Fitness+ and Sharing.
Summary goes back as far as you've been wearing the Apple Watch, recording your Move, Exercise, and Stand totals when you wear it during that time. You can't edit or erase the data. It's also where you will find all your workouts, Awards and Trends.
As mentioned above, Trends compares your last 90 days of activity with the last 365 showing Move, Stand, Stand Minutes, Exercise, Distance, Cardio Fitness, Walking Pace and Running Pace at the top with an arrow on the left and a summary below. If you're doing the same or better, your arrow will be up. If you aren't doing quite so well, your arrow will be down.
Beneath the Workouts section in the Summary tab you'll find a list of the last three Workouts you've done. You can tap on Show More to see all your workouts for the recent months, or All Workouts for your entire history. Tapping each individual Workout offers all the metrics for that particular Workout.
As an example, for swimming, it details active calories, total calories, distance, total time, average heart rate, number of lengths and pool length. It will also show you average pace with stroke splits. For running, you'll get splits, a map of your run, and data including elevation gain, average cadence (steps per minute). During your running workout, the Apple Watch will also show rolling kilometres so you can see your split for the preceding kilometre to see if you're on track.
You'll also see any workouts you've done using a third party app, like Strava, Nike Run Club, Peloton, FIIT in the workout summary, if you have synced your Apple Watch to work with these apps.
Under the Awards section of the Summary tab is where you'll find the badges you've earned, as well as see what you have left to earn.
The Fitness+ tab gives you access to workouts from top trainers if you sign up. It is a subscription service, similar to FIIT, and it is powered by the Apple Watch. Your rings feature at the top of the screen when you do a Fitness+ workout, allowing you to see your progress during the workout. For some, there is also something called the Burn Bar that helps you see how much you are putting in compared to others who have previously done the workout.
Sharing meanwhile, allows you to manage how you share your data with your friends, including whether to mute their notifications, remove them completely, or compete with them in a seven-day challenge. You'll also get a break down of how they've been active when they've worn their Watch.