Apple Fitness+ Meets You Where You Are

My thoughts after using Fitness+ for eight months

Even though exercise and fitness have always been very important to me for both physical and mental health, I’ve never had a gym membership. I don’t like the atmosphere, cost, and questionable hygiene of gyms (even before the pandemic), and I’m a big believer that exercising regularly requires a low barrier of entry if you aim to do it daily. If it takes 30–40 minutes to pack a gym bag, drive somewhere, find parking, and drop your stuff in a locker room before you’ve even started exercising, that extra time and effort becomes a compelling reason not to work out, especially at the end of a busy day. Working out needs to be something you can do whenever you can find the time — and the less time you need, the better. That’s why, for about a decade, I’ve been doing 30-minute P90X3 interval training workouts at home using video files a friend pirated for me. And for the most part, I’ve been pretty happy with them.

But on December 14 of 2020, Apple launched its Fitness+ subscription service, which included a free three-month trial for Apple Watch owners like myself (after that, it’s $10/month, $80/year, or is included with the top-tier Apple One subscription bundle). So to get a good feel for Fitness+ (and recommit to keeping in shape during pandemic lockdown), I decided to put my P90X3 workouts aside and…