The Apple Watch is one of the best devices for measuring physical activity and health. Apple’s device is capable of monitoring endless health data, but it’s really just collecting and aggregating that data. While Apple introduced trends in iOS 15, which does allow some data to be contextualized, most of Apple’s health data doesn’t offer added context.
And most of the apps available for the Apple Watch or the iPhone suffer from the same problem. Most apps are static and offer a visualization of the data, but leave their usefulness up to the user. In reality, today, with the tools offered by Apple Health, the Watch data only serves to have a history.
Athlytic comes to solve this, and it does so with the same premise as Apple: privacy by flag. Although it is more focused on those who do sports with the Watch, the app offers everything to be the only application that you need to install on your Apple Watch to control your sports performance and your health.
Finally an app to take advantage of Watch data
The application, through the data collected by the Apple Watch, offers at a glance to know the cardiovascular load, recovery and physical condition at a glance. Athlytic does not generate any data, it only reads what is available in the health application, analyzes it and offers the user certain indicators that offer a lot of information about the physical state.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is able to take the data of resting heart rate, heart rate variability, pulse, training data, sleep, and caloric intake to analyze the physical state, the cardiovascular load or recovery after training or working. In our tests, the data offered by Athlytic corresponds to our state, so what we experienced in our tests is quite accurate.
Athlytic is very focused on being a sports performance monitor, that is, measuring recovery and effort times after and before training, but it can be used simply to monitor cardiovascular load even if the user does not train.
At this point, a fundamental aspect of Athlytic that those who train regularly will take advantage of is the measurement of effort during a workout. With a simple scale, based on the heart rate ranges, it measures the general effort of a workout.
Training, recovery, sleep, effort… Athlytic analyzes it and simplifies its understanding
These numbers not only serve to have general data on how we have been training, Athlytic is also a great companion for planning training routines. Analyzing the recovery and cardiovascular load levels throughout the day, we can program more or less intensive training depending on how we feel, all of this also contextualized with our activity in the last 60 days and the data obtained with the measurement of sleep. .
Athlytic does not measure sleep, it only collects the data provided by other apps: it is compatible with both the data from Apple’s native sleep measurement function and the most popular ones such as AutoSleep, Pillow, Sleep Cycle, Oura, etc. And if the user uses several at the same time that write data to Apple Health, you can choose to keep one in the app options.
The core of the app is the iPhone version, which is the one that collects, analyzes and displays the data. The Apple Watch app is optional, and it’s really for a quick look at the different spheres of recovery, staging, or straining data. However, we can also use it to start training, although as usual it is much better to leave this task to the native Training application.
You can record a workout using the Watch app for some sports like Running, Crossfit, Weight Training, HIIT, Stair Climbing, Walking or just another, but it doesn’t really add anything compared to the native app.
A comprehensive analysis of cardiovascular load and performance
Regardless of the app the user uses to record workouts, the same data and analysis will be available: calories burned, heart rate, VO2 Max estimates and heart rate recovery. Regarding its star function, the effort analysis, it uses its own effort algorithm that simplifies its analysis through a fairly simple scale from 0 to 10.
Athlytic is, without a doubt, the first straightforward, easy-to-understand, and simple app out there to give context to the health and fitness data Apple collects. It is quite customizable. And it will use historical data to provide information, so it does not require active use by the user. That is, you will not have to be entering any type of information manually, everything will be done automatically:
Like the rest of the apps that use the HRV that the Watch measures, in order to have more exact data on recovery or cardiovascular load, it is necessary to do a one-minute session of breathing so that it registers the variability just when you wake up. A patch that others like Training Today or AutoSleep also need. At least as long as Apple does not allow to measure the HRV just when it detects that we have woken up. Or force manual measurement without having to resort to the Mindfulness app.
Free basic functionality, but the rest under subscription
Athlytic is totally free in its basic functionality, both its download and its use. With the free version you can measure recovery, access to the Watch app and some data related to exercises in the iPhone app, as well as a complication for the Watch. The full version requires a subscription (with a one-week trial period with full access) that costs 3.99 per month or 21.99 euros per year.
The subscription allows the use of Widgets on the iPhone, access to all the complications of the App, and all the analysis functionality, both daily and historical, which is the strong point. A more than correct price for an app that allows you to get the most out of Watch data and that anyone who practices sports on a regular basis will find really useful.
By the way, Athlytic does not collect data of any kind. Analysis and information are recorded locally and are not transferred to third parties. You can download Athlytic for free from the App Store. And yes, the app is currently only available in English.
