The Two Most Surprising Things About Apple's New 'Workout Buddy'

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This week I did over a dozen workouts with Apple’s new Workout Buddy. I ran, I walked, I strength trained, and even did a little indoor cycling. I’ve learned a few things, but the strangest is that I didn’t need an Apple Watch for any of it. 

Workout Buddy is an AI-powered feature that sends a little voice into your headphones to motivate and congratulate you as you’re working out. Apple touted Workout Buddy as a feature of WatchOS 26 and promoted it among the features of the new Series 11 Apple Watch, so you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s part of of the Apple Watch, specifically. But that’s not what I found. 

How to use Workout Buddy without an Apple Watch

But as I found when I took a supported Apple Watch out for a trail run with an old iPhone (a 12 Mini), Workout Buddy requires a phone that supports Apple Intelligence, so I didn’t have access to it. OK, fine, it needs a newer watch and a newer phone. (Or so I thought.) Eventually I got my hands on a 16 Pro and, yep, was able to enable and use Workout Buddy. 

But this week—with a Series 11 Apple Watch on my wrist and WatchOS 26 installed—I discovered something. I could power off the watch, or even leave it at home, and still get Workout Buddy. Here are a few things I tried, all of which got me Workout Buddy: 

• Starting a workout from the Series 10 or Series 11 Apple Watch

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app (you can do that now!) with the Powerbeats Pro 2 headphones paired

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app without any other Apple products in range, just a Coospo heart rate monitor and some Shokz headphones

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app with just Shokz headphones paired (no heart rate monitor, since it was a GPS-enabled walk)

The only configuration that wouldn’t give me Workout Buddy was using the Fitness app without headphones paired. It’s serious about needing headphones, but they can be paired to either the Watch or the iPhone. 

Workout Buddy is more of a chipper sidekick than a coach

I hoped Workout Buddy might provide some kind of coaching or workout guidance, but found that’s not quite what it’s there for. The biggest difference between having Workout Buddy on versus off during a run is that, with Workout Buddy, you get your splits read to you in a more conversational voice.

The main advantage of Workout Buddy is that it gives you a check-in at the beginning and end of your workout to let you know where you stand on your goals and progress for the day and the week, and it will call out any notable recent achievements. 

For example, at the start of pretty much every workout this week—whether running, walking, or strength–it congratulated me on running my fastest-ever 5K last Tuesday. It also let me know I logged at least 16 workouts every week for the past four weeks, which is very consistent of me. 

The workout count seems to be correct (I log a lot of short workouts for device testing), but the 5K callout is wrong. Last Tuesday I earned a 5K badge, but that’s just for logging a run of more than five kilometers, not for running my fastest 5K. According to the Fitness app—remember, the same app that contains Workout Buddy—my fastest 5K was in July of 2021. 

Besides those hallucinations, the information seems to be reasonable. The overly-enthusiastic voice of the Workout Buddy always tells me at the start of each workout where I stand on my ring-closing goals. I need 22 more minutes to close my Exercise ring, it might say, or 37 more calories to close the Move ring. At the start of a run, it will tell me how many miles I’ve already run this week. And if I have music playing, it will name-check the band—seemingly just to let me know it can read that data. “Get into the rhythm with Fleetwood Mac!” it told me once, just as a Fleetwood Mac song was fading out. 

Overall, I find the goal-oriented check-ins useful; knowing I have 22 minutes left on my exercise goal does make me more likely to extend my workout if I was only going to do a 20-minute one. The conversational voice giving me my mile splits is a bit nicer than hearing the generic, more robot-like voice. And if I had run my fastest 5K recently, I’d probably love to be reminded about it at every opportunity. 

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