the best garmin watches They are wonderful specialized tools. They are great for anyone who is active, especially endurance athletes.
They’re great for swimmers, cyclists, runners, and triathletes, giving you extremely accurate metrics designed to help you improve your performance at all levels. They also shine a lot on hikes and trail rides, where GPS tools like height warnings and TracBack, which lets you follow your route back to the start, can be used to get the most out of it.
On top of this, Garmin watches offer heart rate zone technology, some of the most advanced sleep tracking found on your wrist, and all the usual smartwatch bells and whistles, like notification functionality. This really makes them some of the best fitness watches on the market right now.
However, if you’ve ever tried using the sets and reps tool in Garmin’s strength training mode, you’ll know that there’s always room for improvement.
I first tried this with the garmin enduro. In strength training mode, your watch can not only record heart rate and calories burned, but also monitor your splits between sets and recovery. When you press the “up” button to start a set, the watch should monitor how many reps you do based on your arm movement.
In the Garmin Connect application, you can see a record of your exercises performed, the sets and repetitions, including the muscle groups that were worked. You can also design or select pre-designed workouts to perform. So far so good on paper.
In practice, it is a disaster. The built-in technology consistently failed to record the correct number of reps for me. Once I realized my watch wasn’t ticking, my attention was constantly focused on it throughout my run, to make sure I was recording correctly.
Then my form faded as I was thinking more about my watch than my exercises. I then spent my rest periods using the up and down buttons on the clock to manually set the correct number of reps for that particular set.
Playing with the arrow buttons each time to bring the rep counter back up to eight was a frustrating experience. He did not improve that this also happened in a later training. It frustrated me so much that I’ve avoided using the feature ever since.
When I run a Garmin, it’s a joy, and my eye isn’t always on my watch because I have so much faith in its metrics. There is a reason they are consistently high on our best watch for running liza. If I need to check my GPS or the race route, I can; otherwise it just gives me an update on my progress every mile. At the gym, I’ve found myself more than once constantly complaining and worrying about my watch’s inability to do what it could have done in my phone’s Notes app, or even better, with a pen-and-paper workbook.
I understand why Garmin refuses to let the training mode die. Garmin Connect should be your one-stop shop for your entire health and fitness journey, allowing you to track your water and calorie intake, sleep, holistic health and other workouts, as well as your runs and walks. The more time you spend on Garmin Connect, the more complete the experience is supposed to be. But in the process of trying to do it all, small parts of this ecosystem can become a frustrating experience.
I’d be fine if I reduced the set and rep features of the strength training features. I don’t need Garmin Connect to show me a heat map of the human body to tell me that the sets of bench presses I just did worked my chest. I chose to bench press for that very reason. Anyone taking advantage of Garmin’s advanced metrics (i.e. people spending upwards of $600 or £500 on a wearable fitness device) can be assumed to have this basic knowledge. And I certainly don’t need to manually reset the set and rep counter on my watch five times during a 50-minute gym session.
I love the smart functionality that Garmin can bring to endurance exercise, and the rep counter functionality works great in other places – I love seeing the stroke counter when swimming, for example. But for some reason, the strength training mode just doesn’t work, and it makes me want to smash my very expensive watch with the nearest dumbbell.
I can’t help but wonder if, by removing this feature from watches in the future, Garmin could incorporate a different feature that really adds to the experience of wearing the watch in a positive way. For the smart force, maybe we need something like the Platoon Guide.
