Today alongside the introduction of the Apple One services bundle and new Apple Watch models, Apple also debuted a brand new paid service coming in late 2020: Apple Fitness+.
Fitness+ is designed to work exclusively with the Apple Watch, requiring an Apple Watch Series 3 or later. When it launches, it will cost $9.99/month or $79.99/year, or it’s included as part of an Apple One Premier plan – and no matter how you get it, Fitness+ will offer Family Sharing support. There will also be a 1-month free trial for all users, or three months free for anyone purchasing an Apple Watch from September 15 on.
Apple Fitness+ brings studio-style workout experiences to your Apple devices in a way that uniquely integrates with the Apple Watch. As a workout video plays, live metrics from your Watch will display in the corner of the screen so you can easily keep track of things like the duration of your workout, heart rate, and calories burned. You’ll also see your Activity rings on-screen, providing convenient updates on your progress as you exercise.
On launch day, Fitness+ will feature workout videos covering nine different areas:
- Yoga
- Cycling
- Treadmill
- Rowing
- HIIT
- Strength
- Dance
- Core
- Mindful Cooldown
New workouts will be added to Fitness+ every week, and different workouts will be intelligently recommended to you based on your past activity. You can also, of course, manually select the workouts you’d like to do, selecting things like duration to be as short as 5 minutes or as long as 45. Certain workouts will require additional equipment, but Apple says many can be done with no equipment or with only a set of dumbbells.
Even if you have no experience with fitness, Apple hopes you’ll check out Fitness+, as the company has built an Absolute Beginner program to help ease people new to fitness into the rest of its offerings.
Once it launches, Fitness+ will be available inside the new Fitness app in iOS 14 (which used to be called Activity), and the Fitness app will be coming to both iPad and Apple TV for the first time as well, enabling access to workout videos on larger screens than the iPhone provides. And thanks to the tight integration with the Apple Watch, starting a workout video in the Fitness app will automatically start that workout type on your Watch.
The product integrations of Fitness+ aren’t limited to hardware though, as there’s also an Apple Music component. Workouts will include their own music playlists, and you can easily save those playlists into your Apple Music Library if you’re a subscriber.
Creating a fitness service that’s limited only to Apple Watch users seems like a small niche to carve out, but Fitness+ is consistent with Apple’s increasing efforts in health and wellness. The service could become especially compelling over time if it integrates with new health sensors Apple brings to the Watch in the future.
I haven’t tried out an online fitness service before, but I’ll be interested in giving Fitness+ a try when it launches later this year. The close integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem could make for a unique workout experience.
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