Finally, the Apple Watch will let you rest

When I had covid, I was miserable, hacking up my lungs and confined to bed for several days with horrible brain fog. I don’t remember much from that time. I do, however, remember waking up bleary-eyed and feverish to an Apple Watch notification. It said I hadn’t made much progress on my rings. I should take a brisk 27-minute walk. “You can still do it,” it said. No, I could not.

It wasn’t my fault I’d gotten sick, but my 85-day streak was broken anyway. Since then, I’ve had nasty shin splints, migraines, and multiple cross-country flights that make it hard to hit exercise goals — all excellent reasons to prioritize rest or build some extra flexibility into my schedule. Despite knowing better, I still felt disappointed whenever I listened to my body and prioritized rest over an arbitrary streak.

So when Apple announced that rest days are finally coming in watchOS 11, I nearly wept with joy. And I know I’m not the only one. People have been asking for this feature for a really, really long time.

With watchOS 11, Apple is introducing a number of features that finally create space for rest and recovery. The two I’m most excited about are the ability to pause Activity Rings and the ability to adjust goals based on the day of the week.

This is long overdue. The rest of the industry has been steadily pivoting away from gamification and toward recovery for the past few years. And with good reason.

As motivating as streaks can be, they can inadvertently teach you to ignore your body’s cues. When I was sick, I told my Apple Watch to stuff it. I’ve had several friends over the years tell me they dragged themselves out of sick beds just to keep a streak going. Others said they lowered their goals but felt guilty for “cheating.” I get the impulse — breaking a streak can feel like you’ve fallen off the horse. (It’s blatantly untrue, but streaks have a weird, addictive power that sometimes trumps logic.) But a fitness tracker’s ultimate goal is to help you improve your health. Feeling like you can’t rest because of an arbitrary streak is the opposite of improving your health.

Not only that, but rest is actually a requirement for any competent fitness plan. Runners who don’t build rest days into a training plan get injured. If you want to build muscle, forgoing rest is a pretty bad plan since rest is when new muscle is built. It’s no coincidence that elite athletes have flocked to trackers like the Oura Ring or Whoop, which prioritize recovery and sleep above all else.

For these reasons, pausing rings is an excellent idea. In watchOS 11, you’ll be able to pause rings for a day, week, month, or whatever time period you need without it affecting your Move streak. That takes away the sense that you’ve failed. It acknowledges that maybe when you’re on vacation, it’s okay if you want to loaf around by a pool and be present with family instead of worrying when you’re going to squeeze in a workout. That you are, in fact, allowed to take breaks — and that doing so may help you stay motivated in the long run.

Likewise, adjusting your goals based on your schedule makes it easier for beginners to stick to an actual plan. If it makes it easier to stick to plan by lowering your move goal on days you go to the office and then increasing them on the weekends, why wouldn’t you? And while you could technically do this manually prior to watchOS 11, automating it makes it feel intentional. It’s a simple shift in perception, but one that can erase any irrational guilt about cheating from the equation.

Apple is far from the first company to implement these kinds of features. But that’s not the point. When you’re trying to do hard things — and improving your health is a hard thing — it helps immensely when you’re given the grace to be imperfect. And you are going to be imperfect. It’s not a matter of if you’ll get sick or life breaks your streaks. It’s a matter of when. When I broke my longest Move streak to date, it was because something traumatic happened in my life. After a day of ugly crying, I woke up the next morning to a broken streak. I knew it was trivial in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, it felt like getting kicked while I was down. It took me two months to get my head back in the game.

Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if it all would’ve been easier if I’d had the ability to hit pause from the get-go. Some fitness buffs might scoff and say I, and others like me, lack discipline or mental fortitude and that these features are a crutch. Maybe so. But I’m all for making fitness fit into your life — not building your entire life around fitness. This is a much-needed step in that direction.