If you’re like me and are hooked on tracking your activity with your Apple Watch, prepare to be excited. The tech giant announced a new feature this morning called Apple Watch Connected, which is all about allowing people to more effectively engage with their gym via the Watch. Oh, and it involves earning rewards for all of that hard work inside and outside of the gym, too.

The goal of Apple Watch Connected is simple: to help you better communicate and interact with your gym or fave studio, and to get you motivated to move more every day.

What does the Apple Watch Connected experience look like, exactly?

First, you’ll need an Apple Watch (duh). If you already have one, you can use your current piece to sync up your gym’s app (either the regular app you always use, or a separate app designed specifically for the Connected program—ask your gym/studio for specific instructions) with the Watch. If you don’t have one, some gyms will offer special discounts for Apple Watches.

Now, picture this: You can use your watch to easily search the workout class schedule and sign up without having to go online or on your phone. Then, you can go ahead and scan yourself in when you arrive at your club instead of having to whip out a card or phone. Afterward, you can grab your smoothie using Apple Pay at the juice bar.

Courtesy of Apple

When you, say, get set up on the treadmill, you may be able to seamlessly sync up the data your tread is logging to your watch. (This particular bonus will be available at spots that have GymKit-enabled machines, FYI.) If you hit a new personal best, your instructor could get a notification and give you a shout-out over the mic (woo!). And after you’re all done sweating it out, that workout you just crushed gets logged by your gym or studio app and count towards specific perks, like $15 bucks off next month’s membership, for example.

“This deep integration with the device offers members an unparalleled gym-going experience,” Jay Blahnik, senior director of fitness technologies at Apple, said in a statement.

Apple Watch Connected is launching with four major fitness brands.

The following fitness brands all launched Apple Watch Connected today at specific locations, but they’ll be rolling the program out in more spots as the year goes on: Orangetheory, the YMCA, Crunch, and Basecamp Fitness. More fitness brands will also follow suit this year, but TBD on which ones.

Courtsey of Apple

Wondering about data privacy? You’ll get a notification before the gym app collects data from your Health app—and there should be a privacy policy you can read through in the actual gym app (or online) that details how your info will be used by the third-party app.

About those fitness rewards and incentives…they depend on the gym or studio you’re at.

When it comes to the incentives and rewards different brands offer, the parameters are all different depending on the institution. For instance, at Crunch, you can earn a deduction in membership dues of over $300 over two years by staying active and hitting the workout goals in their Apple Watch Connected program.

At the YMCA, on the other hand, the more you move, the more money goes to their Move for Good community initiatives, like youth swim lessons. If you’re an Orangetheory fan, get your butt there—because members can win gift cards to Nike and other brands when you achieve new personal goals.

One other thing: You don’t necessarily *have* to be in the gym space to get credit for your workouts. At Crunch, for example, any movement or activity time logged outdoors or elsewhere still counts toward your Connected goal in the Crunch Time Apple Rewards app.

Courtesy of Apple

Plenty more gyms and studios are coming on board in 2020. So if your go-to spot isn’t on the list above, don’t sweat it just yet. Personally, as someone who is super motivated by closing my rings day to day and looooves the convenience of little things like Apple Pay right on my wrist, I’m curious and excited to see how my gym experience improves and becomes more streamlined with this new program.

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