You can finally use an Apple Watch to track your football workout

With all the buzz around Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024, this almost went unnoticed. Apple is joining the workout tracking trend with major updates for football (soccer) workouts. Similar to cycling, Apple recognizes the increasing desire among athletes to track more detailed data. Until now, football players needed a standalone—and often expensive—sensor to track their training sessions and matches. With the upcoming updates, you can track every football workout with your Apple Watch. Read on to discover exactly what you can measure.

Impact of New WatchOS Workout Features on Football

With the updates coming to WatchOS 11, you'll be able to track the key stats needed to understand your football (soccer) workout.

1. Track Distance and Speed with the Soccer Workout

Previously, the football (soccer) workout in Apple HealthKit only tracked heart rate and workout duration. With the new update, your Apple Watch GPS will also be activated, allowing you to see stats such as distance covered and speed. This provides much more insight into your training sessions and matches.

2. Rate Your Effort

By combining pace, heart rate, and personal data like age, height, and weight, Apple will calculate the difficulty of your training on a scale of 1-10. You can adjust the rating afterwards to match your perception of the workout. This is Apple’s way of providing you with External Load, known in sports science as Relative Perceived Exertion (RPE).

3. Monitor Training Load

With the new update, you can monitor your training load by combining the effort you put into each training session with your personal data. Training load is determined by the intensity and duration of each workout tracked over the last 7 days compared to the last 28 days. This way, you can learn whether you are training too little, productively, or too much.

4. Take a Break

Injured or needing a break? You can now pause your activity rings so you don’t lose your streak. Additionally, you can adjust the goals of your activity rings for each day of the week. For example, if you are very busy on Mondays, you can lower the goal for that day.

All in all, these are some exciting new features for those who enjoy tracking their workouts!

How to Protect Yourself and Other Players

Wearing a watch can potentially cause injuries to other players. There are many wrist braces and other protective gear available to prevent causing harm to others.