How to Add Cycling Distance to Apple Health (iPhone)

A Sunday ride can be added this way the next morning: 24.6 km in 1 h 15 min, read off the bike computer, for example when the phone spent the ride in a saddle bag with a flat battery. It takes about a minute, most of it spent on the duration stepper.

The taps, with the labels as the app shows them

Open the Insights tab and tap Log Workout. A sheet with the same title slides up.
Under Activity Type, tap Cycling (the bike icon in a grid of 11). The sheet always opens on Walking, so this is the tap people miss.
Under Details, set Date to the day and time the ride started. The picker will not offer a start time that would make the ride end after now.
Raise the stepper next to Duration: 30 min to the ride's length. It moves one minute per tap; for a longer value like 75, holding the + button down speeds it up.
Under Metrics (Optional), type the ride in Distance (km). Decimals work with a point or a comma. Add Calories (kcal) as a whole number if your bike computer gave you one.
Tap Save Workout. The sheet just closes. There is no green banner here, unlike the Home tab, so check Workout History if you want to see it.

Worked example: a 24.6 km ride

Log Workout sheet, Activity Type Cycling
Field	Value
Activity Type	Cycling
Date	Sunday, 9:30 AM
Duration	75 min (shown as 1h 15m)
Distance (km)	24.6
Calories (kcal)	520
Row in Workout History	Cycling, 24.60 km · 3.0 min/km, 1h 15m, 520 kcal
Average speed (not shown by the app)	24.6 / 1.25 h = 19.68 km/h

The 3.0 min/km is 75 minutes divided by 24.6 km, rounded to one decimal. Fit as only speaks minutes per kilometre, which is a runner's unit. For a ride, 19.7 km/h is the number that means something, and you have to work it out yourself.

What Apple Health shows afterwards

The ride appears among your workouts in the Health app as a Cycling workout from 9:30 to 10:45 AM, with 24.6 km and 520 kcal on it and marked as entered by hand. Any app you have allowed to read workouts from Health can see it.

Three things stayed exactly where they were, and the first one stung:

The Cycling Distance chart under Activity in Health. Fit as stores the kilometres on the workout itself and does not write a separate cycling distance sample, so a typed ride is missing from that daily and weekly total.
The Active Energy total. The 520 kcal live on the workout, not as a separate energy sample.
Your steps. Fit as writes steps only for Walking, Running, Treadmill and Hiking, so a ride adds none.

A side effect in the Insights cards

Longest Logged Walk/Run counts any workout that has a distance. After a ride like this, it would read 24.6 km, longer than most walks, and Best Pace would jump to 3.0 min/km, a pace nobody walks. If you use those two cards to follow your walking, one logged ride bends them for as long as it stays among your last 50 workouts.

Miles, cost and what it cannot do

Kilometres only. A 15-mile ride goes in as 24.14 km (15 x 1.609344); there is no miles switch anywhere.

The Log Workout sheet has no ad and no PRO check, so adding rides costs nothing. PRO removes the ads elsewhere in the app and opens the older days in Step List; it does nothing extra for cycling.

Fit as does not track a ride. No GPS, no route map, no speed or heart rate: it only saves what you type after the fact. Notes typed on the sheet are not saved, and there is no edit button, so a wrong ride has to be deleted in the Health app and added again.

Questions and answers

Can you add cycling to Apple Health?

Yes, as a workout. In Fit as, Insights > Log Workout > Cycling saves a Cycling workout with the date, duration and, if you type them, the distance in km and the calories. It does not add to Health's separate Cycling Distance chart.

How do I add a bike ride to the Health app?

Use an app that writes workouts to Health. With Fit as: pick Cycling in the Log Workout sheet, set the start time and duration, type the distance and calories, and tap Save Workout. It is free and has no ad on that sheet.

Does Apple Health count cycling as steps?

A ride added with Fit as writes no steps at all; the app only turns distance into steps for walking, running, treadmill and hiking workouts. Your step total stays where it was.

How do I track a bike ride on iPhone with the Health app?

Fit as cannot do that part: it has no GPS and records nothing while you ride. It is for adding a ride afterwards from numbers you already have, such as a bike computer reading.

How to add a workout to Apple Health manually, with date and time · Fit as

How do I add cycling distance to Apple Health?