How an Apple Watch Can Help Your New Year's Resolutions
Whether it's for fitness, personal development or a new hobby, realistic goal setting for 2025 requires an understanding of your abilities as well as the desired endpoint. Small enough to be discrete, but always present, an eSIM-enabled Apple Watch like the Ultra 2 or the new Apple Watch Series 10 GPS + Cellular is an all-in-one personal coach, assistant and study aid. Whatever your goals for the new year, your Apple Watch can probably help. Here’s how.
Using an Apple Watch to Improve Fitness
Through its detailed health monitoring capabilities, built-in workout features and the host of third-party fitness apps in the App Store, the Apple Watch has consistently led the sports watch field since its 2015 debut. The rapid rise of products like the $200-a-year WHOOP health tracker or the Fitbit reflect the ongoing popularity of wearable fitness assistants.
Gyms famously fill up over January when the inclement weather, post-Christmas hangover and New Year’s guilt drive crowds to their nearest studio. As a result, it’s actually one of the worst times of year to go to the gym. New visitors, or those returning from a long absence, often require time and space to get to grips with the equipment, build confidence and plan their workouts – all things that become hard to manage in a busy gym environment. The built-in Apple Watch Workouts feature and external Apple Watch apps like Couch to 5K offer an alternative. They provide enough guidance and personalised health monitoring for even inexperienced athletes to build the fundamentals, before committing to purchasing a gym membership or sports equipment.
The best New Year Apple Watch apps for fitness and health
1. Watch to 5K
Watch to 5K is the Apple Watch version of Couch to 5K, the word-of-mouth phenomenon and iPhone app backed by the BBC and the NHS. Couch to 5K’s appeal is perfectly encapsulated by its title: this run-coaching app’s promise to turn novices into regular joggers has resulted in over 7 million downloads.
2. Zombies, Run!
For those who need more direct encouragement, Zombies, Run! is an Apple Watch app that, through audio and on-screen alerts, drops the user into the middle of a zombie apocalypse and makes them run to survive. Less focused on compiling metrics and more on creating an immersive running environment, Zombies, Run! offers a new way to get up and get out when you’re feeling sluggish.
3. Apple Fitness+
The free, pre-installed Apple Watch Fitness App is a comprehensive tracking tool and guide for independent workout sessions, presented in a no-frills display. For a more in-depth approach, the paid Fitness+ version adds video lessons, personalised coaching plans and metrics for twelve different sport and exercise types including swimming, yoga, dance and HIIT. With support for wheelchair workouts in the WatchOS 11 software update, Apple have brought this functionality to a wider user base. Combining Apple Fitness + with a cellular Watch plan lets users leave their phones at home and get online wherever their workout, swim, cycle or run takes them. While it won’t match the results of a personal trainer, at $9.99 a month (and free for the first three months), Apple Fitness+ is considerably cheaper than a gym membership.
4. Strava
A ‘social network for runners’, Strava motivates by adding a communal element to traditionally solitary sports like running or cycling: users can share their runs with a network of friends and even join one of the thousands Strava-organised running groups IRL.
Using an Apple Watch to Stay Motivated
The new year often represents a chance to look inward, consider our lifestyle and take stock of our wellbeing. From logging statistics and tracking progress over months to sending gentle reminders that are nevertheless hard to ignore, an Apple Watch provides a discrete but ever-present nudge in the right direction.
Mindfulness
For those who balk at the thought of yet another paid subscription service (especially when aiming to reduce stress), the Apple Watch comes with a free Mindfulness app. The concept of an Apple Watch as a meditation tool can seem counterintuitive: how could a wrist-mounted notification machine help its wearers switch off and disconnect from the modern world? In practice, it’s surprisingly effective. Through a mixture of audio, visual and haptic cues, Mindfulness encourages the user to pause and reflect for a few minutes each day. Meditation requires frequent practice – always at hand, an Apple Watch makes it easier to fit this into any schedule.
Sleep Monitor
Not every New Year’s resolution needs to be an active one. Getting a healthy amount of sleep is a challenge in itself, and a habit that can be achieved through repeated practice. While sleep monitors are nothing new, the Apple Watch’s built-in sleep tracker and accurate monitoring of health data makes it a convenient way to record and analyse personal sleep patterns.
Activity Rings
Activity Rings are one of the hallmarks of the Apple Watch: this simple graphic of three colored circles grows throughout the day and ‘closes’ when a particular fitness goal, be it walking steps or burning calories, is reached. Motivation, at hand, to build habits over time.
Using an Apple Watch to Get Organised
After fitness, one of the most common New Year's resolutions is getting organized. Whether that’s getting finances in order, planning appointments or just waking up on time, a cellular Apple Watch makes it a little easier to navigate the admin of daily life.
Schooltime
When activated, Schooltime mode turns the Apple Watch display into a spartan clockface, freezes notifications and blocks the use of all apps. Initially designed for children as part of Apple Watch For Your Kids mode, Schooltime has found popularity with adults too - the rise of similar services like the Minimalist Phone App indicates a growing appetite for screen disengagement across all ages.
Apple Reminders
Simple and effective, the Apple Reminders function has barely changed since its initial release in 2011. The Apple Watch version is a foolproof organizational aid. It syncs across all devices, meaning reminders made on an iPhone or Mac will also display on the Watch, where they are most likely to be seen.
Haptic Feedback Alarms
If you need to set multiple alarms to stand any chance of waking up on time, the Apple Watch may offer a solution. Keeping the alarm clock on the other side of the bedroom so that you’re forced into getting out of bed is a tried-and-true method. The major downside here is that the first thing you do in the morning is something that makes you miserable – hardly an ideal start to the day. The Apple Watch alarm doubles down with a classic alarm tone as well as pulsing vibrations, increasing the chances of waking up as planned, and feeling as fresh as possible.
Using an Apple Watch to Reduce Screen Time
A cellular Apple Watch is a counterintuitive but highly effective way to limit screen time among children and adults. Nowadays, those looking for a digital detox can’t simply trade their smartphone in for a brick - owning a portable computer is now taken for granted, with banking, email, and 2-factor authentication services inextricably tied to our phones.
When people think about reducing screen time, they don’t usually mean meaningful interactions. Instead, they want to cut out the empty calories of online presence: dopamine-fuelled social media doomscrolling, succumbing to the TikTok or YouTube video algorithm, and pouring money into ‘freemium’ gaming apps and online casinos. These activities have little to no appeal on the Apple Watch’s dinky screen. The goal is to spend less time online and make the time spent more worthwhile. A cellular Apple Watch takes this concept further by allowing access to the true essentials – Apple Pay, email, banking and Apple Wallet – without the media-friendly screen size of an iPhone.
For those unsure of the new Apple Intelligence AI preinstalled on new iPhone and iPad devices, a cellular Apple Watch offers the chance to stay connected without partaking in Apple’s generative AI.
Cellular Apple Watch Plans
Owners will require an iPhone to set up and manage the features of the Watch initially – but after that, the watch functions as a standalone device, with its own cellular plan and provider, independent of the iPhone. This feature, known as Apple Watch For Your Kids (formerly Family Setup) has seen considerable popularity among parents who use it to keep tabs on multiple Apple Watches at once and send their kids off into the world with a cellular Apple Watch instead of a smartphone.
A point to note about using a cellular smartwatch as your primary source of contact is battery life – a regular Apple Watch Series 10 lasts for around 18 hours on a single charge – in practice, they need to be charged every day.
A cellular watch plan provides Apple Watches with the same level of mobile connectivity as an iPhone, able to make calls, texts, and access mobile internet. From fitness to mindfulness, goal setting and personal development, a cellular Apple Watch with a plan from an official Apple partner like BetterRoaming is a one-stop solution for tracking and achieving your 2025 New Year's resolutions.
