The Apple Watch does not appear to count squat reps natively. Apple's own Workout app documentation describes its strength workout types — Traditional Strength Training and Functional Strength Training — in terms of active calories, heart rate and duration, and does not document counting repetitions or sets anywhere for them. An entire category of third-party watch apps exists specifically to add rep counting from the accelerometer and gyroscope, which is consistent with the built-in Workout app not doing it. (Checked July 2026; this can change with any watchOS release.)
Disclosure: we make Pushup RPG, a phone app that camera-counts pushups and squats. That gives us an obvious interest here, so we will say the inconvenient part early: we have no Apple Watch app either. If wrist counting is your requirement, we are not your answer, and the third-party options below are.
What the watch is genuinely good at during squats
"It doesn't count reps" is not the same as "it's useless". Start a strength workout and the watch will track heart rate through the session, estimate active calories, record duration, close your rings, and feed Apple's training-load view so you can see how the week compares to the last month.
For a lot of people that is the useful half. Rings and consistency are behavioural tools; rep counts are training data. If what you want is credit for having trained and a sense of how hard the session was, the built-in workout does that without any extra app.
Why wrists struggle with squats specifically
Worth understanding before you go shopping, because it explains why the third-party apps vary so much.
Wrist-based counting infers reps from motion of your arm. That works reasonably for movements where the hand travels a long, distinctive arc. In a bodyweight squat your hands often do very little — they might be clasped at your chest or held out front, barely moving relative to your torso. Wrist counting has less signal to work with there than it does for, say, a press.
Camera counting has the opposite trade-off: it sees your whole body and can judge depth, but it needs a phone propped up with a clear view of you, which is more setup and impossible in a crowded gym corner.
Apps that do count reps on Apple Watch
From App Store listings, checked July 2026. We have not tested these ourselves and are not ranking them — we are telling you they exist and what their listings say, because that is what we can honestly do.
| App | Platform | What the listing says about counting |
|---|---|---|
| Rep Up for Watch | iPhone + Apple Watch (watchOS 10.6+) | Wrist motion sensing — recognises the repeating motion pattern and counts from it, detecting when you stop to reset. A general strength rep counter rather than a specialist; the listing names push-ups among supported movements. |
| CounterUps: Push-Ups Tracker | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch (watchOS 10.0+) | Several modes on the phone — camera, distance sensor, manual tap and voice. The listing states Apple Watch auto-counts push-ups using gravity detection. |
| Push Up Counter & Tracker (Puuush) | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch (watchOS 10+) | ARKit camera counting on iPhone; on the watch it counts from the gyroscope and accelerometer, with the listing stating no calibration is needed and that it works on either wrist in any orientation. |
Note that all three describe themselves around push-ups. Whether any of them counts squats specifically is not something we can confirm from their listings, so check before you rely on it. That is exactly the kind of gap a vendor page usually papers over.
So which approach should you use?
- You want reps counted and you own a watch: a third-party watch app is the low-friction route. Nothing to prop up, nothing to frame.
- You want depth judged, not just movement detected: a camera app sees range of motion in a way a wrist sensor cannot. That is the trade you are making for the setup hassle.
- You want rings, heart rate and training load: the built-in Workout app already does this, and adding an app on top does not change it.
- You want all of it from one place: that does not currently exist as far as we can tell, ours included.
For what it's worth, our own app sits firmly in the camera camp: it counts pushups and squats with the phone's front camera, on-device, crediting only full-range reps — and it writes finished sessions to Apple Health (opt-in, write-only, with no permission requested to read anything), so watch-tracked and phone-tracked work at least end up in the same place. There is more on that in how Pushup RPG works with Apple Health.
One caveat on everything above: this is a hardware and software claim about a platform that updates yearly. It was accurate as far as we could establish in July 2026, and it is worth re-checking against Apple's current documentation rather than trusting any blog post — including this one — a year from now.
