Taking the strength assessment
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Is your iPhone about to replace your personal trainer? With the iOS 27.2 public beta, Apple is turning the Health app into an AI-powered fitness coach. Instead of just tracking steps, it now features 17 camera-based workouts to test everything from your flexibility to your VO2 Max.
I threw on my workout gear and Apple Watch and spent two days putting it to the test. Here's what works, what surprised me, and whether it's actually worth the download.
Navigating the Redesign: From Daily Insights to Your Health Age
The new Health app is organized into three tabs: Insights, Longevity, and Browse. It opens to Insights, which dynamically surfaces the most relevant metrics based on the time of day. For example, in the morning, the first card shows sleep data, followed by Readiness, so you can plan your day's activity based on its guidance. The top of the page also shows a personalized summary generated by Apple Intelligence. Mine commented on my relatively low Sleep Score after a night of some tossing and turning, and suggested that I take it easy if possible.
The Longevity tab provides an overview of your long-term health and is divided into two sub-tabs. The first, called Overview, shows a pie chart that quantifies your wellness across seven subcategories: hearing, heart, mental wellbeing, metabolic health, movement, nutrition, and sleep. You can tap each piece of the pie chart for details.
The other sub-tab under Insights is called Health Age. This tab compares your chronological age to an estimated effective age. In other words, it aims to compare how old you are with how old you might feel based on your current health and fitness. Scrolling down shows how your Health Age has changed over time and the factors contributing to it.
The third main tab is Browse, and this is the only section carried over from the old version of the Health app. A search bar at the top lets you quickly find any specific data. You can then pin certain cards to the top of the page beneath the search bar, and scroll further to see the rest of your data organized by category.
Computer Vision Assessments: Putting Your Balance and Flexibility on Camera
If you’d like even more details added to the pie chart in the Longevity tab, you can use the app to take a variety of wellness assessments. Apple offers 17 different assessments; these are optional, and you don’t have to take all of them at once.
Some, like the ECG, might already be filled out for you if you have recently used your Apple Watch to take a reading. Most, like Review Your Sleep and Note Your Mental Outlook, ask you three to five related questions. You need your own cuff to log your blood pressure or compatible AirPods to evaluate your hearing.
Another assessment lets you import the results of recent bloodwork if you have access to that information through your doctor's online portal, or you can schedule an appointment to get labs done. Apple has partnered with Quest Diagnostics for this feature, and you can book an appointment at a nearby location through the Health app for $119.
The assessments I found most engaging ask you to stand up and get moving. These tests use your phone’s camera and a connected heart rate monitor, such as an Apple Watch, to assess your balance, flexibility, strength, and VO2 Max (the maximum volume of oxygen your body can use during a workout, a key indicator of cardio fitness).
Before taking these tests, you’ll want to put on workout clothes and make sure you have enough room to move around. The app will tell you to set your phone on the floor, leaning against a wall, then stand up so the front-facing camera can see your whole body, and you can see the screen and hear the instructions. You might have to rearrange some furniture if you're tall and live in a small space.
Once I arranged enough room, the tests worked well and kept rolling even with minor interference. My cat decided to waltz in front of the phone's camera during the VO2 Max test at one point, and the test continued despite the brief obstruction.
The tests themselves are mostly simple. For the flexibility assessment, the app guides you through various movements, such as raising your arms and bending your legs. Balance asks you to stand on each foot, one at a time, for as long as you can (or up to a minute for each). The cardio fitness test has you walk and then run in place with an increasing cadence to raise your heart rate, then measures how quickly it comes back down once you slow your pace.
The strength test is the most involved. You need to do as many push-ups as you can, hold a plank for as long as possible (or up to two minutes), squat with your arms raised, and then sit in a chair and stand up quickly six times. That last part of the test was the only one that seemed out of place, as it struck me as more of an exercise in speed and balance than strength. I’m also a little bitter; while the app complimented my arm and core strength, it rated my lower-body strength only Good, not Excellent.
The tests were also pretty harsh when assessing my flexibility. Specifically, it said my lower-body flexibility was Fair, and my upper-body flexibility Needs Attention.
For any tested category, you can see your exact results charted and get advice on how to improve. I’m aware of my lack of flexibility, so I plan to heed its advice to see if it helps over time. The basics of “stretch more often” are obvious, but I appreciate that the app offers some stretches and instructional videos to help address my specific limitations.
Final Thoughts: A Promising Upgrade for iPhone and Apple Watch Users
The overhauled Health app isn’t going to replace your personal trainer overnight, but it bridges the gap between passive tracking and active improvement better than any software Apple has released to date. Even in beta, the camera-based assessments are surprisingly accurate, easy to run at home, and remarkably resilient (cat interruptions included). If you already own an Apple Watch and want clearer, actionable feedback on where your fitness actually stands—rather than just a list of raw numbers—this update makes the Health app well worth exploring.
About Our Expert
I’m PCMag’s senior writer covering smart home and wearable devices. I’ve been reporting on tech professionally for nearly a decade and have been obsessing about it for much longer than that. Prior to joining PCMag, I made educational videos for an electronics store called Abt Electronics in Illinois, and before that, I spent eight years covering the smart home market for CNET.Â
I foster many flavors of nerdom in my personal life. I’m an avid board gamer and video gamer. I love fantasy football, which I view as a combination of role-playing games and sports. Plus, I can talk to you about craft beer for hours and am on a personal quest to have a flight of beer at each microbrewery in my home city of Chicago.
