I wore my Apple Watch on my ankle so you don’t have to

I’m not someone who’s easily swayed to try a new trend. Typically, if I’m on TikTok, I’ll see no less than 10 new trends in a given week that look interesting. They can range from making my own salad dressing or matching an outfit in a different way than I’d thought before. Finding these kinds of trends can be exhausting but, if you’ve trained your algorithm enough, they come to you.

Fitness and training tips and trends frequently come across my feed and trying to incorporate all of them into my daily life is impossible. I don’t have the time to get a ton of different equipment and constantly try out new things. While I’ve incorporated things like jump rope training into my workouts, I still focus on walking and running (I can usually find time to do a few workouts a week while balancing a busy work schedule and home life.) One of these health trends that came across my feed over the past few months is people wearing their Apple Watches around their ankles to better track movement and metrics.

Since I already wear an Apple Watch daily, I didn’t have to do too much to try this trend. So I did it for a few days and a few workouts to see what the fuss was about. From my experience, I didn’t see why there would be a fuss at all.

Brand

Apple

Heart Rate Monitor

Optical and electrical

Battery Life

Up to 18 hours

Operating System

watchOS

Customizable Strap

Yes

SIM Support

Yes on supported models

I saw the benefits initially

At least that’s what I thought

When I first decided to give this a try, I took my watch off of my wrist and tried to wrap it around my ankle. The problem was that my ankle is much thicker than my wrist. I had a silicone band that wasn’t going to work. I had to quickly go to Amazon and order a stretch loop band that allowed me to slide the Apple Watch under my foot and tighten it around my ankle. It worked well, so for an extra $10, it wasn’t a huge deal.

One thing I’ve always wondered about the Apple Watch is how well it tracked my steps when I wasn’t able to move my arms much. In the case of pushing a stroller (I have a toddler) on a walk or doing yard work that requires pushing a wheelbarrow, how accurate is it at getting my steps if my arms aren’t swinging much? I figured the Apple Watch being on my ankle would provide me with better metrics for counting steps.

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But the ideals are greater than the execution

It didn’t hold up to rigorous or even slight testing

The neighborhood behind my house is a large winding road with a number of houses on it. It also ends with a steep upward hill that, once you get to the top of, is almost exactly 0.75 miles from my driveway. I have done this measurement many times, pushing strollers, holding dog leashes, or just jogging on my own. I know for a fact that it is 0.75 miles because when I get home, it’s 1.50 miles once I’ve come back. So, I tested this out and went for a jog with my Apple Watch strapped to my ankle.

What I found when I checked the watch a short distance into the jog was that it had paused. I restarted it and found myself constantly wanting to check it to make sure it was still going. The problem is, when you stop moving, and you’re tracking a run on the Nike Run Club app, it pauses it automatically. I hadn’t stopped moving initially for it to be paused but, when I did stop to check it, it did stop. So I just tried to keep my pace going and see where we landed.

I returned home after going up the hill and back and saw that it had calculated 1.25 miles, meaning it missed a quarter of a mile during the tracking. I hadn’t even gone a quarter of a mile before I checked in the first time, so I know it wasn’t from when it had been paused. This was a disappointing find because I figured it could register the movements of my legs just as well as my arms. It can’t be overstated that the sensors on the Apple Watch are made to specifically check your heart rate from your wrist, so they’re calibrated that way and not meant to be worn on other parts of your body.

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The yard work test was up next

Middling results were found again

I had to do some mulching in my yard that day as well, so I kept the Apple Watch strapped to my ankle and went about my work. I figured this would be a great way to see how well it tracks movement as I would be pushing a wheelbarrow throughout the afternoon. While I didn’t have a baseline number of steps to go against that I normally do for yard work, I counted my steps initially for the first few trips to and from the mulch pile.

What I found was that the Apple Watch was decently accurate at capturing the steps, only coming 20 or steps lower than what I had counted in my own head. This feels like it could be within a reasonable margin of error that using a device in a way it isn’t intended to be used could be justified. But, for people who rely on certain step counts each day or want to make sure that every step they are taking is being recorded accurately, this probably isn’t the way you want to use your Apple Watch.

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You lose the functionality of the Apple Watch

You can’t check your notifications easily at all

There’s no denying that wearing the Apple Watch around your ankle makes it feel like an ankle monitor. It made me feel like I was on house arrest, especially any time it would buzz from a notification. While doing yard work, my Ring alerts kept going off because I was walking around the yard and being picked up by my cameras, causing them to make my Apple Watch buzz constantly. Also, I got a phone call at one point and legitimately thought about sitting down with my legs criss-crossed in order to answer it on my watch, since I had work gloves on and didn’t want to fish my phone out of my pocket.

Using the Apple Watch around your ankle eliminates you from being able to use it for a lot of what it does well, which is heart rate monitoring, sleeping tracking, or even just paying for things with Apple Pay. Even if there were benefits to wearing it around your ankle, you would only get them when you’re working out, and you can’t guarantee it’s actually tracking your movements properly. Throughout my testing, I didn’t find the benefits were actually there, and I haven’t gone back to trying this trend.