On Your Wrist.
In Your Data.

Ritual's Apple Watch app brings GPS cardio tracking directly to your wrist - real-time pace, distance, heart rate, and route mapping without touching your iPhone. The Watch app runs independently during sessions, recording the full GPS track and heart rate data, then syncing to your iPhone session history when the session ends.

For runners, cyclists, and outdoor athletes, wrist-based tracking removes the need to carry a phone during sessions. The Watch handles the full recording responsibility: GPS coordinates, timestamp data, heart rate via the optical sensor, and session metadata. All of this transfers to Ritual on iPhone for the complete post-session analysis.

GPS accuracy on Apple Watch Series 4 and later is sufficient for running and cycling splits at the level of precision Ritual's analytics require. Pace is calculated from GPS coordinates at 1-second intervals. Distance accumulates from the same GPS track. The data quality matches what most dedicated GPS devices produce.

Heart rate is the most accessible real-time indicator of training intensity. During cardio sessions, heart rate directly reflects the metabolic demand of the effort - it tells you whether you are training in an aerobic base zone, a threshold zone, or a maximal effort zone, in real time, without additional hardware.

Ritual's Apple Watch app captures heart rate continuously during GPS cardio sessions. This data feeds the heart rate zone analysis in the iPhone app - identifying what proportion of each session was spent in each of the five standard training zones (easy, aerobic, threshold, hard, maximal). Zone distribution is more actionable than average heart rate alone: two sessions with the same average HR can have completely different training stimuli depending on zone distribution.

Resting heart rate, tracked passively by Apple Watch throughout the day, is one of the most reliable indicators of recovery quality. A resting HR elevated by 5+ beats above baseline typically indicates incomplete recovery, overreaching, or incoming illness. Ritual's Health Score integrates Apple Health heart rate data to factor recovery quality into the composite score.