How to manually add a workout on the Apple Watch

If you haven’t tracked it, it never happened right? Forgetting to hit the workout tracking button on your Apple Watch can happen or you’ve taken it off and forgotten to put it back on for a gym sesh, but that doesn’t meant that you can still have some record of it taking place.

There is still a way to make sure all of your workout time is all accounted for if you need that evidence you did sweat buckets and power through another big HIIT class.

The good news, it’s something you’ll be able to whatever Apple Watch model you’re rocking right now. Whether you’ve got and Apple Watch Series 7 or the Watch SE, you’re good.

If you want to know how to manually add a workout to your Apple Watch to make sure it counts towards you daily activity goals, here’s what you need to know and how to do it.

How to manually add a workout to an Apple Watch

Works with: All Apple Watch models

The key thing to realise here is that to do this, you’ll need use the Apple Health app.

This is essentially Apple’s hub of all of the health and fitness-centric data you capture whether it’s runs or showing you your heart rate data.

So what you’re doing is putting it into that health and fitness aggregator will mean it sits with the rest of your logged data, so you can still factor it into trends and how much exercise time you’ve put in.

• To manually add a workout so you still have a record of it, you need to do the following:
• Open the Health app on your iPhone and then go to the Browse tab
• Next, tap Activity and scroll down until you find the Workouts section.
• Tap and then tap Add Data in the top right hand corner of the screen

From here you can select activity type, calorie burn, distance covered and when the workout started and ended.

Once you’ve entered the information hit Add and it will be added to your workout history and calendar inside of the Health app.

Do manually logged workouts count towards Activity rings?

Unfortunately they do not. Apple needs that motion and sensor data to influence the movement of those rings.

So if you were banking on it helping you Close those Rings, that sadly isn’t the case here. Once you’ve manually added the workout to the Health app, it won’t influence the Move and Exercise rings.

Can you add a manual workout from the Apple Watch?

Right now, that’s not possible. You have to use Apple’s Health iPhone to keep a record of any workout time where you didn’t use your Apple Watch to track it.

It’s a simple thing to be able to do and hopefully, with your Apple Watch on you’ll remember to keep it strapped for all of your workouts. If you forget, you do at least have some record that it did actually happen.