How to Pause Apple Watch Fitness Rings

For the first time ever, now that iOS 18 is available, you can pause your rings on your Apple Watch and the Fitness app. That means if you’re poorly and you can’t complete your workout one day, you’re not going to break your streak. Maybe you’re traveling, so you can’t move as much as you’d like to; you don’t need to worry about messing up your rings.

To do this, I’m simply going to tap onto my rings in the Fitness app, which brings up more detail about each of my three rings. I’m recording this first thing in the morning, so I haven’t done a huge amount yet, please forgive me. But if I scroll down, there’s now the new button there that says “Pause Rings.” Tapping here gives you an option: you can pause just for today, the rest of the week, or the rest of the month, or you can choose a custom amount of time to pause for. For this, I only want to pause it for one day, so I’m simply going to tap onto “For Today.” Then you’ll notice the rings have gone grey. I can’t add any calories, I can’t add any move goals, I can’t add any stand hours — everything is just paused. I’m not going to lose any streaks; my data is not going to get ruined. Instead, I can come back tomorrow when I’m feeling a bit better and I can smash those goals once again.

Of course, I do also have the option to edit that pause. That means I can cancel the pause, or I can extend it if I need to. There are lots of other things that are new in the Fitness app for iOS 18, in fact, across your whole iPhone. Did you know, for example, you can now have different move goals for different days of the week, and you can customise your Fitness+ home screen? Well, if you want to learn more about what your iPhone can do now that you’ve got iOS 18, you can actually check out my brand new eBook down below this video, or jump across to my channel where there are hundreds more quick tips for you there.