Strength training

Verve treats strength as co-equal with aerobic training, not as an add-on. In the UK Biobank analysis of over 70,000 adults, improving cardiorespiratory fitness and muscle strength together was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than either alone — the two protect through different mechanisms, and neither substitutes for the other.

Sitting today, as the tile counts it.An hour counts as sitting when fewer than 50 steps happened in it, from 07:00 to now; it is the same number the Movement balance row shows. Short, regular breaks help more than one long workout does. The phone only knows you were not walking — not whether you sat or stood — and a watch adds the standing minutes beside it.

The 60-minute figure. Public guidance asks for muscle-strengthening activity on two or more days a week; roughly an hour across those days is the volume the mortality studies were built on, and is the number Verve cites. It is a figure from population evidence, not a personal prescription. Someone starting out will do less and gain a great deal; someone training seriously will do far more, with the benefit curve flattening rather than stopping.

Why the app stopped drawing it.The Strength card used to show your minutes against 60 — a bar, a “to go”, a “target met”. For a beginner that reads as a bar they are under every week; for an athlete it is meaningless. The card now reports the minutes and the sessions, and the number lives here, where it can be explained. The same reasoning removed the 150–300 minute band from the Zone 2 card — seeZone 2 Training.