The Unexpected Side Effect of Apple Watch Competitions With Friends
By day five of a seven-day Apple Fitness+ competition, things start to get serious. If my childhood best friend texts me tauntingly that she’s beating me by more than a thousand points as the week is winding down, I might hop on my folding workout bike for twenty minutes after dinner even when I really don’t feel like it, to make sure I close my Move ring that day. When I get a notification that she’s completed a walk in the evening, I often hit reply on my watch and tell her to slow down, complaining that I haven’t even gotten up from my desk yet. Just knowing that someone is on the other end of my watch, able to see how much I’ve moved that day, is motivation enough to get me out of my apartment. But unexpectedly, the best part of the Fitness+ app that comes with the Apple Watch isn’t these little notifications that nudge me to be less sedentary.
Before I got my Apple Watch a few months ago, I wasn’t texting my best friend every day. We still don’t, really, since there isn’t much of anything new to talk about. All I do is sit in my apartment. I work, maybe go for a walk. Make dinner. Rinse and repeat. But lately, since I got my watch, we’ve been competing in the Fitness app on a regular basis. And though I haven’t seen her in months—haven’t gotten to hug her, or have a few drinks with her on a Saturday night—what I do get is a daily notification on my watch telling me that she’s just completed a 20-minute strength training workout. As it turns out, that’s not nothing.
I began sharing my Fitness stats with all the people in my life who have Apple Watches, because the eyes of others felt like a good way to motivate myself after a long winter spent sitting. Apple Fitness+ comes free for three months with any new Apple Watch. It’s a copycat Peloton app, basically, with guided running, spinning, rowing, dance classes, and the list goes on, all of which you do while wearing your Apple Watch so it can measure heart rate and calories burned. When you add friends on it, the watch buzzes to let you know whenever they finish a workout, too, and you can check to see how they’re doing with their goals that day. You can also reply to them encouragingly and express how impressed (or unimpressed!) you are. Then, there is the competition feature: You challenge your friends to go head-to-head, collecting points based on your own achievements toward your goals.
Beyond my own fitness entirely, the competition feature has become an effortless and constant way to check in with my far-away loved ones, and see what they’re up to without having to ask, “How was your day?”—which you know was the same as the last one—for the hundredth time. Instead, I am alerted that they burned 137 calories going for their after-work evening stroll, the same one I take each day 490 miles away. I can picture the route through the park behind my best friend’s house where I know she’s walking. If it’s a buzz that tells me that my mom has finished a dance workout, I know she’s in our basement with Pitbull blasting. A workout isn’t something you catch long-distance people up on; it’s just a routine thing you do. I’ll always hear about any monumental updates in my loved ones’ lives—but it’s these mundane details that make me feel closer to them day in and day out.
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Competition mode doesn’t change much other in the Fitness+ app than prompt your Apple Watch to mock you when your friend is beating you. But those few extra push notifications encourage more regular communication than we’d have otherwise. Instead of saying that nothing much is new with me, I can ask how her dance class was. Or comment on how zen she must be when she gets another Yoga badge. I can even use one of Apple's suggested auto replies, which include the very neggy and rude: “Bet you can’t do that again.”
We talk about other things too, once our workout quips start the conversation. By eliminating the need for the routine “Hi! How are you?” every couple days, they let our chatting flow naturally from one thing into the next. There’s nothing forced—it’s not a routine FaceTime catch-up or a planned Zoom trivia night to make sure our social skills haven’t completely dissolved over the past year. It’s instead almost a simulation of actually being around someone, privy to their schedule and their mood and the weather where they are and when they have a break from work. We've unlocked a new level of easy, everyday closeness that will outlast the pandemic. Even if it comes in the form of a post-HIIT bike ride buzz on my wrist saying, "Bet you can’t do that again."
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