Stay active this summer with Cardiogram Leaderboards and Workout Zones

To help you stay more active this summer, we’re excited to launch two new features to Cardiogram for Apple Watch today: Leaderboards and Workout Zones.

Daily Leaderboards

One of the best ways to stay healthy is to involve your community, and one of Cardiogram’s most frequently requested features is the ability to compete with friends on your step counts.

With the Daily Leaderboard, you can compete with friends, track each other’s progress throughout the day, and challenge each other to be more active. This makes staying active more fun and is surprisingly addictive!

You can even invite friends who don’t own an Apple Watch — the Cardiogram Leaderboard is compatible with iPhone’s built-in step tracker.

On our team, Avesh is an avid runner and usually leads the Leaderboard with 20k-30k steps per day. Since we started testing an internal version of the Leaderboard, each member of our team has been checking our activity levels much more frequently, and there’s a surprising sense of satisfaction whenever we get close to Avesh’s stats.

Research has shown that incorporating concepts of competition and social accountability may in fact yield the most desirable exercise outcomes. [1]

In addition to competing and comparing with your friends, the Daily Leaderboard lets you compare your exercise levels to others in your age range. It’s a great way to calibrate yourself to the population and another motivator to get you moving.

Workout Zones

Workout Zones let you track the intensity of your workouts. For each workout, you can now see how long you spent in each of your target heart rate zones. The American Heart Association recommends [2]:

• At least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity (50–70% of max heart rate [3]) at least 5 days per week for a total of 150 minutes

OR

• At least 25 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity (70–85% of max heart rate) at least 3 days per week for a total of 75 minutes.

We hope you like the Leaderboard and Workout Zones. With these new features available today, go out, enjoy the summer, and start getting more active each day!

We’d love to hear from you — if you have any feedback, email us at hello@cardiogr.am.

[1] “Exploring social accountability for pervasive fitness apps”. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287832793_Exploring_social_accountability_for_pervasive_fitness_apps

[2] “American Heart Association Recommendations for Physical Activity in Adults”. http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/PhysicalActivity/FitnessBasics/American-Heart-Association-Recommendations-for-Physical-Activity-in-Adults_UCM_307976_Article.jsp

[3] “Target Heart Rate and Estimated Maximum Heart Rate”. https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/measuring/heartrate.htm