motion

Motion is a personal training companion for cyclists, runners, and walkers. It reads your workouts from Apple Health — your Apple Watch, Peloton, or any app that writes to Health — and can also record outdoor workouts itself with your phone’s GPS. It then tells you what to do today and tracks how your training is trending.

Along the bottom: Motion (your day + what to do), Progress (where your training is trending), Recover (are you ready to push?), Friends (share and follow), and You (profile, history, and everything that tunes the app).

No. Motion is fully usable on the phone alone — GPS tracking, courses, saved routes, Peloton, and social all work. What a Watch adds is the heart-rate layer: HR graphs and zones, effort, HR recovery, HRV, and VO₂ max. Without a Watch those simply stay empty rather than showing made-up numbers.

From the home screen, pick a sport and Start. Every sport has an indoor/outdoor pair — Ride / Indoor Ride, Run / Treadmill Run, Walk / Indoor Walk, plus Hike. Outdoor sports open on a full-screen map centered on you (with a 3-2-1 countdown); indoor sports run a clean, mapless screen and save the right indoor type to Apple Health. Strength, HIIT, and yoga arrive automatically from the Watch.

Records an outdoor walk, run, ride, or hike with your phone’s GPS — no Watch needed. You get a live route map, distance, pace, and calories; auto-pause when you stop; voice splits each mile; a live weather chip; and a lock-screen live card (and Dynamic Island) with your time and distance while you move. Optionally share your live location so friends can watch your dot in real time.

Start Walk, Run, Ride, or Hike from your wrist and it records heart rate, calories, distance, and the GPS route into Apple Health — the phone shows it like any workout. Two pages like Apple’s Workout app: swipe for controls, land on metrics with your heart rate colored by live zone. Walks and rides auto-pause when you stop, and ending shows a summary on the wrist.

Pool and open-water swims hand off to your Apple Watch. You get time, heart rate, calories, and laps on the wrist; starting a swim auto-enables water lock and counts strokes, and on an Apple Watch Ultra you also get live depth. Swims read in laps everywhere — the watch, your live banner, and friends’ view.

Motion opens on a personal greeting and a swipeable hero that tells you what to do today: your recommendation for right now, your Journey (what every workout is building toward), your Momentum (how consistently you’re showing up), and a Weekend Challenge. Below that sits today’s plan, a short read from your on-device coach, and your recent activity.

The chip at the top is your Readiness — a 0–100 green light for effort, from CasaHealth if connected or estimated on-device from your heart rate, HRV, and sleep. Tap it for the full explainer and the bands (Optimal / Primed / Steady / Low / Drained). High means push; low means your body’s asking for an easier day.

Set your status to Resting, Sick, or Injured and Motion pauses your plan — the home screen recommends recovery instead of nagging you to train, and you keep your streak. Set it back to Active whenever you’re ready.

A curated course is a multi-week structured program that picks your sessions for you — each workout, its targets, and the rest days, laid out from a start day you choose. There’s an Indoor Bike ladder (Power Foundations → Builder → Peak) built around your power, and a Running ladder (Running Foundations → Run Builder → Peak) built around your pace. Each course unlocks when you finish the one before it, and every session’s targets come from a single number about you — your FTP for the bike, your VDOT for running — which the course’s Week 1 test establishes automatically.

The bike courses are built around your FTP (Functional Threshold Power) — the highest power, in watts, you can hold for about an hour. It’s your cycling anchor: every zone target in the course is a percentage of it. Motion measures it with a guided 20-minute all-out test — warm up, then hold the hardest steady effort you can for 20 minutes. Your FTP is set to 95% of your average power over that effort.

What you need: a bike that shows your power output in watts — a Peloton, a smart bike or smart trainer, or a power meter. Motion runs the 20-minute timer on screen; when it ends you read your average watts off the bike and type it in, and Motion sets your FTP and fills in every ride’s watt targets. No power meter? You can still enter a known FTP by hand in the You tab — but a power source is what makes the curated bike rides work.

The running courses are built around your VDOT — a single number that captures your running fitness (it reflects your effective VO₂ max). It’s your running anchor: every pace in the course — easy, tempo, interval, rep — is derived from it. Motion sets it with a time trial: warm up, then run a set distance as hard as you can hold. Pick 1 mile, 2 miles, or 5K, run it all-out, and enter your finish time — Motion computes your VDOT (Jack Daniels’ method) from the real distance and time.

What you need: just your running gear and a way to run a known distance and know your time — a running watch, your phone’s GPS, or a measured track or course. No special equipment like the bike’s power meter. Already know your VDOT? Enter it by hand in the You tab and every pace target fills in right away.

Tap any workout for everything about it: a route map colored by heart rate, big stat tiles, mile or km splits, segments, a single Effort verdict, heart-rate zones, cardio focus, HR recovery, weather during the workout, and running form for runs. You can rename it, save the route, and share it as a clean card with the real map and weather.

Every workout you’ve ever done in one timeline — newest first, grouped by month with each month’s count and distance, and a filter chip for every workout type. Find it under You → Workout history.

Save a route you repeat and Motion times you on it — this time vs your best vs your previous. Start a time trial and race your ghost: a translucent version of your best run moves along the route at its real pace, and a banner shows how far ahead or behind you are.

Import your whole past from MapMyRun, Strava, Garmin, and similar apps. Export your data there (TCX files carry heart rate and calories), then You → App settings → Import workouts. Motion writes them into Apple Health as real workouts, skips anything already there, and your all-time totals update immediately.

Reserve a username and invite friends by handle or link. Follow people to see their workouts in your feed with likes and comments, tap a name for their profile and stats, and watch anyone sharing live in the LIVE NOW strip. A weekly leaderboard shows who’s moving most.

Two separate switches, both off by default: Share workout routes (friends can open your finished maps) and Share live location (friends watch you in real time while you track). Your own card always shows your route; a friend’s map only appears if they turned sharing on.

Apple Health files every workout under the device that recorded it — delete that device and Apple can wipe years of history in one tap. Motion keeps its own private archive of every workout it’s seen, so your lifetime totals survive even if the original watch or phone is later removed. It only ever reads from Health, never writes workout data back, so it can’t create duplicates.

Two levels, on purpose. Remove from Motion only hides a workout — it always stays in Apple Health and you can restore it from Settings → Removed workouts. Delete from Motion + Apple Health truly erases it, behind a second confirmation with no undo, and is only offered on workouts Motion itself recorded.

Tap You → App settings → Troubleshooting → Refresh from Apple Health to re-pull your workouts. If Motion has no Health access, the same screen opens iOS Settings so you can grant it.

Heart rate, zones, effort, and HR recovery come from an Apple Watch. A phone-only workout gets the map, distance, pace, and splits — just no heart rate.

Reconnect Peloton under Troubleshooting. If your session dropped, Motion will also nudge you to reconnect.

Crashes report themselves — just reopen the app. You can also Send logs to developer from Troubleshooting, or email us at motion@slateapps.app (screenshots help).