Does Apple Watch track pickleball?

Yes. Apple Watch has a Pickleball workout in the Workout app, and it records your session like any other workout. What it doesn’t do is keep the score. Here’s what you get, and how to get the rest.

Starting a pickleball workout

Open the Workout app, choose Add Workout if Pickleball isn’t already in your list, and pick Pickleball. It’s on Apple’s list of workout types, and Apple’s developer documentation has included a pickleball workout type since watchOS 7.

What it records

Your time and heart rate through the session, with heart rate zones that Apple works out as percentages of your maximum heart rate from your health details. Enter your date of birth in the Health app so the zones are calculated, or set them yourself in the Workout settings. Like other workouts, it counts toward your Activity rings, with your active calories estimated from your height, weight, sex and age along with your activity.

Apple has used those workouts to study the game. Its 2023 analysis of more than 250,000 pickleball and tennis workouts found the average pickleball workout lasted 90 minutes, with heart rates peaking at 143 beats per minute on average. Pickleball heart rate and calories covers what those numbers mean and how far to trust the calorie count.

What it doesn’t do

The Workout app records a workout, not a game. It doesn’t keep the score, track who’s serving, or know who won, and one 90-minute session of several games shows up as a single block of exercise. Your heart rate tells you how hard you played. It can’t tell you how you played.

Keeping score on your watch

For that you need a pickleball app on the watch. Some keep score and nothing else, some read your swing from the watch’s motion sensors, and some pair with video. The best Apple Watch pickleball apps goes through them by what each one does, and How to keep score in pickleball explains the score itself.

Rally Trace is ours. It keeps score on your Apple Watch, with a tap on the side that won each rally, and runs the workout itself, so you don’t need the Workout app as well. Each session is saved to Apple Health as a pickleball workout, and every game shows on your iPhone with its heart rate, an effort score and the result, so you can see which games were hard and how they went.