Best apps to track skiing, snowboarding, and hockey on your Apple Watch
- mar
- 22
Photo courtesy Apple.
Winter hasn't quite left us yet — there's still plenty of time to hit the slopes or ice rink with you and your Apple Watch.
Whether you're a skier, snowboarder, or hockey player, the Apple Watch has some excellent apps that make it easy to track your exercise. watchOS 4.2 even has custom workout APIs built-in that support specific skiing and snowboarding metrics, including:
- Vertical descent and horizontal distance
- Number of runs
- Average and maximum speed
All that is in addition to the basic workout metrics you'll get (heart rate, calories burned, time taken) and basic workout APIs (automatic pause, Siri, Health app recording, and the like).
Unfortunately, hockey doesn't yet have specific APIs built in yet, but we've found apps that do a great job of simulating the stats necessary to help you better track your play.
Here are our favorite apps for winter sports!
Slopes
A powerhouse ski tracker on iPhone, Slopes on Apple Watch provides an equally powerful experience for monitoring your runs on your wrist.
You can start a run right from the app (or use Siri), and pause, resume, or end it at any time with a spoken or tap command. While on a run, you can glance at your watch to get vertical descent information, distance skied, speed, calories, and your heart rate.
If you purchase Slopes' $19.99 yearly Slopes Pass, you can also view interactive 3D replays and terrain maps to get an at-a-glance view of where you've been, view a daily timeline of your runs, and estimated live statistics during your day. (You can also buy day and weekend versions of the Slopes Pass for $1.99 and $4.99, respectively.)
Free - Download now
Snoww: Ski & Snowboarding
Like Slopes, Snoww can record your distance, vertical drops, speed, calories, and time on the mountain. But the app isn't only interested in tracking your personal metrics — it's designed to let you share those stats with your friends and other members in-app.
You can compete against friends, other skiers on the same courses, or skiers across the world during your run times. You can even create in-person groups for ski trips that let you check your stats and monitor where your friends are in real time.
Free - Download now
SNOCRU Skiing & Snow Tracking
SNOCRU combines the best parts of Slopes and Snoww to provide a high-level skiing and snowboarding tracker that also lets you connect with your friends. In addition to keeping tabs on your run data, SNOCRU also lets you connect with friends.
You can create a DAYCRU for in-person adventures, challenge your pals to specific challenges (like skiing the most vertical feet), and even chat with friends through a private messenger service and share photos (though this is primarily available through the iPhone app).
SNOCRU's iPhone app also lets you monitor snow conditions at your favorite resort or mountain, along with weather reports and general resort information; you can even use its optional Near Me location feature to find restaurants and local shops for your post-run experience.
SNOCRU is free, like Slopes, but offers in-app purchase passes ($4.99 for a month or $27.99 for a year) to remove ads on the iPhone app, add animated route sharing and heat maps of your runs, along with other special challenges.
Free - Download now
HockeyTracker
HockeyTracker is one of the few apps out there built specifically to track hockey games and play: Not only does it monitor your health data, it also features automatic shift detection (when you pop on and off the ice) and lets you measure your shift length, top speed, and heart rate per shift.
You'll additionally get a measurement of your overall calories burned, distance skated, max and average speed, VO2 max, and heart rate recovery. Hockey Tracker even has algorithms that attempt to analyze your hockey fitness ratio as well as your max and average skate efficiency.
You can also manually input game scores, goals, assists, and plus-minus rating on your iPhone, and view all past practices, scrimmages, and games on your smartphone.
You can try HockeyTracker free for a week; after that, to use the app you'll need a monthly or yearly subscription ($2.99 or $19.99 respectively).
Free - Download now
Your favorites?
Do you have any winter sports apps for Apple Watch that you love? Let us know in the comments!