Support

Getting started, and what to do when something isn't working

Getting started

• Open In The Zone on your iPhone and set your age. Everything the app tells you depends on it — zones from a wrong age are wrong zones.
• Install In The Zone on your Apple Watch from the Watch app on your iPhone.
• Open it on your watch, choose an activity, and allow Health access when asked. Heart Rate is the permission that matters.

Why does my iPhone show no heart rate?

Live heart rate comes from the watch, not the phone. The watch app has to be running a workout for anything to appear.

This is a limitation of iOS rather than a bug: heart rate recorded by an Apple Watch reaches the iPhone's Health store only when the two devices sync, and that sync is batched on a schedule the system controls. It can lag by many minutes. Rather than show you a stale number that looks live, the app shows nothing until it has something real.

The watch and phone disagree about my zone

The two devices each calculate zones from your profile, so they disagree only if the profile hasn't reached the watch. Open In The Zone on your watch while your phone is nearby and it will catch up. If it persists, change your age on the phone and change it back — that forces a fresh sync.

No distance is recorded

Choose the right activity. Indoor activities estimate distance from wrist movement; outdoor ones use GPS. A treadmill run recorded as outdoor will wait for a satellite fix it can never get.

Outdoor workouts also need location permission on the watch. You'll be asked the first time you start one.

My workout won't stop from the phone

Tapping Finish sends a request to your watch, which owns the session. If the watch app isn't in the foreground the request is queued rather than delivered instantly, and usually arrives within a few seconds. If the workout is still running after a minute, end it on the watch.

Achievements reset

Achievements count only workouts recorded by In The Zone. An early version mistakenly counted every workout in Apple Health, including ones recorded years ago by other apps, and handed out awards nobody had earned in this app. Fixing that meant clearing them once.

Deleting workouts

Deleting a workout in the History tab removes it from Apple Health entirely — from every app that reads it, not just this one. It cannot be undone. Apple only permits an app to delete workouts it recorded itself, so workouts from other apps can't be removed here.

My watch isn't tapping me

Wrist taps only happen when a target zone is set — Settings → Target Zone — and only during a workout. They're limited to one every twenty seconds, so a reading sitting exactly on a boundary can't buzz continuously. Check the watch isn't in Silent or Theatre Mode.

The spoken zones sound robotic

iOS ships only compact voices, which is why. Better ones are a free download: Settings → Accessibility → Read & Speak (called Spoken Content on iOS 18 and earlier) → Voices → English, then pick anything marked Enhanced or Premium and tap the download icon. Come back to In The Zone → Settings → Audio → Voice and choose it. Siri's own voice isn't available to third-party apps, so Enhanced and Premium are as natural as it gets.

Using a chest strap

Any strap supporting the standard Bluetooth heart rate profile works — Polar, Garmin, Wahoo, Coospo and others.

If you have an Apple Watch, pair the strap to the watch, not the phone: on the watch, Settings → Bluetooth, then tap it under Health Devices. watchOS feeds it straight into the workout and everything else keeps working as normal.

Only pair it to your iPhone if you're training without your watch. A strap holds one connection at a time, so a phone that has paired it will claim it before the watch can.

Zones, and where the numbers come from

Maximum heart rate is estimated with the Tanaka formula (208 − 0.7 × age), from a 2001 meta-analysis of 18,712 subjects. It is more accurate than the familiar 220 − age, particularly past 40. If you have had your maximum measured, enter it — a real figure always beats an estimate.

Zone boundaries follow the American College of Sports Medicine's five-zone banding. You can measure against percentage of maximum, or against your heart rate reserve using the Karvonen method if you know your resting heart rate. The two are not interchangeable at the same percentage, which is why the app always shows which is in use.

Requirements

• iPhone running iOS 17 or later
• Apple Watch running watchOS 10 or later, for live heart rate