TempoMate: Run Cadence BPM

This metronome is one I first built for my family.

After a while you notice that exercise has a rhythm. When your stride goes, your breathing goes with it, and the run falls apart; hold your stride at a steady rate and your body lasts longer. Lifting is the same — lower over three counts, pause at the top for one, and the movement comes out clean.

So I started using a metronome. And I found that none of them are made for someone who is actually moving. Most are built for musicians: rows of knobs, a vocabulary of their own, and you have to stop, stand still and stare at the screen to change anything. But when you're running you can't look at a screen, and when you're lifting your hands are full. Plug in headphones and the click fights your music. And a watch has a screen that is always right there, and nobody had put a metronome on it.

What I wanted was simple: I start running and it knows how fast I'm going; I move on to the next set and it knows the count has changed; and when the phone isn't on me, I don't have to look at anything — a tap on the wrist tells me the beat is still there.

There wasn't one, so I built it. My family uses it and so do I, and I keep changing it — every time something feels wrong on the track, I come back and fix it.

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■ The easiest way to use it: a remote on your wrist

Set everything up on the phone first — tempo, scene, whether to record it in Health — and after that the phone can stay in your pocket.

· Put a complication on your watch face, or keep it in the Smart Stack: one tap and the app is up, no hunting for an icon
· While the phone is playing, the watch is the remote: tap to start or stop, turn the crown for tempo, swipe to change scene — without taking the phone out
· When the phone is out of reach, it plays the click itself and taps the beat on your wrist, so you keep time without looking
· All three setups work: phone on its own / watch on its own / both together. Move from one to the other mid-run and the beat carries on — nothing to restart

■ You don't have to log it afterwards

From the moment you start, the session is being written into the Health app: duration, heart rate, active energy (and speed for the activities that have one). Want a heart-rate check mid-run? Raise your wrist.

No need to open Apple's Fitness app, and no switching between apps. You decide what each scene counts as: Run as running, Slow Jog as mixed cardio, Practice as nothing at all.

■ Nine scenes, each with its own setup

Run, Slow Jog, Walk, Jump Rope, Strength, Elliptical, Stair Climber, Practice and Custom. Each scene remembers its own tempo, pattern and timbre.

· Run: breathing rhythm over 4 or 5 steps (2:2 / 3:2) — run with your breath
· Slow Jog: slower than walking without feeling wrong. Counts as mixed cardio in
Health — logged as a run, the pace column would look odd
· Walk: steady, for holding a pace
· Jump Rope: intervals — jump some bars, rest some bars; through the rest the watch
(when it plays on its own) still taps once a bar
· Strength: tempo prescriptions like 3-1-1-0 and 2-0-2-0, where every count is fixed
· Elliptical / Stair Climber: neither moves you forward, so cadence matching reads
wrong — tap tempo only
· Practice: 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 and 6/8 time signatures, eighth-note, triplet and sixteenth-note subdivisions, and a one-bar count-in
· Custom: pick the tempo range and what it counts as

■ Works without looking — VoiceOver too

Double-tap to start or stop, swipe up or down for tempo, swipe left or right for
scene. Turn VoiceOver on and the whole watch face reads as one sentence — scene,
tempo, which beat, and who is playing — and each of those has its own action.■ On privacy

Nothing is collected. No account, no ads, no analytics, no network connections at all. Cadence is processed on-device in real time and is never stored or uploaded. Your settings live in your own iCloud, where I cannot see them.