Exercised Help · Amar Sagoo

Exercised: Help

How does the app work?

Exercised helps you add workouts to your Apple Health database, primarily by trying to guess when you’ve been exercising. It does this by assuming that visits to places you specify correspond to workouts.

If it thinks you’ve done a workout, it will suggest adding it to Apple Health, pre-filling the details for you to review. It uses various methods to guess the start and end more precisely, beyond just the time you arrived and left.

Not all workouts can be automatically detected this way, for example if you stayed at home to exercise. In those cases, you can add them manually by tapping “Add Other Workout”. The app still tries to make this process easy, by prefilling the form as best it can based on your past behaviour.

What if I exercise at home?

Because the app assumes that a visit to a place corresponds to a workout, it can’t guess when you exercise in places where you also spend time otherwise, for example at home. You can add such workouts manually by tapping “Add Other Workout”.

What about exercise that’s not tied to a place?

If you do exercise that doesn’t correspond to visits to a particular place (for example, cycling around your neighbourhood), the app can’t detect those workouts automatically. You can add them manually by tapping “Add Other Workout”.

What if I do more than one type of exercise in a place?

If you might do different types of exercise on different visits to the same place, you can select all those activities when you’re adding the place. After a visit, the app will try to guess which one you did based on what you tend to do on different days of the week. If it guesses incorrectly, you can simply switch to one of the other activities you originally specified.

The app only allows specifying one type of activity per workout. So if you do multiple types of exercise during a single visit, you can either choose a more general activity that covers them all, such as “Other/General”, “Mixed Cardio” or “Cross-Training”, or add multiple workouts manually for the different activities you did.

How is energy burned calculated?

The energy you used in a workout is estimated from your body weight, the duration of your workout and the effort involved (based on the type of activity and, if relevant, its intensity). The estimated effort for different activities is based on the Compendium of Physical Activities.

Note that the energy calculated by the app is only a rough estimate. The actual energy you use during a workout will depend on many factors it can’t capture, for instance, how much time you spent taking breaks. Some activities allow adjusting the intensity with a slider. For these, you can consider selecting a lower intensity level to reflect longer or more frequent breaks.

Do I need to grant all the permissions the app requests?

Here are the permissions the app requests, what they’re used for and to what extent they’re required:

Apple Health:

Write:

Active Energy, Workouts: These are needed for the basic functioning of the app, since its purpose is to help record your energy use in your Apple Health database.

Read:

Activity: This allows the app to display your move goal from Apple Fitness and your progress towards it each day. This permission is optional.
Weight: If you grant this permission, the app can check if your weight is already stored in Apple Health and use this to prefill the form when you add a workout. If you don’t enable it, the app will ask you to enter your weight the first time, and it won’t automatically update this if you record a different weight in Apple Health in the future.

Location: In order to automatically detect workouts from visits to your places, this permission needs to be set to “Always”. If you choose “Allow Once” or don’t upgrade from "While Using the App" by choosing “Change to Always Allow”, the app won’t be able to reliably detect when you’ve visited a place. It will still function but you’ll mainly be limited to adding workouts manually.
Notifications: If you grant this permission, the app will let you know if it detected a visit and suggest adding a corresponding workout. If you don’t grant it, you’ll need to open the app manually after a visit to see any workout it suggests you add.
Motion & Fitness: This permission allows the app to check how your device moved during a visit, in order to improve its guess of when your workout began and ended. For example, if you leave your phone in a locker, this stationary period can be used as a hint as to when you were exercising. Without this permission, the app will only know the time you arrived and left, which leaves more room for error in the estimate.

Is my data private?

The app only ever adds information to your Apple Health database or saves it privately on your device. It’s never shared with the developer or any other third party. More details can be found in the privacy policy.