What is Apple Fitness+?

Apple Fitness+ is like a gym in your pocket. You have to pay for it, but it offers 3,000-plus ad-free video workouts you can access on your iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. They are led by professional fitness instructors and new routines are added every week.

Thinking of signing up? Here’s everything you need to know about Apple’s Fitness+ service.

Apple offers new subscribers three months free access to Fitness+ when they buy an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, or Apple TV. Once that trial is over the service costs £9.99/month or £79.99/year.

It’s also included in the Apple One bundle, which costs £32.95/month, alongside Apple Music, TV+, Arcade, iCloud, and News+. You only need one account for a whole family, as you can share Apple Fitness+ with up to five family members.

The most barebones Fitness+ setup is an iPad or iPhone. You just need a screen on which to watch the workouts.

Add an Apple Watch and you’ll see key stats, like your heart rate, on-screen. The ideal Fitness+ rig, in our opinion, uses an Apple TV box to show sessions up on a big screen. You can use a MacBook’s display too, although you’ll still need an iPhone or iPad to start a session.

When you exercise, stats gathered by your Apple Watch are displayed on screen so you can watch your progress in real time. Even though you can access Fitness+ using just an iPhone, you do need an Apple Watch for best results.

Each workout also has its own playlist of music selections from Apple Music. You don’t need to subscribe to the company’s music streaming service to listen to those playlists, just to download them for later use.

Apple regularly adds new workout types to the service. At time of writing there are thirteen workout types: core fitness, cycling, dance, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), rowing, strength training, treadmill (walk and run), Pilates, yoga and meditation and cooldown.

The catalogue of available workouts currently stands at over 3,000 and more are added every Monday.

Once you tap the Let’s Go button to launch your selected workout on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV, a second start button will appear on your Apple Watch.

Tap this to begin the session. If you aren’t wearing your watch, just tap the Work Out Without watch button. The session will begin. After each workout is finished you can see a summary of stats, including calories burned, in the  Fitness app on your iPhone.

Apple offers ‘Time to Walk’ and ‘Time to Run’ workouts. The walking podcasts are led by celebrities, from a range of disciplines, who will play a little music and talk to you during a walk. The Stephen Fry session is particularly good. Time to Run workouts feature running trainers who share tips and try to coach you through a run.