This New Apple Fitness Tool Helped Me Bust Out Of A Fitness Rut

It’s amazing how fast a fitness routine can fall by the wayside. I usually work out at least four times a week—a mix of outdoor runs, Peloton rides and strength training at my gym. Then, last month, my husband, Jeremy, and I adopted a one-year-old rescue pup named Dolly, and my routine flew out the window. Dolly is a very sweet, timid girl who is ever-so-slowly coming out of her shell and showing off her mischievous puppy side. She also requires near constant supervision. Because she remains deeply skeptical of all humans aside from me, we’ve been spending a lot of time together—RIP to my early morning workouts. 

The physical gains that come from regular exercise are great, but it’s the mental health benefits that get me out of bed at 5:35 a.m. most days. And while the joy of watching Dolly become more comfortable in our home has been immense, I’ve sorely missed starting the day with a sweaty endorphin boost. Gym classes are currently out of the question as they don’t fit into my Dolly schedule. And while I love my Peloton, I desperately need more outdoor time. I’ve been on a running hiatus since an underwhelming fall marathon, but I recently started thinking about how much I enjoyed running throughout the winter last year—a sure sign it’s time to lace up my sneakers again and start sneaking in quick runs after I give Dolly her morning exercise. Still, I needed a little extra motivation. 

Enter Workout Buddy, Apple’s recently launched, AI-assisted hype machine. You can activate Workout Buddy on a variety of workouts within the Apple Fitness app—including indoor and outdoor running, walking and cycling; hiking; elliptical; stair stepper; and HIIT and functional and traditional strength training. (In terms of technical requirements, Workout Buddy uses Apple Intelligence, so you need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 or later, operating on the latest OS, in order to activate, as well as an Apple Watch Ultra, Apple Watch Series 6 or later or Apple Watch SE 2 or later. You also need to ensure both your Watch and your Phone have Siri enabled in order to use Workout Buddy. This sounds like a lot, but I’m horrible with tech and I was able to set up Workout Buddy in seconds, and then activate it on my Watch for Outdoor Run workouts using the bell icon at the bottom right of the Watch screen.)

After choosing one of three upbeat and uncannily human-sounding coach voices—which are modelled after those of real-life Apple Fitness+ trainers—and connecting my Bluetooth-enabled headphones, it was off to the races. As someone who genuinely enjoys running alone, I was curious to see just how chatty my new Workout Buddy would be. I’ve done guided runs before on other fitness apps, and found them a bit too verbose. So I was happy to discover that, after a general greeting—“Way to get your workout started!”—I only heard from her at kilometre markers. Then and only then, she’d chime in to give me my pace and heart rate.

As I clocked further kilometres, Workout Buddy told me how my current pace compared to my previous one, and congratulated me for running up a hill (it was an icy one too, though to be fair she had no way of knowing). After we completed our first 5K together, she gave me feedback on my distance, average pace and calories burned, as well as props for closing my daily Exercise ring. On subsequent runs, she noted when we had run our longest distance and fastest pace together, as well as other milestones—such as total distance run this year—based on my workout history.

“Workout Buddy [gets] you into the right frame of mind for the workout,” says Julz Arney, Senior Director of Fitness Technologies and Fitness+ at Apple. “But it’s also pulling data from the years of sweat equity [you’ve put] into the Apple Fitness ecosystem.” Unlike a real-life workout buddy, Apple's version will know when you hit your fastest-ever pace, and pump you up accordingly. (She'll also never text you a flimsy excuse minutes before you're supposed to meet up for a run.)

I tested Workout Buddy exclusively for outdoor runs over several weeks. Her kind words helped me get back in the running groove again, and I found her steady stream of data points highly appealing. (One caveat: If you've been using Pace Alerts, I would recommend turning them off when you start using Workout Buddy as I found having both activated resulted in too many interruptions.) I look forward to many more runs with my Workout Buddy—so much so, I just signed us up for a half marathon.