Decreasing Move Points & Third-Party Workout Apps

If you notice your Move points decreasing or seem to be not as high as they should be, this can be caused by a third-party workout app, such as Strava or Peloton for example.

Here's what happens:

  • The rings fill up from calories calculated and saved by the Apple Watch
  • The third-party workout app is also tracking calories according to its own algorithm/models
  • The third-party app saves the workout on iOS and associates the calories with the Workout
  • Later, when the workout syncs to Apple Watch, the Watch gives those calories preference over Apple Watch calories when generating the Move ring.

Because of this, you'll likely notice the Move ring points change in the Activity/Fitness app (normally, they go down by at least a few points).

This preference is an acknowledgment of the user's actions to track workout calories from the app of their choice. If you don’t trust the app, you should not give it access to write calories (as you have done now). If you want to revoke permission from a third-party workout app, the section titled "View your data sources" explains how to see which devices and apps update specific health categories here.

If you do trust the third-party app and want to use it, you can.

There is a difference between Active Energy and Move ring calories, too.

  • Active Energy in the Health app shows data from all sources and calculates its statistics based on the ordering of sources. See the section on “How Health handles data from multiple sources” on this Apple support article.
  • The data shown on the Move ring only uses calories saved by Apple Watch (with the exception of workouts as noted above).

If you reorder the Active Energy sources in Health app to have the third-party app you're relying on to be listed  above the Apple Watch, then you should see the same value as Move ring. To do this, follow the steps here in this section titled "Prioritize data sources”.

If you have more than one third-party app that you use, we suggest picking whichever one you use more often to make your main data source. It is a personal choice to use these third-party apps and it is ultimately up to you to determine which will be the most accurate for you.