A workout, as Verve reads it

Apple and the watch makers show pace, splits and a map, and do it well. Verve’s workout page shows what only Verve can say about the same forty minutes, and it says it in figures. What each figure is, where it comes from and what it is not, is here.

What Verve keeps.MET-hours are the session’s MET value times its hours: 30 minutes at 4.4 MET is 2.2 MET-h. The same quantity in minutes is 132 MET-minutes. The page prints one of them, never both, because two spellings of one number read as two numbers that disagree. The average heart rate is Apple Health’s over the session. Calories are not shown: what Verve could print is an estimate from the MET value and your weight, not a measurement, and an estimate on a page of measurements is the one figure a reader cannot tell apart. METs vs MET-hours has the difference between how hard and how much.

Effort, in your bands.Your moderate band runs from your resting heart rate and your age (Karvonen), so it is yours, and it moves as they do. A session is scored against the band that applied on the day and is never re-scored when the band later moves: a finished day is finished. The two dashed lines on the minute chart are that band’s edges, which is why the three figures under the bar do not repeat them. Strength, flexibility and balance always read as light here. Heart rate is not a measure of their effort, and pretending otherwise would credit a hard set as a slow walk.Zone 2 has where the band comes from.

Minute by minute.Each bar is a minute’s average heart rate, coloured by the band it fell in. The trace is read from Apple Health on your phone when the page opens, and is not stored by Verve or sent anywhere. A minute without a reading is a gap in the chart, not a zero. A workout logged by hand, or recorded without a watch, has no trace and the card says so in four words.

Recovery.The fall in heart rate in the first minute after the workout truly ended, read from Apple Health’s end time rather than the start plus the duration. The small line under it is the two readings: the rate at the end and the rate a minute later. A walk that ended below your moderate band is not read, because there was nothing to recover from, and the card shows a dash. The one cited line, and why there is no second one, is onheart rate recovery.

Zone 2.The minutes this session spent inside your moderate band, and under it the week’s running total against the 150 the app asks for. Why 150, and why it is a dose rather than a goal, is on Zone 2.

This week.Moderate and vigorous minutes across the week’s aerobic sessions, as measured, against the first flag on the Weekly Ascent. This is the same figure the Activity tab draws, from the same function, so the two cannot disagree. It is not MET-hours: an earlier version of the page summed MET-hours over every row in the week, background movement included, and read “25 of 10” under a workout worth 2.2. Verve does not count a vigorous minute twice the way the published 150 does, which is why the flags on the Ascent carry no organisation’s name;weekly volume has the arithmetic.

What travels, and what does not.The MET-hours, the band split and the zone 2 minutes are stored on the activity row, go into your export, and with sync on reach My health on this site, where In depth and the coach’s summary read them. The trace and the recovery are read live from the phone each time and never leave it.