Google Fit guide: Everything you need to know about Google's fitness platform (2024)

Jimmy Westenberg / Android Authority

Google Fit is the fitness app for the rest of us. It focuses on simplicity and doing a few core things well. It also links with several powerful fitness trackers. There are benefits and downsides to Google’s app, all of which we’ll explore in our comprehensive Google Fit guide.

What is Google Fit?

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Depending on what type of user you are, you’ll either think Google Fit is great or way too simple for what you need. Fitness apps can be hit or miss. Some are overly packed with features and require a learning curve, while others have an intuitive design but not many features. Google Fit falls in the latter category.On its own, Google Fit is a basic fitness app. However, it also acts as a hub for any fitness or health data gathered from popular apps and fitness trackers.

Let’s say you use a Nest Hub (2nd gen) for sleep tracking, a Wear OS watch for general day-to-day activity, and a Polar watch for tracking your exercises. You can connect all of your devices to Google Fit and see your data in one place. If you’re more familiar with Apple’s ecosystem, think of Google Fit as Google’s version of Apple Health.

Google Fit profile and navigating the app

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Users sign into Google Fit with an existing Google account. Once you tell the app a little about yourself (gender, date of birth, weight, and height), you can set up your activity goals. Google Fit uses your step count as your main daily goal.

Back on the Home tab,users can tap a colorful ring widget. This will take you to a summary of your daily, weekly, and monthly views of your Heart Points and steps data. If you scroll through your history and want more details on your activity stats for a specific day, click on the day to find all your recorded activities. From there, you can click on an individual activity to see more minute details like distance, steps, calories, and pace metrics.

Back on the Home tab again, there’s also a small floating action button at the bottom right that looks like a plus sign with Google’s color scheme. This button lets you manually track a workout or add an activity, weight measurement, or blood pressure reading.

Move Minutes and Heart Points

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Google Fit approaches things differently than other fitness apps. You can still check on stats like heart rate and step count, but Google Fit also combines your activity metrics to make themmean something. For instance, you might see that your lunch walk took around 22 minutes to complete. However, you might not know what that means about your overall health. How do 22 minutes of activity affect your fitness? Most importantly, what goals do you need to meet to stay healthy?

Apps compatible with Google Fit

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You may want to connect Google Fit with other apps for a few reasons.Let’s say you use a Garmin device for tracking your workouts through an app like Strava, but you love Google Fit’s Move Minutes and Heart Points metrics. Connecting your Google Fit account to Strava will automatically transfer your fitness data to Google Fit.

You also might want to connect Google Fit to another app if you’re using a device from theWear OS platform. As discussed, Google’s fitness app isn’t the most versatile option. If you want to keep track of your activity on a more powerful platform like Runkeeper, connecting your Google Fit account to a third-party app will do the trick.

Google Calendar integration

You can also schedule recurring exercises with Google Fit through Google Calendar. To do so, open Google Calendar, tap the + button on the bottom-right corner, then Goal, thenExercise. From there, you can choose which exercises you’d like to schedule (run, walk, yoga, hike, etc.), how often you’d like the exercise to recur, the duration of your exercise, and what time of day you’d like to exercise. This is a great way to integrate activity into your schedule.

Devices compatible with Google Fit

Many fitness and health devices are compatible with Google Fit, most smartwatches. Google Fit is the default fitness app for Wear OS devices (unless a company includes its fitness app), so you can access Google Fit if you pick up a Wear OS smartwatch.

Though all Wear OS smartwatches are compatible with Google Fit, the data the app records will depend on your watch. For instance, Google Fit won’t record heart rate data if you use a watch without a heart rate sensor. On the other hand, if your Wear OS watch doesn’t have a heart rate sensor but you own a standalone heart rate sensor (such as a chest strap or armband), you can connect that device to Google Fit to see your heart rate data.

Do you need the Google Fit app if you already own a Google Fit-compatible device?

The future of Google Fit

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Google’s fitness and health products are a bit all over the place. It already has Google Fit — a fitness service that connects with all Wear OS watches — and the company doesn’t show any signs of abandoning it anytime soon. However, Google also now owns Fitbit, which has a stellar fitness application. So, what’s Google to do with two fitness apps?

We’ve already seen some overlap between the two services, and Google promises that more Wear OS devices will eventually offer more Fitbit staples. Meanwhile,Fitbit is deeply integrated into the Google Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 with fitness and health experiences on the devices centered around Fitbit’s top-tier services. The result is a powerful smartwatch stacked with Google’s tools and an invaluable fitness companion tied to Fitbit’s fantastic ecosystem. This is likely just the beginning of what we can expect from the company in the future.

What’s missing from Google Fit?

Google Fit’s strengths lie in its simplicity. It’s the app version of a basic activity tracker; it keeps track of your simplest health metrics and not much more.

Some apps, for instance, let you join health and fitness groups, post status updates and photos, comment on posts and ask for advice if needed. Others focus more on activity progression and staying updated on your friends’ performance. None of that is available in Google Fit.

The app also doesn’t display progress over time for certain activities. You can’t click on a running activity and see how you’ve progressed over the previous weeks or months. You can do this with weight, heart rate, Move Minutes, and Heart Points, but not exercises.There’s also no food or water logging in the app, though you can keep track of your weight.

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