How to pause your Apple Watch activity rings and keep your streaks intact

One of the enduring features of the Apple Watch is its three activity rings: Move, Exercise, and Stand. Apple made Close Your Rings a central piece of Apple Watch marketing and even built many of its special Activity Badges around various streaks where you close your rings every day for a certain period of time.

Users noticed a problem with ring-closing streaks almost immediately. What if you get sick? What if you’re stuck traveling where you can’t exercise? What if you suffer an injury? Or can’t wear your Apple Watch for a little while?

For years we’ve asked for the ability to pause our activity rings, and with watchOS 11, Apple is finally allowing it. Here’s how you can pause your activity rings for up to a month so you don’t lose your streaks. This will only work if you’ve updated your Apple Watch to watchOS 11 or later (available September 16, 2024).

1. Open the Activity app on your Apple Watch.
2. Tap on your Activity rings. You’ll be presented with two options: Change Goals or Pause Rings. Choose the latter.
3. From here, you’ll be able to scroll down and pause your rings for various amounts of time: Just for today, for a week, a month, or a custom length of time.

Foundry

There’s a one-month limit to how long you can close your rings, and of course, you don’t get credit for any of your streaks while it’s paused. But you don’t lose any of your streaks either.

There does not appear to be a way to do this from the Watch app on your iPhone, unfortunately. So if you need to pause your rings because your Apple Watch has been damaged and is unusable, you’re still out of luck.