I am someone who is borderline obsessed with monitoring my health and fitness data. I use a smart scale, a calorie- and nutrient-tracking app, smart workout equipment, and my beloved Apple Watch to create a picture of my overall physical well-being that is as complete as possible. The only time I take my Apple Watch off is when I’m dressing up to go somewhere nice and even then, it pains me deeply. Just imagine the heart rate and calorie-burning data I’m missing out on while I waltz around in my fancy dress. It’s sickening.
All of these apps and devices work in concert to keep tabs on my every heartbeat and footstep, but there is a notable exception. I am usually against linking my Apple Watch to apps that track my workouts, as this has caused headaches in the past by double-importing data into my food-tracking app and daily Apple Health summary. That defeats the purpose of the monitoring altogether by significantly inflating my burned calories and total active minutes. Still, earlier this summer, reluctantly, I linked my Apple Watch to my Peloton Bike, expecting it to cause the same problems—but it only impressed me. Now, I’m a believer in linking these two devices and have been relying on their digital partnership for months. I’ll tell you why, plus how to do it.
How to link your Apple Watch and Peloton device
On your Peloton app, select your Profile (on the right of the menu at the bottom of the home screen), then find the hamburger menu on the top right of your profile screen. Selecting that will bring you to a page called More and right there, under Add-Ons, you’ll find Apple Watch.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
Tap that, grant the permissions in Apple Health when prompted, hit Set up, and you’ll see three choices: Connect to Health App, Share Your Location, and Track Your Movement. For our purposes, with the Bike and other at-home workout equipment, you’ll just toggle on that first one, but if you want your outdoor runs tracked privately, toggle on the second one, and if you want your pace for indoor runs and walks recorded, hit the third one, too.
From there, you want to double-check that the Peloton app is included among the apps on your Watch. Open the Watch app on your phone, scroll to the bottom of the screen, and select Peloton from the list under Installed on Apple Watch. Make sure Sure App on Apple Watch is toggled on.
Why I enjoy the link between the Apple Watch and Peloton
When I first linked the devices, I needed to test it all out. I hopped on my stationary bike and started a workout. I opened the Workout app on my watch and selected “indoor cycle,” then opened the Peloton app on the watch. It showed me a blank screen with just a few words telling me to start a workout on the bike, so I did. Suddenly, the watch screen changed and began showing my heart rate. More importantly, a small heart-rate tracker appeared on the upper left on my Peloton touch screen along with a power bar showing what “zone” I was in based on my heart rate. (My Peloton “power zones” are customized to my fitness level because I took the FTP test offered through the bike, which you should also do.)
There’s already plenty of information available on the screen—like cadence, resistance, and output—but I didn’t find this distracting. It was actually pretty helpful to get a sense of what “zone” I was in. I only selected a 10-minute workout, so I didn’t expect to be wiped out, but it was nice to gauge how much I was pushing myself so I could work to get the most out of those 10 minutes. When the class was over, I opened the Lanebreak app on the bike. Lanebreak is a virtual game offered by Peloton that I absolutely love and play every day, so I was interested in seeing if the heart rate monitor would pop up on the screen during a level, too. It did!
After my five-minute cooldown Lanebreak level ended, I opened the Workout app on the watch again to mark down that I was done, like I always do. To my surprise, the Peloton app actually overrode it; the Workout app had stopped tracking my indoor cycle session as soon as the Peloton app took over. That made me nervous because I was afraid that the workout wouldn’t be reflected in my Apple Health daily summary or Activity Rings, but when I opened that up on my phone, there they were: Two “indoor cycle” workouts under Sessions. Where they’d normally have the green Apple Workout logo next to them, they had the Peloton logo. They were tracked and categorized just like an indoor cycle session I would normally monitor using my watch. They counted toward the Move and Exercise portions of my Activity Rings and all, but unlike with other apps, they didn’t double-enter in my calorie burn and time spent on the bike.
I opened my nutrition-tracking app to make sure the burned calories hadn’t been double-entered there somehow. They hadn’t! The Peloton App succeeds where other apps have failed: It doesn’t make tracking your movement across various apps and devices a convoluted mess.
Finally, I opened the Peloton app to look at the summary of my workouts. They usually include estimates of your burned calories and output, plus which muscles you worked and how long you were at it, but now, they included more detailed breakdowns of how long I spent in each heart rate zone and provided more information on my total output.
What is the benefit of linking these devices?
Like I said, the Peloton app tracked the same things my Apple Watch would track on its own using the Workout function: my heart rate, my burned calories, and the duration of my workout. So, you might wonder, what’s the point of linking the bike (or Peloton Tread or Row) to the watch at all?
There are a few benefits, actually. First, it’s convenient to see my heart rate and power zone reflected on the Peloton screen. I don’t have to glance down at my wrist to see my heart rate like I usually do; I can stay focused on the screen, which is important for safety, and pace myself in real time to make sure I stay in the zone I want to be in. In the months since I’ve linked these devices, I’ve grown dependent on this easy-to-see information and can’t imagine ever going back to not having it displayed there. Simply put, it keeps me focused and prevents me from looking at my phone or watch, which is precisely what I need since I’m so anti-distraction when I work out.
Second, linking the Apple Watch and Peloton device enables you to see something called your “strive score.” This is a Peloton-specific personal metric that helps you understand and visualize how hard you worked during a class or ride, and it’s based on a combination of your heart rate and how long you spent in each of Peloton’s seven “power zones.” (Lower zones correspond with a lower heart rate and higher zones correspond with a higher one.)
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
Be warned: You have to toggle on the strive score separately, which I didn’t know at first, so my original 10-minute ride doesn’t have one, but all my subsequent Watch-enabled workouts do. Doing this is simple: From that same More menu in your profile, hit Settings and scroll all the way to the bottom. Toggle on Track and Display Strive Score and then choose whether in-class participants can see it or not. I was annoyed that the only strive score I got for the day was a measly 2.2 on my five-minute cooldown, but that only inspires me to, well, strive for a higher one tomorrow.
Overall, there is no downside to linking your Apple Watch and Peloton device, which isn’t always true when it comes to other fitness apps. In fact, you can get even more comprehensive workout data by doing it and I, for one, think it’s awesome.
In fact, adding the Apple Watch to my account has opened up the ways I can use Peloton to meet my fitness goals overall. It’s made tracking the walks I take with the app’s walking classes a lot more effective, for instance. To be honest, I’ve more or less stopped using the native Workouts function on my Watch altogether. Even when I’m teaching a spin class in the gym where I work, I track that workout using Peloton by opening the app, tapping Track along the bottom-row menu, and hitting Cycling. Since it tracks and catalogs this workout the same way the Workouts app does, there’s no downside. I get all the data I would from the native app, plus a strive score, all while keeping my Peloton streak alive. The Peloton app, bolstered by Watch data, gives me a better breakdown of how long I spend riding at different BPMs, which is crucial for my class planning, to say nothing of my fitness. I do the same thing when I’m walking somewhere or completing a lift at the gym, too, because the strive score and ability to track and monitor everything within one app are just plain useful.
