The Best Garmin Fitness Watch (For Me)
Fitness watches are electronic watches that monitor health and fitness related metrics throughout the day.
Depending on the watch these can range from simple heartbeat measures, to semi-sophisticated sleep analysis, and even full navigational maps.
In typical Graham fashion, my feelings about them have gone from ‘couldn’t care less’ through ‘I must have one immediately’ to ‘I own one’ in about 4 days. I’ve chosen the Garmin Vivoactive 4S (£230), for these reasons:
- (Relatively) affordable. It had everything I needed, for less than half of the ‘big daddy’ Garmin, the Fenix 6 Plus at £500. There are much cheaper fitness trackers, such as the Fitbit Charge 3 at £100, but they didn’t have features I wanted such as pulse ox and body battery.
- Pulse ox. Whether I have sleep apnea or not is something of an open question, and I hope the Vivoactive’s built-in pulse oximeter (which measures the level of oxygen in your blood, and should generally be above 96%) will help determine that.
- “Body battery”. I’m a big believer in picking a few clear, simple metrics, and then striving to improve them. Garmin offers a “body battery” metric out of 100 on some of its newer watches, that attempts to summarise how rested, stressed, and generally ready-for-action you are at any given moment. The Internet seems divided on how accurate and useful it is, so, we’ll see.
- Waterproof. I intend to take up swimming this year. The Garmin offers swim tracking, including an estimate of your “SWOLF”, a metric of your swimming efficiency.
- Activity tracking. I also intend to start going to the gym, and the watch can track various metrics here - heartrate, time spent exercising, etc. As with the body battery, I’m hoping for simple metrics I can track and graph.
- Maps. The higher-end Garmins offer full built-in maps that you can bring up on the phone and navigate with, similar to using Google Maps on your phone. This would be very helpful when I’m out hiking, as it avoids constantly bringing the phone out. The Vivoactive doesn’t have this functionality, exactly, but there are some promising alternative solutions. One is an app, Locus Maps, that can stream maps from the phone to the watch. We’ll see how well this works in practice.
- Good battery life. E.g. days, not day, as with the Apple Watch. Note that Garmin watches generally have screens that are rather low contrast, but this lets the battery last a long time, even though the display is constantly on so the time can easily be checked.
- Data export. I think I can get the data exported to play with. It’s somewhat unclear. As a developer and data-nerd this is useful to me, but most people may not care about this.
Stuff it has didn’t care about much:
- Garmin Pay. Lets you pay with your phone, but only supported by a handful of banks in the UK.
- Storage for offline music from Spotify. Not sure if I’ll use this, as it’s more for runners that don’t want to have a phone on them while they run, but it’s a nice-to-have.
A note on Garmin naming:
An ‘S’ variant is for smaller wrists, like mine. They offer the same functionality as the non-S version, but the battery life is often a bit smaller. The ‘X’ variants tend to be larger. Annoyingly they sometimes also come with extra functionality, e.g. the Garmin Fenix 5X.
Here were the other contenders, and how they compare to the Vivoactive 4S I chose:
Garmin Fenix 6 Pro (£550) The current best Garmin. It:
- Is much more rugged. It looks like it’s built for an expedition, and frankly my Vivoactive feels a bit plasticy by comparison, especially in the silver/grey version I got. However, the Vivoactive also has a much more casual style that fits better in day-to-day life.
- Has built-in maps
- Offers more navigational tools
- Offers everything the Vivoactive does and much more, but is over twice the price. If money’s no object, and the styling is acceptable, this is the one to go for.
The pro variant has storage, allowing for built-in maps and offline music storage. The non-pro can be had for £100 less.
Garmin Vivoactive 3 & 3S (£150) The previous iteration of the Vivoactive can be had for much less, but misses the pulse ox and body battery features I wanted. Otherwise it’s near identical, so get this if you don’t care about those.
Garmin Fenix 5 Plus (£400) From the standard 5, it added:
- Maps, so you can navigate on your phone ala Google Maps
- Garmin Pay
Garmin Fenix 5 (£350)
- Only the 5X Plus has pulse ox, and it’s far too large for my skinny little girl wrists.
- Does not have the body battery feature
Garmen Venu (£330) Identical to the Vivoactive, but with a much nicer (brighter) screen, for about £60-100 more, and somewhat shorter battery life. I checked it out in the shop and the screen truly was a lot nicer, but for me personally, it wasn’t worth the extra money.
Garmin has quite a few watches, and I checked out some of the others. The Forerunner series seems to be very close to the Fenix, but a little more oriented towards runners, a bit cheaper, and a bit more cheaply made. I’d personally go for the Fenix over them. The others didn’t suit me, generally not having the features I wanted.
Suunto I briefly looked at a few Suunto watches, but they seemed to be way behind the Garmins in features.
Apple Watch Series 4 (£400) Missing pulse ox, only water resistant (not proof, so no swimming with it), and I don’t particularly want to buy into Apple’s closed garden.
So, Garmin Vivoactive 4S is on my wrist as of about 3 hours ago. I’m happy with it so far, and may write a review after I’ve used it a few weeks.