Why Apple Watch Finally Learned to Take a Rest Day

Anyone who owns an Apple Watch knows the feeling. You’ve been sitting for an hour or more, perhaps hunched over your laptop or sprawled on the couch with a bag of Doritos in your hand. Eventually, you feel a gentle vibration on your wrist and a message pop up saying, “Time to get up.” In the decade since the watch was invented, some 115 million people have given in to that demand and been rewarded with instant validation.

“I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be so annoying after a while,’” says Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, who played a key role in the Watch’s creation. “Every time I got up and heard, ‘You did it,’ I liked the pat on the back. I’m not sure what that says about me.”

For anyone who professes to have a “ring addiction,” like Williams, who has a treadmill in his office that he can swing around on during video calls, there are always those who wish the watch were a little less demanding. Especially when it comes to the precarious business of maintaining a hard-fought streak—Williams’ personal best is more than 400 days—in the face of ill health, travel, family chaos, or any combination of the three. So a decade after its launch, the Apple Watch is finally learning how to take a proper rest day with its latest watchOS 11 update. With its expected launch this fall, you’ll be able to pause your streak for a day, a month, or even longer if you need to. It’s a small change that has a big impact on the watch’s ethos.

“We really thought about the pause feature for a long time,” says Jay Blahnik, vice president of fitness technology. “The nature of streaks is that they have to end, and people like me want to know when my streak is going to end because it allows me to reset and try again, and that’s my motivation.”

The new Training Load feature for Apple Watch compares your training results from the last seven days with those from the previous 28 days, encouraging you to make gradual progress in your training.

If there’s one idea that unites Apple’s latest vision for the Watch, it’s a smarter approach to your fitness. Over the years, various iterations of the wearable have been able to track your heart rate, calculate your blood oxygen levels, and track whether you got three hours of sleep last night. What did you use this wealth of information for? Probably nothing more than the ability to see your Thursday morning hangover in statistical form.

With the arrival of the new Vitals app, several key health metrics have been consolidated into one place, along with advice on how to interpret them. If you’re feeling great and your baseline numbers are spot on, you’re good to go for another 10 minutes on the Peloton. But if you’re not? That could be an early sign that you’ve caught the bug and need to slow down a bit today.