Squats

Why it works

Squats do what push-ups do to your morning, except you stay upright and your wrists thank you. Standing up and sitting back down under your own weight is the fastest way to tell your body that the horizontal part of the day is over.

The count runs on your front camera through Apple’s body pose detection, reading the angle of your thigh against the horizontal. Standing tall reads as up, thigh near flat reads as down, and a rep is only credited when the whole cycle happened in the right order. That ordering rule exists specifically to block the most popular cheat, which is sitting on the edge of the bed and pumping your knees. It looks identical to a squat if you only measure the knee. It looks like nothing at all if you also check whether the person was ever standing.

Setting up takes a few seconds. Put the phone low, leaning against a wall or a bag, and back away until your legs fit on screen. It tells you when it has a clear read and then counts you in, and if you drift out of shot it says so instead of silently failing, which matters a lot when you are mid set and cannot see the display. There is no give up button while the camera is working. If ninety seconds pass with nothing counted you get swapped to a regular tapping mission, never a free dismiss. Squats and Push-Ups run on the same detection engine, so if one works in your room the other will too. Enable both and you get a coin flip between legs and arms, decided by your phone while you are still asleep.