Marissa Stephenson, writing for Men’s Journal, has one of the Apple Watch reviews I wanted to read today. Stephenson’s review is focused on fitness and using Apple Watch during workouts.

It won’t replace your heart rate monitor.
To track any workout, the Watch employs an accelerometer and optical heart rate monitor. I used the Watch’s built-in Workout app whenever I began a session, designating if I was going for a run, walk, cycle, or “other.” Just like nearly every other tracker or sports watch on the market, the Watch is primed to gauge my cardio workouts, but not muscle-activation during strength training — if I bend over to pick up a quarter or a 200-pound barbell, it doesn’t know the difference. But the Apple Watch can factor heart rate. Pick up that barbell enough, and it should read my elevated heart rate and log a higher calorie burn. Except the optical HRM didn’t really seem to do that. Huffing through heavy squats, the Watch read my heart rate as fairly low. And more frenetic CrossFit workouts perplexed it; the Watch couldn’t get a read on my second-by-second HR during box jumps, burpees, and pull-ups, and my overall calorie burn and HR seemed off for these “other”-type training sessions. That’s a problem Apple says you can fix by using a heart rate monitor strap and synching it with your Watch. Or, maybe you don’t care so much about hyper-accurate HR and calorie counts, and in that case, just go by the Watch’s less-than-perfect estimate.

Based on Stephenson’s take, it seems like Apple could use a few updates to make the Watch more accurate and compatible with a wider variety of workouts. I look forward to trying one in my daily routine soon.