Google redesigns Google Fit for Wear OS, Android, and iOS

Raise your hand if you walk 10,000 steps a day or complete 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity or 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week as recommended by the American Heart Association (AHA).

It’s wonderful if you do — you’re living a healthy and active life. But most Americans fall short of these recommended fitness goals, putting them at higher risk of getting health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or dementia.

Why? The goals feel unachievable. To help correct this, Google reached out to the AHA to build a revamped Google Fit app and platform that better translates its physical activity guidelines into more achievable goals that Americans can incorporate into their daily routines. Basically: You don’t need to have a gym membership in order to live a healthy and active life.

Google Fit launched in 2014 as an all-in-one dashboard for Android and Wear OS (formerly Android Wear) users to track all of their physical activities and monitor their health.

The app has added numerous features over the years, and while it’s great to have so much data on oneself, non-power users have found it overwhelming.

During a sit-down preview for the new Google Fit app rolling out to Android, Wear OS, and iOS users immediately, Google Fit’s senior product manager, Margaret Hollendoner, told me the drop-off for Fit users was unsurprisingly high. Most users set up their Fit profiles and then gradually over time, they give up on their goals.

“As we talked to our users and tried to learn more about what their experience was, we heard that the flexibility of the app that might have worked for some power users was quite overwhelming for these people,” says Hollendoner.

Hollendoner listed a variety of reasons for why users might become unmotivated to continue staying active, including (but not limited to): dauntingly high goals and seasonal changes or holiday disruptions. 

“10,000 steps seemed really daunting to these people who were really far from that total,” says Hollendoner. “They weren’t really seeing any results for the effort they were putting in and so they were losing motivation and struggling to stay motivated over time.

Together with the AHA, Hollendoner and the Wear OS team worked to create a new way to measure success, while simultaneously meeting the organizations recommended guidelines.

New metrics: Move minutes and Heart Points

Though it may be fairly obvious what the AHA’s weekly 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity or 150 minutes of moderate physical activity means, it turns out there’s a larger portion of the American population that has no clue what that really shakes out to. 

What’s considered moderate activity and what’s considered vigorous? Hollendoner and her team set about to better define them with the new Google Fit app.

The new Google Fit is no less robust than the version it replaces. It still tracks everything the old app did (steps, calories, heart rate, weight, etc.) and still pulls in data from third-party apps like the running and cycling app Strava, but how this data is presented is all new.

“We are still learning what it takes to communicate those guidelines best to Americans,” says Laurie Whitsel, Vice President of Policy Research and Translation at the American Heart Association. “At the American Heart Association, we’re really supportive of companies like Google that are taking that step to incorporate evidence-based recommendations into applications that transform lives.”

Instead of focusing primarily on steps or minutes of any particular physical activity, the new Google Fit uses two new metrics to measure activity intensity: Move Minutes (moderate) and Heart Points (vigorous), represented with a blue and green ring, respectively.

“We learned from the AHA that while steps are a great way to get people moving, the intensity of the activity is really when you start to see health benefits in terms of the effort you’re putting in, more so than the amount of activity you’re getting,” says Hollendoner.

The new Google Fit uses two new metrics to measure activity intensity: Move Minutes and Heart Points.

With Move Minutes and Heart Points, the new Google Fit encourages user to live a less sedentary lifestyle, but also to get their hearts rates up, which has been scientifically proven to be good for your health.

“If you look at the health benefits of people who meet the 150 minutes a week, there’s a 35 percent reduction in heart disease in those people,” Kapil Parakh, Medical Lead for Google Fit and a practicing cardiologist, explained to me.

“It’s beyond just the heart — levels of diabetes are 45 percent lower. If you look at falls, depression, and dementia it’s 25 percent lower. Even cancer is 20 percent lower. Breast cancer and colon cancer in people who are meeting the 150 minute guideline is 20 percent lower. It’s pretty remarkable the spectrum of health benefits.” 

Move Minutes and Heart Points are far easier to understand and less overwhelming to process Hollendoner says.

Per the AHA’s Move and Heart Point translations of its recommended time-based physical activity goals, Fit recommends users get at least 60 minutes of movement per day and at least 10 Heart Points. After a week of tracking, the app will slowly suggest higher goals, based on your consistency.

Move Minutes are self-explanatory: For every minute you move, you get closer towards your Move Minutes goal. A Move Minute is any moderate intensity movement tracked by your Android phone or Wear OS smartwatch. Any heart rate that’s 50-69 percent above your max predicted heart rate is considered moderate intensity, Parakh says.

Heart Points, on the other hand, measure vigorous activity. Users get one Heart Point for every Move minute and two points if you dial up the activity if your heart rate is 70 percent or higher than your normal heart rate.

Move Minutes and Heart Points are designed to help motivate users to stay active throughout their day with small changes. 

For example, picking up the pace while you’re walking from the train station to the work office could  be recorded as a vigorous activity if gets your heart rate high enough. All that gardening work you do every weekend? That counts as vigorous physical activity towards your goals. 

The traditional physical workouts still count (Google Fit recognizes up to 120 different physical activities), so if you’re into rowing, or running, or biking, or anything that gets your heart rate going higher than usual, they’ll still be logged and translated into Heart Points.

“It’s not the case that you need to buy a gym membership or suddenly start working out if you’re not doing so today,” says Hollendoner. “That’s the kind of thing we want people to understand — design a metric to help users realize this is something they could do in their daily routines and that that would have a much greater impact on their health than sort of quantity of exercise alone.”

In many ways, the new Google Fit feels like it’s gamifying physical activities. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. Anyone who uses Apple Watch for fitness-tracking will know that the smartwatch is effective in essentially guilting you into “closing the rings” and completing your daily fitness goals. The new Google Fit is no different than that.

If a user sees they’ve already completed their Move Minute goal, but haven’t for their Heart Points, they may actually take action and walk quicker instead of slowly. 

When I asked if these two metrics were exclusive for Google to use, Hollendoner told me they’re not. 

“It’s a new concept in Google Fit, but it’s going to be in the Fit platform too,” says Hollendoller. “We are reaching out to all of the partners like Strava — so if I’ve got my activity from Strava that are showing up here we can give people credit for what they’re doing in the Fit app, but we’re also making Heart Points available in the platform so that Strava and other apps can start to pick up on this concept.

“And hopefully other apps will start to use it and it’ll become more reinforcement for the existing recommendations and guidelines. So it’s not intended to be exclusively for Google Fit, but that’s where users will see it first.”

More achievable fitness goals

Google showed me a preview of the new Google Fit app working on a Wear OS-powered Fossil smartwatch as well as on iOS and Android and I have to admit it’s quite nice.

I’m not ashamed to say that I really relate to the majority of Google Fit users. I liked that the old version of the app was so detailed with my fitness data, but I personally found the goals impossibly difficult to achieve so I gave up on using it.

I also like that the app has more emphasis on celebrating successes with features like the trophy section, which includes all of your accomplished goals and detailed breakdowns for them. It seems like such a silly thing – that you’d need little digital awards to provide reinforcement — but it goes a long way to making sure you actually continue to maintain your goals. 

The new Google Fit app feels lighter, but still powerful. Power users still have access to an immense amount of data. Most importantly, at a glance, the two new metric goals, Move Minutes and Heart Points, make physical activity feel less like work and more like a regular part of your life (because it is and should be).