Skip navigation
Microsoft Band Tip: Keep Track of Your Exercises

Microsoft Band Tip: Keep Track of Your Exercises

You have to do some of the work

While Microsoft Band will track your heartbeat, steps, and calories burned automatically throughout the day, you can also manually log the time you spend exercising. This can be virtually anything—going for a walk, riding an elliptical trainer, playing a sport like basketball, whatever—that you do over a period of time and may wish to compare with previous exercises.

Note: This tip is based on content in my free e-book, Microsoft Band Field Guide, which I'm currently writing. You can always find the latest version of this book—which will be updated as Microsoft Band is updated—at the Field Guide Books web site.

Logging an exercise is simple enough: Tap the Exercise tile on your Band, and then press the action button to start the exercise. While you exercise, Band will display the duration of the exercise, your heart rate, and the calories you've burned. When you're done, press the action button and then tap End.

You can always access your most recent exercise on your Band: from the Exercise tile, swipe to the left to see basic details about that workout. But you can also access your most recent exercise from the Exercise tile in the Microsoft Health app. (This is the app you use to sync Band data to the cloud, set goals, and view your activity history. It's available for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone.) Thanks to the additional onscreen real estate, this view of the exercise provides a lot more detail.

I strongly recommend naming each exercise you perform so that you can easily identify it later. You do so from the Microsoft Health app: Open the exercise, scroll to the bottom of the display and tap Name. Then, type in the name (like "Walk," "Basketball," or whatever) and tap Done (the check button). Now, when you view your activity history (Menu, then Activity History in the Microsoft Health app), you can quickly identify each exercise. You can also filter this view to only show exercises.

Note: If you're a runner, you should use the Run tile to track that activity instead of Exercise.

Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish