Gentler Streak won the Apple Watch App of the Year award at the end of 2022. In a year when Apple’s built-in health and fitness offerings took significant steps forward with the releases of iOS 16 and watchOS 9, how did a third-party fitness tracking app manage to make such an indelible impression? Here’s why Gentler Streak has had such an impact and how it can help you on your fitness journey.

What Is Gentler Streak?

If you use an Apple Watch for fitness tracking, you’ll be familiar with closing your Activity Rings each day by meeting your Move, Stand, and Exercise targets. The rings are a helpful guide to help you ensure you undertake sufficient activity every day, with awards for achieving unbroken streaks in closing the rings.

Gentler Streak app is an equally powerful activity tracker app. The difference is that it offers a more compassionate perspective on your workouts. Instead of pushing you to close those rings daily, the app analyzes your heart zones and helps you see when you’re working at your optimum level and when you’ve gone too far and it’s time to take a break.

Gentler Streak builds rest days and active recovery workouts right into the habits that you track. The intention is to grow a fitness habit that suits you for life. And in life, you need to be able to take breaks from your routine to prevent burnout and fatigue. Working hand-in-hand with Apple Health, Gentler Streak is available for iPhone and Apple Watch.

Download: Gentler Streak (Free, subscription available)

How to Get Started With Gentler Streak

Fire up Gentler Streak, and your Streak screen shows the following:

• A personalized fitness summary
• Insights for You: a series of short reads giving you expert knowledge about your own activity.
• Latest activities: these are broken down into exercise type, duration, active energy, average and maximum heart rate, and heart rate training zones.

The Insights section contains further details about your exercise history, a series of articles about exercise and the human body, and some genuine profiles and fitness stories to inspire your journey. There are also dietary insights and women’s health articles, although you’ll need to subscribe to Gentler Streak Premium to access the entire library.

Gentler Streak shows your training log in a detailed Activities tab in the iOS app, where you can examine your exercise in minute detail, filtering data according to activity. You can delve deep into single workout summaries and look at patterns across the week, month, year, or all time.

This makes it easy to track where you’ve pushed yourself too far. It’s perfect for everyone on a fitness journey, from those doing beginner workouts to seasoned athletes who want to maximize each workout.

Gentler Streak Apple Watch App

The Apple Watch utility is what won Gentler Streak the 2022 Apple Award, and it’s easy to see why. You can start a workout using Apple’s Workout function, and Gentler Streak automatically logs your activity. Or choose from more than one hundred exercise types within the dedicated app, which supports many more activities than Apple Workout, including dog walking, gardening, physiotherapy, and wheelchair sports.

The watch app also features:

• Heart Rate zones, which provide live data while you exercise so that you know when to ease off and avoid overtraining
• Dedicated metrics, which change to match the activity you’re undertaking
• Map, distance, and location for any outdoor activities

How to Use and Customize Gentler Streak to Help Your Fitness Journey

Go Gentler is the key feature of the Gentler Streak app. Tap this button within the iOS or watchOS app to specify the optimal activity for your “gentle” day. You can choose a rest day, an active recovery activity, a strength training program, or a cooldown.

Managing your Apple Watch Activity Rings when on vacation has long been an issue for Apple Watch owners who don’t want to break those fitness streaks. Gentler Streak has the perfect solution.

Simply use the Set Status function with the app’s Settings for complete control of your activity program. Here you can select your activity status to say whether you're active, on a break if you’re taking a few days off, sick, or injured.

Choose Gentler Streak for a More Self-Compassionate Fitness Program

Gentler Streak’s emphasis on your well-being makes it an outstanding exercise tracker. After using it even for a short time, it will lead you to look more closely at your own exercise routines. It’s pretty alarming to be told that you’re overreaching after what you thought of as a typical workout!

As Gentler Streak responds to your readiness for exercise and makes you more aware of your activity levels, you'll learn to incorporate rest and active recovery into your program. Until Apple incorporates some of these features into its own Fitness offering, you’ll gain more insights about your health and fitness through Gentler Streak. This app is well worth downloading and even upgrading to Gentler Streak Premium.