The Best Garmin Watches

Bear in mind how you intend to use your Garmin smartwatch when shopping for one. Is it primarily for tracking your workouts, for hands-free access of your phone’s messages or for monitoring your health? Some watches include the ability to store and play music independent of your phone, while others need to be within Bluetooth range of your phone to do so.

Consider how often you feel comfortable charging your smartwatch, which will vary depending on how you use it. Using the GPS function actively will drain more power than passive tracking. If you want to use more high-powered applications, you will have to charge your watch every day. Having your watch monitor your health and then accessing the data on your phone or computer will allow you to go days between charges.

While all of Garmin’s smartwatches monitor the wearer’s heart rate, stride and location, some will also monitor the oxygen and water saturation of your skin to estimate stress levels. Still others are capable of monitoring details as small as how long your feet are in contact with the ground as opposed to how long you are in the air, in order to suggest more efficient techniques for running. As the precision and breadth of measurements increases, so will the price of the smartwatch; determining where the balance of features to cost lies is up to each shopper.

• Garmin offers an app available in both the Android and iPhone stores to collect and analyze the data your watch measures. You can use this to keep an eye on trends as well as adjust your watch’s setup.
• The Garmin app is also accessible on their website, so you can still use this function if you don’t want to download the app.
• Several of Garmin’s smartwatches and apps will evaluate your running stride, ground contact-to-air time ratio, breathing and stress patterns. These evaluations are then used to suggest ways to fine-tune your workouts.
• You might consider purchasing replacement bands for your smartwatch if you are going to be particularly active. A broken band will effectively make the watch unusable until replaced, and having spares on hand will prevent losing important exercise data.