r/Garmin

What are some findings from lifestyle logging that you have discovered?

I am talking specifically about long-term tracking, not just 5-10 nights of data, which is simply too few data points to draw reliable conclusions.

For me, the following things have negative impact on my sleep:

• Weed - this one is interesting. I found that although it helps me fall asleep faster, it increases overnight stress and lowers H RV, meaning the net impact is still slightly negative.
• Sauna (late evening).
• ADHD meds - even at a very low dose taken in the morning.

Got my first marathon this Sunday, my Garmin is predicting me 3:34 but Strava is saying 3:50. I would be happy with any sub-4 time. How realistic is this goal?

FR955 for about 3 years and has been mostly reliable. Starting February this year whenever I get out for a run my HR gets overstated by 20-30 BPM. This can happen at the start of run, or in the middle of it. At first I thought it was cadence lock, but my cadence is different. I usually do a warm-up and wait for GPS to connect before hitting start. Strap is tight. Garmin support said it's "noise" until the watch calibrates, but I've never had this issue in the past. Anyone else notice this? Is it really like this now? Makes the HR sensor useless, where in the past it was fairly accurate.

Update: Garmin support offered a refurb replacement for $220 (out of warranty), however mentioned it will have the same issue because I am not performing enough of a "warmup". Also it's not in stock in Canada so not sure when I would actually receive one.

Update 2: Garmin support suggested the following:

Select an activity profile (like Run).

NOTE: Don't start recording the activity yet.

Stay on the activity screen with GPS signal indicator.

This allows the watch to lock on to GPS and heart rate before you begin recording the activity.

Warm up for 5-10 minutes, enough to elevate your heart rate and get good blood flow throughout your body.

When ready, press START/STOP to begin recording the activity.

I've done this many times in the past and still had the issue. Do we really need to spend 5-10 min on the start screen before starting the activity in order to get accurate HR? Never had to do this in the past.

TLDR: Garmin support says you need to do a 5-10 min ritual before actually starting the activity to gain accurate HR date, but it doesn't work for me. I may buy a Coros and wear both at the same time to see what happens.

Hi guys,

I was eying on getting me a watch to keep myself more motivated. I go to the gym, try to do Hyrox once a week and started with running (currently running 6.5km).

I wanted to go for the Garmin Forerunner 165 but saw the 170 just got released and I love the Garmin readiness Function. So I read here on Reddit and watched some YouTube videos and so many people are saying there are alternatives for less price.

I know this is a Garmin-sub but maybe you guys can still recommend an alternative, maybe one that suits my profile better? My only issue is the price 300 bucks for the 170 / 350 for the 170 Music but I really love the readiness function.

A watch for around 200 bucks would be awesome. I am from Europe

How can I turn my Forerunner 955 into a bike computer mounted on the handlebars of my bike?

I don‘t like the chunky adapter that just makes the handlebars big enough so it can „wear“ the watch.

I am sure someone here has tried this.

Debating between the 170 music ($350) and the 570 (on sale for $450). Do you think the $100 difference is worth it? Mostly multiband and the aluminum build seem to be the biggest differences. What would you go with any why? Thanks!

Hey guys, I’ve noticed my solar instinct 2 inflates the number of metres I’ve swum. For reference, I train at a 25 metre pool. And my watch always inflates my distance by at least 100-150 metres.

Have any of yall experienced this? My Apple Watch SE was more accurate than this.

What a huge missed opportunity to push back on Google’s Fitbit Air launch. The Fitbit Air looks incredible and is extremely promising. The AI health and coaching also look incredibly powerful (if executed right of course). Not to mention that if the auto detection works well, it will be a true killer.

I don’t think there is much or anything that Garmin could possibly offer that will be better than the Air. Personally, the value of Garmin Connect is getting smaller and smaller as other companies come in with better coaching, health insights, and metric analytics. I already sync all my data to Apple Health and Strava and use third party apps to ingest and analyze my data.

Not to mention that Garmin probably planned to have the CIRQA priced at a few hundred dollars (although let’s see how that will look like now that the Air is priced so competitively).

Edit: What’s funny is that if Garmin released (or at least announced) the CIRQA back when everyone thought they will, I would have bought it instantly. Now I just waiting for the reviews of the Air to make my decision. Garmin, you guys made a huge mistake for not releasing it when the hype was at its peak.

Hey all,

I dunno about the rest of you, but with the FR70 & FR170 announcements, in addition to silence following Fitbit Air announcement, does anyone really still think Garmin Cirqa is coming?

I was super excited for it, but something must have gone wrong in production and so it has been delayed, can't really be mad at Garmin as there was no official announcements, just annoyed at myself for getting so excited.

I would want to get the Fitbit Air, but they don't have the DSW's, and initial reviews of the Health Coach releasing today so not seem too positive (obvs waiting for the embargo to lift in a week and here from other reviewers), as well as it being unclear if my workouts tracked on Garmin would make it to the app (I would want to wear Garmin during workout, but not for the rest of the day)

Hopefully we see a decently priced screenless wearable from Garmin one day, but I think the release window for such a product this year has about passed

Bought a Garmin Venu 4 a month ago to help manage stress, but it has turned into yet another source of stress.

The main issue is sleep tracking. Two or three times a week, I wake up after a perfectly normal 7–8 hour night of sleep and see either "Sleep not detected" or something absurd like "You slept 16 minutes."

My bedtime routine is fairly consistent. During the last hour before sleep, I either watch something while sitting at my desk or read a book while lying in bed. Interestingly, those mysterious "16 minutes of sleep" are often recorded during this period. After that, I actually go to sleep and manually start Activity → Sleep on the watch.

I've tried pretty much every suggestion I could find online:

• Disabled Evening Report
• Disabled Morning Report
• Adjusted my sleep schedule
• Manually started Activity → Sleep before going to bed
• Tightened the watch strap to the point where my fingers were practically going numb
• Installed the beta firmware (currently 17.19)

Nothing has helped.

As a bonus, I discovered that once you're on beta firmware, you cannot downgrade to the stable release unless the stable version number becomes higher than the beta version currently installed.

At this point, my bigger concern is trust. If the watch is this unreliable when it comes to something as obvious as sleep duration, how can I trust any of the other metrics it reports?

Am I doing something wrong? Has anyone else experienced this? Were you able to fix it?

Every time I need to charge my watch, I think to myself, where is the charging cable? There is no other device that I have these thoughts about. For all Garmin's faults, they produce a watch that I can constantly forget the charger.

I saw a watch face on a recent post that I really liked, installed it last night and started keeping an eye on battery today. It went from 38% to 26% in less than 6 hours. I’m fine with having to charge once or twice a week but this is a bit much to me.

This is not a rant to other developers or blast their work, so no drama needed from devs who sell their work to Garmin users. Keep calm and good luck.

If your Garmin watch has been hit with random freezes, reboots, or critical resets, especially when you open maps or start a heavy activity, you are probably blaming a Garmin firmware bug.

You might be looking at the wrong culprit. The issue is very likely that bloated, massive paid third party watch face you have running in the background.
I develop custom watch faces for Garmin hardware, and I want to explain exactly why these heavy apps are choking your watch.
The Trade-off:
Battery Life vs. Processing Power
We need to understand that Garmin watches use low power processors for a specific reason. A weaker CPU is the exact price we pay for that incredible multi week battery life. These chips are built for efficiency, not heavy lifting. They do not have massive amounts of system memory or processing pipelines to throw around.

What Happens Under the Hood:
I observe people paying money for watch faces, and a lot of them, despite those apps having incredibly huge storage footprints. Many paid developers pack their projects with massive custom fonts, unoptimized background graphics, and relentless tracking code.
When a watch face uses up that much storage, it causes massive background overhead. The processor has to work constantly just to manage that data.
When you leave that heavy watch face to do something intensive, like rendering a heavy topographic map with thousands of lines and data points, the low power processor gets completely overwhelmed. The system gridlocks. When the operating system detects that a process is stuck and cannot respond in time, it triggers a watchdog restart to protect itself. That is exactly why your watch reboots.
How to Fix It
If you are sick of the reboots, stop spending money on poorly optimized apps just because they look flashy.
Test it yourself:

1. Check the storage space of the watch face in the store. If the storage is huge, it is a major red flag.
2. Look for lightweight, well optimized watch faces that respect the limits of the hardware.
3. If you use mapping heavily, swap out the heavy stock maps for a clean OpenTopoMap file.

Do yourself and the community a favor: look at the storage space of a watch face before you install it. If the storage is huge, walk away. Instead, try to find good developers who actually know how to code for efficiency, and support them.
The moment you clear out the bloated background apps and feed the watch clean map data, the traffic jam disappears and your watch will finally stabilize. Keep your footprint light, choose quality and I wish everyone a good day.