Apple Watch - Move Activity (Ring) Not Working

Recently I noticed that the move ring on my Apple Watch wasn’t progressing properly. Since my job keeps me mostly confined to my chair, firmly behind my desk and monitors, I use my Apple watch to make sure I get up and move around throughout my day.

I know it’s time to do something when it starts yelling at me. It prompts me to stand or ‘get going’ if I haven’t moved in a while or if I’m not on track for hitting my daily move goals. I realized how much I depend on this information throughout my day when over half the day went by before I realized I hadn’t gotten any motivational berating yet. And after checking my watch, it was only showing that I moved about 3% of my move goal for the day. Once more, I didn’t realize the problem until about the time I was going to bed.

Extremely disappointed and thoroughly confused, I did what any IT technician would do: reboot the device. I knew it was connected to my phone’s health apps, so I rebooted my phone too. I placed them on the charging station next to my bed thinking everything was fine and I would get good numbers for my move goal the following day.

Meh. That was wrong. By lunchtime, I still had almost no move progress on my move ring. I thought to myself: I just don’t have time to deal with this. I will have to get to it later tonight. Fast forward to about a week later, I finally had the time, and patience, to start looking into the issue. I couldn’t see any obvious issues with the watch or the phone. Everything was connected with no errors.

Then it hit me! I think I know what the problem is. See, I also have a Bluetooth scale that I use in the morning to track my weight. A week prior, the batteries died and after I replaced them, the first time I weighed myself it showed my weight as 3lbs. Yes, 3. It must have thought I was a fat mouse.

After calibrating it, it was showing the correct weight on the scale and I was off on my merry way thinking all was good. What I didn’t realize was that when it did that reading, it CHANGED my weight in the health app on my phone! I hadn’t gone back to weigh myself for almost a week, because I forgot to take the scale back to the bathroom after recalibrating it. So, for about a week, the activity tracker on my Apple watch was calculating all my movement based on the weight of a fat mouse.

The quick fix:

  1. Weigh myself again on the scale while my phone was attached

The manual fix:

  1. On phone (or iPad) open the Apple Watch app
  2. Click on My Watch
  3. Scroll down and select Health
  4. Select View Health Profile
  5. Select Edit
  6. Select Weight and adjust
  7. Select Done

This just goes to show… being lazy (not putting the scale back for a week) has ramifications. Just think how much time that would have saved me researching this perplexing issue! Wow, that was frustrating.