Wear OS Boxing Training: How FightFlow Measures Effort

Android training gear is a zoo, and that is mostly a good thing.

You might be wearing a Galaxy Watch. Or a Pixel Watch. Or a Garmin you bought for running and now wear for everything. Or an old chest strap that still does the job.

FightFlow reads compatible heart-rate and calorie records from Health Connect when your wearable's companion app writes them there.

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From your watch, not your weight or age

One rule sits under this whole feature: FightFlow never invents a number about your body.

No calorie models based on weight or age. No MET tables. The app does not ask your weight, your age or your sex, because it has no use for them. Every figure you see comes from the wearable you trained in. If your watch did not record something, the row stays blank instead of showing a number the app invented.

Calories come directly from FightFlow's Wear OS app or from compatible records in Health Connect. The watch or its companion app supplies the calorie figure; FightFlow does not add a calorie estimate of its own. For a Health Connect record that runs past the session, FightFlow counts the part that overlaps the session, in proportion to time.

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Two ways in, and you can use either

With the Wear OS app. FightFlow ships one. Start a session on your phone and the watch starts the workout itself, logging it as boxing or martial arts and streaming live heart rate into the session player while you train. When the session ends, the workout ends. You never touch the watch. It arrives with the phone app from the same Play listing.

Give it a minute. The watch needs a few seconds to find your pulse, sometimes up to half a minute, so a short session can have too few readings for a heart-rate curve or time in zones. When no result is available, Session End may flag missing or too few readings and suggest checking the watch's fit and sensor access. If the strap goes loose mid-session, the phone tells you the watch cannot read your pulse.

The phone also saves the session to Health Connect as Boxing or Martial Arts under the name FightFlow, so it counts in whatever else reads that store.

With everything else. Garmin, Fitbit, Polar, a chest strap, anything that writes to Health Connect. Start a workout on the watch the way you always do, train, and FightFlow matches your session against what the watch recorded. Same numbers, two taps more effort.

Health Connect is Android's shared health store. FightFlow can read heart-rate and calorie records that compatible companion apps write there. On Android 14 and later it is built into the system. On Android 9 to 13 it is a free download from Google Play.

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Android will tell you the truth about permissions

On this point Android is ahead of iOS, and it changes what FightFlow can tell you.

On iOS, HealthKit deliberately refuses to say which read permissions you granted. That is a privacy decision and a defensible one, but it means an app cannot tell "you said no" apart from "there was nothing to read". Both look identical: silence.

Health Connect reports which permissions were granted. So FightFlow can check whether the required access is available, without prompting you again. Missing readings alone do not tell it whether you forgot to start a workout.

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Using the numbers

Intervals and rests. The session view plots your heart rate across the session. Conditioning sessions with interval data also show average and peak heart rate for each work interval, plus heart-rate drops during rests.

Weeks of training. The Effort tab plots your weekly average heart rate and can filter by training type. Compare sessions with similar setups: if the same work starts costing fewer beats per minute, that's a sign your conditioning is moving.

Personal bests. Three of them per training type: most calories, best calories per minute (so a short, hard session can compete with a long, easy one), and most time at or above your hard zone. Average heart rate isn't one, because it falls as you get fitter, and a best you can only beat by getting less fit would make no sense.

If Reels saved a clip of the session you want to review, watch it alongside the heart-rate data.

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Free, and kept on your phone

The whole feature is free for everyone. None of it is part of Unlimited.

And your health data is kept on your phone. FightFlow stores what it reads from the watch and Health Connect there, and there is no FightFlow account or server to send it to. If backup to your Google account is on, Android's own backup can include it. The watch app's readings reach the phone through Google Play services, which can route them through Google's servers when the two are not directly connected.

Training on an iPhone instead? The same feature, and an Apple Watch app to match, in Apple Watch Boxing Training.

With FightFlow's Wear OS app, start the session on your phone and the watch follows. For other wearables, check that the companion app writes the required data to Health Connect, then start a workout on the wearable before training.