Your move plan gives you personal move, exercise, and stand goals to help you stay healthy. It also includes your personal training zones based on your resting heart rate.

Your goals are recalculated every day so that there is a balance between activity and rest. They are based on the recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO), your body’s current state, general fitness, and activity level. You won’t see a 10,000-step goal if you’re not used to physical exercise. And we won’t suggest a 10-minute workout if you’ve been running marathons recently.

Physical activity reduces the risk of diabetes and heart problems, lowers cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and anxiety, improves cognition. Goals taking into account your individual circumstances and lifestyle will help you move more and increase your stamina — because you’ll work out in your appropriate heart rate zones. And you won’t feel guilty about sometimes being off your cardio game — the goals will adjust to you, not the other way round.

To calculate your goals and heart rate zones, we need your heart rate and step count. We get this data if you wear a fitness tracker synced with Apple Health, Google Fit, Samsung Health, or Garmin Connect.

If you don’t have a fitness tracker that tracks your heart rate, you’ll still get activity goals. However, we won’t be able to personalize your cardio goal without your heart rate data, so we’ll automatically set it to 20 minutes — in line with the minimum recommended by the World Health Organization. If there is no data in the aggregator or the aggregator is not connected to Welltory, you won’t receive your move plan.

Note that some fitness trackers (like Fitbit) can’t write your data to Apple Health or other aggregators. In this case, we won’t be able to send you the move plan either.

Another message, yesterday’s move report, will help you monitor your progress.

There are two kinds of move plans: for Apple Watch users and for people using other trackers. They only differ in goal names. If you use Apple Watch, your goals will have the names you’re accustomed to: Move (in kcal), Exercise, and Stand. If you have another tracker, your goals will be named Steps, Cardio, and Stand-ups. That way, Apple Watch users won’t be confused and will monitor familiar goals, and athletes with other trackers won’t have to get their heads around “active calories” and will simply track their steps.

Move plan messages are only available in Welltory Premium.

Deeper dive:

FAQs:

Yes, it’s how many active calories you burn or how many steps you walk. To reach this goal, you simply need to walk to your office and back, do housework, play with kids, etc. Such everyday activities are usually enough.

Not exactly. To reach this goal, you need to make your heart beat faster. The higher your heart rate and the harder your workout, the faster you’ll achieve the goal.

To see how many minutes you need to spend in a particular heart rate zone, tap the colored sections — the number of minutes in your Exercise/Cardio goal will increase or decrease, just like in the GIF below (the values are purely illustrative).

For example, you can have a 30-minute brisk walk to your office and back every day with a heart rate of 120 bpm. Or walk upstairs a few times a day with a heart rate of 150 bpm. In both cases, you’ll reach your goal.

Close to it. The Stand/Stand-ups goal helps you avoid staying in a sitting position for too long — it’s about getting up and moving around for three minutes every hour or two. For example, if you’ve got an 8-hour goal, you need to stand up and move for three minutes straight at 8 different hours during the day.

During these three minutes, you can stretch a little, get yourself a glass of water or a snack. You might think that it’s a waste of time, but after a month, you’ll notice that such regular breaks reduce back pain and neck pain and improve your focus.

Usually, fitness trackers recommend one-minute exercises every hour. But we’ve conducted an in-house study based on our users’ anonymous data, and it turns out that a light exercise will have a positive effect if it includes 180–300 steps. You can hardly walk so many steps within a minute, so we’ve set a three-minute norm. We’ve also worked out a formula to align your daily number of stand-ups with your lifestyle.

A training zone is a heart rate range where your workout will be most effective. Our training zones will show you your today’s optimal heart rate ranges to burn calories, grow muscles, or improve your stamina and strength.

Your heart rate zones are recalculated every day based on your resting heart rate and age. They also consider your body’s current state: if you’re sick or did 300 burpees yesterday, you won’t get the zones today.

Note that the WHO recommends working out in the green and yellow zones. The red zone is a place for well-trained athletes, and you’d better go there after consulting a physician or under their supervision.

Learn more about our training zones, with formulas and proofs, here.

You might have noticed that the WHO, as well as developers of Apple Watch and other fitness trackers, set “one-size-fits-all” goals.

For instance, the WHO new guidelines recommend 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity per week for all adults — including people living with chronic conditions, such as type-2 diabetes, or disability. It is routine practice, and regularly reaching such goals, any person can improve their health.

However, it’s not clear what to do with these cumulative 150 minutes. Should you go for one long exercise, or is it better to have several workouts? Fitness tracker developers suggest a 30-minute goal every day with an option to change it if necessary. And it works for many people.

But what should you do after a month when your body gets used to regular workouts? Should you continue with 30-minute goals? Should you aim higher? If yes, by how much and based on what calculations? And if you’re sick or on vacation, what happens then?

These questions are difficult to answer — there are many expert opinions and studies, but they often contradict each other. That’s why we’ve decided to create such activity goals that will gradually lead you to a healthier lifestyle and blend seamlessly into your life.

We’ve spent quite some time thinking of the best way to do it and ended up taking into account not only your gender, weight, height, and age, but also the WHO recommendations, guidelines of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and meta-analysis of 32 studies considering physical activity normative data. After that, we personalize the results based on your individual activity data.

That way, unlike other trackers, we set a new Move/Steps goal every day depending on:

The Exercise/Cardio goal takes into account:

The Stand/Stand-ups goal is calculated based on:

This approach allows Welltory to really understand you and suggest appropriate activity goals for the day.

Here is an example. Let’s say you’re an athlete. You’re having a workout today. Yesterday, you started wearing Apple Watch and using Welltory. Both your watch and Welltory know just some basic info about you. That’s why the goals can hypothetically be more or less the same:

You go to the gym and have a pretty hard workout. The next day, you don’t feel that fresh, and the HRV measurement shows your body is recovering after your yesterday’s sports adventure.

Your Apple Watch goals will stay the same — because you haven’t manually changed them. And Welltory goals will automatically adjust to your state and decrease:

As a result, Apple Watch will motivate you to move and exercise more, while after pushing yourself, it’s better to restore energy. And if you use Welltory along with your watch, you’ll know to have some rest.

Yes, Garmin also adjusts the step goal every day — but their calculations are based on a universal formula rather than an individual one.

Robert, a semi-professional marathon runner, did a little research. He studied how the auto step goal feature worked on his Garmin Forerunner 235. And he came to the following conclusions:

Similar observations were made by the author of this Quantixed article about Garmin Fēnix 5.

Apparently, Garmin calculations are based on yesterday’s step count. If, for example, Robert runs long distances for two days in a row, his goal may increase by 20% and become unattainable, especially after a marathon. And vice versa: if he gives himself a one-week rest after a marathon, the goal will become too easy.

That’s why we take into account not only your yesterday’s steps and workouts, but also your activity data for the whole week. And we also use your heart rate data — it helps us set an optimal goal for your body’s current state given the past week’s stress, workouts, and physical activity.

If you didn’t receive your move plan, you must have opened Welltory for the first time during the day when it was already evening. Open the app earlier in the day to get your move plan.

There can be two reasons for this: you don’t have a fitness tracker that sends us your heart rate data or you’re not meeting your cardio goals.

If you don’t have a fitness tracker, haven’t synced your fitness tracker with Apple Health, Google Fit, Samsung Health, or Garmin Connect, or haven’t synced Welltory with one of these aggregators, we can’t personalize your cardio goal. We’ll set your goal to 20 minutes, which is right around the minimum recommended by the World Health Organization.

If you’re getting less than 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week, we’ll also set your goal to 20 minutes. Once you start meeting it, we’ll personalize your numbers to help you get in better shape gradually.

There can be two reasons for this. The first is that you’ve already reached your goal for the week — for instance, with two HIIT workouts and a run.

The second reason is that you’ve let us know you’re not well today — either by putting tags “illness” or “cold/flu”, or by taking an HRV measurement and getting not-so-good results. For example, it can happen if the stress level is too high or too low, while the productivity and energy levels are below 50%.

When you get better and are ready for new challenges, your Exercise/Cardio goal will be there again. The tips below goals will help you understand why the goal is not there today.

Most likely, we don’t have enough data to calculate your goals, namely your heart rate and step count for yesterday. Without this data, our formulas won’t work. There can be two reasons for the missing data: you haven’t connected your data aggregator or didn’t wear your tracker yesterday.

Make sure to connect your aggregator and give Welltory access to your data, whether it’s in Apple Health, Google Fit, Samsung Health, or Garmin Connect. After that, wear a fitness tracker for at least one day.

Note that some fitness trackers (like Fitbit) can’t write your data to Apple Health or other aggregators. In this case, we won’t be able to send you the move plan.