Get The Most from Your Apple Watch Stand Goal

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For Apple Watch users the presence of daily rings can be a real motivator to stay active. Each of the three rings, exercise, move, and stand has benefits to keeping active and can help change habits throughout the day. The Stand goal, which we cover in detail in this article, is helpful to avoid long period of inactivity whether that is sitting on the couch, at a desk, or in bed.

How Often to Hit the Apple Watch Stand Goal

Unlike the other goals, our views is that the stand goal can and should be accomplished almost daily. While exercise and move will be harder to close on rest or low activity days, a stand goal can be hit simply by making sure you are not entirely sedentary.


A good stand goal will include being active in nearly every hour. It suggests that even if you do not exercise, there are benefits to even moderate movement on a regular basis.

This is backed by research which suggests “In recent decades, affluent populations have become increasingly sedentary, with many adults spending 70% or more of their waking hours sitting. Parallel with this change, evidence has emerged identifying habitual sedentary behavior (prolonged sitting) as a novel risk factor for cardiometabolic disease and all-cause mortality, independent of time spent in exercise.” (citation)

Stand Goals as a Monthly Challenge

Each month Apple produces a new monthly goal, linked to closing rings or completing workouts of some sort. The stand goal of course shows up in these goals on occasion.

The most common stand goal is as a part of either a “close all rings” goal or as a simple “Close the Stand Ring X times”. While each goal is unique, and based on your own past challenges, the structure of these goals does not vary much.

Stand hours, the number of unique hours in which you have stood for at least 3 minutes, is the only aggregate that has never shown up in our goals. These means that there is never a goal based benefit of over achieving the stand ring.

Perfect week of Stand Goals

The Stand Goal may also be the ring that is easiest to close everyday of the week, leading to an additional daily badge.

In practice many folks have shared with us that their stand goal is only hard to close on days with out of the ordinary activities. This would be something like a road trip, plane trip, long meeting, or similar. The most impactful of this is long distance travel that crosses time zones. Since a stand goal has to be met in the clock hour, doing something like crossing a time zone or even the international date line can make it impossible to achieve the goal for that hour.

Stand Goal Target – What Should My Apple Watch Stand Goal Be?

So having covered all of the above details, the question still remains of what a good stand goal should be. Generally a stand goal must be personalized, but is most likely to be uniform across different people since it is less linked to body type or personal preference.

If following standard guidelines an individual should sleep around 8 hours per day. Since there is no way to accomplish this while still achieving a stand hour, this leaves only 16-17 potential stand hours on a good basis. The variation is because technically stand goals go by the clock hour so if you, so if you sleep from 12:30-8:30 you can still close the ring in the 12:00 hour as well as the 8:00 hour.

It is typical that sometime in a daily schedule you will have one hour that is low activity. This could be because of a commute, a meeting, nap time, or some other low movement activity. Add in another hour to not wear a watch while it is charging and the maximum likely target is around 14 hours. We recommend setting your Apple Watch to a 12 hour Stand Goal target, which accounts for these variations in daily schedule and sleep.

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