Creating running workouts with an Apple Watch

As apple have updated and introduced new features into their Apple Watch, it’s taken it from a fancy daily watch into something that even the hardcore fitness enthusiast can use.

What we are going to show you here is how to use an Apple Watch to build a workout. We’ll show you how to create the following workout:

10 minutes Warm Up, 6 x 3 minutes at Threshold effort with a 90 second recovery, 10 minutes Cool Down

Open the Workout App and find Outdoor Run

From there press the circle with 3 little dots inside it. This open up a few different workouts, but from there scroll down to the bottom and press ‘Create Workout”

From here you have the option of doing a number of workouts

Open

Calories

Distance

Time

Pacer

Custom

We’re going to press Custom

To start with, underneath Warmup it is set to Skip. We don't want that! To add a warm up, Click on that, select the goal as Time, and it’ll default this to 10 minutes, but you can tweak that if you want a longer warm up

There is then an ‘Add’ button, you are going to press that and you get the option of

Work

Recovery Repeats

We are going to start with Work - you then get the option of Open, Distance or Time, and we are going to use Time

Use the scroller to get the Time we want, the above workout calls for 3 minutes, so that’s what we’ll use

Then press done

We are going to go back to the ‘Add’ button, and this time select Recovery, select Time and change that to 1 minute and 30 seconds

This final bit is a little tricky. It’s where we are going to set the repeats up. You are going to press the purple ‘Add’ button, select Repeats

You then get asked to select the group of intervals you want as part of you repeat. We want BOTH the Work and Recovery and so going to highlight them both.

The next page as you how many repeats you want, and we are going to set that to 6.

This is what it’ll look like when all done

Scroll down and give the workout a name - (if you have an iPhone or iPad near by, it’ll pop up and allow you to use that to name the workout on the keyboard, which makes life a lot easier.)

Then finally select “Create Workout”. Then you are done!

It’s as easy as that. It probably seems a bit trickier than you would like right now, but following the guide will help.

We’ve also recorded a video of us setting up a workout, and you can watch that here:

To start the workout, navigate to your Custom Workout, press it and away you go.

We’ve also got the file available to download here: what you’ll need to do is email this file to yourself on an Apple Watch, and press it to view, and then you can save this. As this was done on iOS 10 beta, it might not work until later in the year.

When inside the workout screen you will see the interval you are in, time left and the interval pace. The Apple Watch will buzz and / or beep when its time to send the interval. I wish there was the option to ’count down’ into ending the interval, sadly it doesn’t do that yet.