How to Disable Your Workout Buddy & Make It Stick

While Apple intends for its new Workout Buddy function to provide helpful motivation, some people do not enjoy the little AI voice piping stats into their ears and interrupting their workout playlists. However, there isn’t one setting that unilaterally silences this feature, so if you want to make sure it goes away and stays gone, here’s what to do.

Jump To:

• How to Turn Off Workout Buddy in Workouts
• Toggle Off Voice Feedback
• Choose Your Alerts
• FAQ

How to Turn Off Workout Buddy on Apple Watch

If you want your Workout Buddy (the chipper voice telling you how your workout is going) to turn off and stay off, you’ll need to go into each workout it’s enabled for and manually toggle it off. Even so, you might still get Siri telling you stats about your run through the Voice Feedback feature, so that might need to go off, too. Let’s go over all the ways you can completely disable Workout Buddy.

If you’re looking to turn off some of the notifications but not all of them, you have some customization options. For more ways to tailor your perfect Apple Watch workout experience, check out our free Tip of the Day newsletter.

How to Turn Off Workout Buddy in Workouts

The first thing you’ll want to do in order to turn off your Workout Buddy is turn it off for your individual workouts. To do this:

1. Open Workout on your Apple Watch.

2. Scroll to your desired workout.

   
   

3. Tap the Notifications icon.

   
   

4. Tap Workout Buddy.

   
   

5. Toggle Use Workout Buddy off.

   
   

Note: you will need to do this for every single workout you have Workout Buddy enabled for. Doing it for one workout will not affect the others.

Still Getting Voice Notifications? Toggle Off Voice Feedback

Before Workout Buddy, there was Voice Feedback, which is just Siri giving you basic workout stats, like splits, rather than A.I.-powered feedback on your workout, plus reading out notifications like the text you just got from your spouse who is wondering how much longer your workout will take. If you toggle Workout Buddy off, Voice Feedback will stay enabled, and if you toggle Voice Feedback off, it won’t affect Workout Buddy. The only way to achieve complete silence is to turn them both off. To toggle off Voice Feedback:

1. Open Settings on your Apple Watch.

   
   

2. Scroll down and tap Workout.

   
   

3. Scroll down and toggle Voice Feedback off.

   
   

Want to Still Get Some Notifications? Choose Your Alerts

If your problem with your Workout Buddy is that you’re receiving alerts you don’t want, but you want to keep some of them, you can customize the alerts you get. To do this:

1. Open your Workout app.

   
   

2. Scroll to your desired workout.

   
   

3. Tap the Notifications icon.

   
   

4. Under Alerts, tap on an alert.

   
   

5. Toggle off any settings you don’t want an alert for. How to do this will vary by alert.

   
   

6. If you want an alert, select which kind.

   
   

Now you will only receive the alerts you want.