Adventure! We all have very much our own definition of it, whether that’s a night-time no-holds-barred, safety-net-free, SAS-style abseil down a sheer cliff face, or ordering a full-fat fizzy drink instead of the sugar-free alternative, everyone has wildly different levels and limitations when it comes to the idea of adventure.
Which is why, in its infinite wisdom, Garmin make a model of tracker or smartwatch to suit everyone from the near-sedentary to the seemingly near-suicidal.
As I sit/stand somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, often remaining unnervingly still for large periods of time before suddenly bursting into unexpected bouts of bionic action, like a crazed house cat at three in the morning, I was deemed perfectly placed to put a six-strong selection of Garmin’s current greatest health-measuring hits on my wrist and through their paces.
So, picking one prime model from each of the wellness watchmaker’s most popular lines, I’ve run/walked the exercise gamut from easy armchair aerobics to acts of sheer Herculean hefting, all under the guidance of Garmin. Cue 80’s style music montage…
Best Garmin watches at a glance:
- Best for all manner of sport: Garmin Vivoactive 6 - £280, John Lewis
- Best for grappling with the whole sport gamut: Garmin Forerunner 965 - £500, Amazon
- Best for sheer style in and out of the gym: Garmin Venu 3S - £400, Amazon
- Best for light life and serious sport: Garmin Fenix 8 Solar, Sapphire - £950, Garmin
- Best for those on a mission: Garmin Instinct 3 AMOLED, Tactical Edition - £500, Amazon
Garmin Vivoactive 6
Best for: All manner of sport. And golf…
The very latest iteration of the vivoactive, hot on the heels of the 5 comes this, the pleasingly sequential 6. The lightest and most socially acceptable in judgmental civilisation after a vigorous workout down your platinum-level private health club, the vivoactive 6 is an unassuming looking little techie timepiece that, despite its relatively diminutive dimensions, comes action-packed with all the fitness features and body metric measures to ensure you’re performing at your peak and also, importantly, not in any immediate threat of going belly up due to one too many burpees.
Featuring sensors that keep a constant eye on your heart rate, daily resting heart rate, respiration rate, fitness age, stress levels and your body battery energy, you’re in exceptional electronic hands as you plough through the plethora of training tools that the 6 has half-inched from its bigger, far more expensive siblings.
Forged from fibre-reinforced polymer and anodised aluminium, a tough as well-aged boots Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protects the nicely vivid 1.2-inch AMOLED display to stop any accidental scuffery ruining your view, while a sizeable 8GB of memory keeps ample workout downloads ready to roll whenever you are, and an 11-day battery life will keep you fully apprised of your metrics and performance down said gym for longer.
With a whopping 80+ sports apps available for the likes of swimming, running, cycling, skiing, boxing and, yes, even motorcycling, plus Garmin Coach available at a few strokes of the screen or via the physical buttons on the case, count your steps, see calories burnt, real-time check your cadence, review your swim efficiency, monitor your recovery time and, of course, track your movement against precise GPS maps, the vivoactive 6 does the lot and more.
What kind of more? Well, for those who enjoy a good walk ruined, the 6 is also a fully functioning golf watch that’ll give you your yardage to the green, measure shot distance, keep score, track stats, give you a view of the green complete with pin position, and is even tournament legal. So, if you’re less a ‘hanging-of-cliff’ and more a ‘hanging-on for the 19th hole’ kind of person, the 6 is your dream digital caddy.
Available in a range of finishes (see specs below), the vivoactive 6 is a stylish, feature-filled smartwatch that lends itself to the needs of both the very active and the more sedate, and for a surprisingly low price, too. Pure 6-appeal.
Buy now £280.00, John Lewis
Garmin Forerunner 965
Best for: Grappling with the whole sport gamut. Including grappling…
The Garmin Forerunner comes in, at last count, over 80 different iterations, catering to all comers from the low-level user with shallow pockets in their Lycra leggings, right up to those with no need for pockets at all because they keep all cash digitalised and ready to be accessed over Garmin Pay. And it’s in this latter camp that the latest Forerunner, the 965, lingers, waiting to be let off the leash.
At a relatively small 35.4mm (1.4-inches) in size, the 965 features a clear, bright AMOLED display with a 454 x 454-pixel count, a whopping 32GB of memory, and a big ol’ battery that’ll see you good to go for up to 23 days, dependent on usage, obviously.
Built from titanium for strength and lightness, Corning Gorilla Glass DX takes good care of the display, while the bundled silicone strap will fit all but the most elephantine of wrist sizes (135-205mm) and the colour options run from the subtle to the, well, not so.
Inside, meanwhile, is an exercise-obsessed Aladdin’s Cave of cutting-edge tech, including an absolute array of sensors for pinpoint GPS tracking and monitoring of your heart rate, respiration rate, stress and blood oxygen saturation, alongside a barometric altimeter, gyroscope, compass, thermometer, accelerometer and ambient light sensor. These all work in glorious union to unerringly measure your metrics and track every step, swing, stroke of any of the seemingly endless number of sports it can cover, whether that’s a triathlon, indoor rowing, cycling, swimming, motocross, ice skating, martial arts, or cricket. In fact, the only sport it appears not to work with is Octopush, but I may have simply missed that in the option settings.
Naturally, all the usual suspects relevant to all those exercise options are present and correct, too, such as step counter, calories burned, swim speed, distance travelled, reps achieved, etc., tracking and recording every inch you travel on your journey to Olympian-like status.
With various safety features also in place, such as Incident Detection and Group Live Track available to keep an eye on you in case anything goes Pete Tong while you’re out pushing your boundaries in the wild, you can run, ride and race secure in the knowledge that a snapped ankle or bad fall won’t see you simply become another victim of Britain’s bear population.
And as this is king of the Forerunners, it also comes rammed to the rafters with day-today dynamics, like Bluetooth for connectivity with your Android or iOS smartphone, thereby allowing for notifications, text response, call rejection (Android only), calendar access, smartphone/memory-based music control, Vibe camera remote, and more besides.
A truly great watch for those keen to achieve their own greatness, the Forerunner 965 is all things to all athletes.
Buy now £500.00, Amazon
Garmin Venu 3S
Best for: Sheer style in and out of the gym
Another option that looks just as good out and about in polite, non-sweaty society as it does pumping perspiration down the gym, the neat little Venu 3S comes in a single 41mm size and a selection of six slick colour combinations, including the decidedly showy Soft Gold & Dust Rose. Featuring a 390 x 390-pixel 1.2-inch AMOLED display protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3, the Venu S3 comes with 8GB of memory and a battery that’ll keep you fit as a fiddle for up to 10 days between charges.
GPS-enabled for tracking your outside adventures, over 30 inbuilt apps for sports and workouts combine with Garmin Coach to keep you active whatever your discipline that day, while special apps for wheelchair users and a chair push tracker make smart exercise accessible to all.
Monitoring your essential metrics such as heart rate and blood oxygen saturation level while you work out, relax and sleep, the Venu S3 also comes with all the benefits of a smartwatch, including Garmin Pay, smart notifications, text response/call decline, music control (stored on watch or smartphone), Bluetooth phone calling and voice assistant support, and the ability to directly access the Connect IQ store for downloadable faces, widgets and additional apps, so it’s not all about the grunting and groaning (which is the soundtrack to how I exercise these days).
Easily Garmin’s most voguish fitness watch, the Venu S3 has all the style cues necessary to cut a dash during daily life and ample amounts of serious smarts to keep you safely in shape during time at the gym or blazing an untrodden trail through nature itself, including incident detection and alerts should anything go horribly awry on that trail.
Buy now £400.00, Amazon
Garmin Fenix 8 Solar, Sapphire
Best for: Light life and serious sport
Garmin truly does a watch for everyone, from those who merely want to dabble in the whole well-body thing all the way up to those looking to go pro in their chosen field of fitness, and the Fenix 8 Solar, here, is a smartwatch very much for those in the latter camp.
As the name gives away, not only can you charge the watch via the conventional method, this Fenix 8 (other versions are available) captures the rays of Sol itself allowing it to run for much, much longer unaided, even though we live in the UK and rarely see much of that big burning ball of hydrogen in the sky. Indeed, with a battery life of 21 days already, the solar charging lens adds an extra 7 days to that, taking you to a whole 28 days without the need to charge.
Built to last from titanium, fibre-reinforced polymer and a display of Power Sapphire glass, the Fenix 8 Solar is a rugged beast that good down to 10 ATM underwater and comes absolutely packed with sensors and apps to measure your every body metric from your heart to your skin temperature to you respiration rate, and let you track every extent of exercise with multiple GPS and sports apps that cover every activity from ‘Jump Rope’ to horseback riding, golf, Tubing, scuba diving and, well, if you can think of a sport, the Fenix 8 Solar will have an app for it.
Offering up daily suggested workouts, Garmin Coach is onboard, with specific iterations for running and cycling, while on-screen animations push your limits and workouts galore jockey for your exercise attention.
Onboard too are all the expected benefits of having a Bluetooth connection to your smartphone, so you can control music and give offline commands thanks to the inclusion of a built-in speaker and microphone, all while in-built mapping keeps you firmly on track.
And it doesn’t end there; in fact, the Fenox 8 Solar is so feature-packed that it would take far too many virtual pages here to cover it all, but as smartwatches aimed at the serious sportsperson go, this has got the lot… including, last but not least, an LED torch for those so driven by the ceaseless pursuit of the prefect performance even the night cannot stop them.
Buy now £950.00, Garmin
Garmin Instinct 3 – AMOLED, Tactical Edition
Best for: Those on a mission
Garmin’s very latest addition to its extensive line-up, the Instinct 3 – Tactical Edition pulls no punches. Designed to be able to survive whatever insane environment you want to throw at it, with a bezel built from fibre-reinforced polymer/aluminium, a case from fibre-reinforced polymer and a chemically strengthened glass coating the 416 x 416-pixel 1.96-inch Adaptive AMOLED display.
Good down to 10 ATM to appease divers and/or the very clumsy, the Instinct 3 comes backed by multiband GPS for precision tracking, a battery life of up to 24-hours and some 4GB of memory, which may not seem much compared to other models featured here, but given that this is a smartwatch with a steely focus on sport and the dogged pursuit of better performance, it’ll be space enough for your needs.
So, with a battery built to deliver up to 24-days, the Instinct 3 Tactical Editions features sensors in spades to keep you instantly informed of your most important metrics and location in three-dimensional space, including Garmin Elevate wrist heart rate monitor, pulse ox blood oxygen saturation monitor, barometric altimeter, compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, thermometer, and ambient light sensor.
Naturally, Garmin Coach and a whole raft of workout options are, literally, on-hand, alongside a wealth of apps covering a breathtaking array of sports, be they indoors, outdoors, on land, in water, on snow, on horse, or motor-assisted. Then there’s the other activities and features that make this Instinct 3 the Tactical Edition, namely the likes of ‘JumpMaster’ that lets users calculate high-altitude release points according to military guidelines, ‘Stealth Mode’ which keeps Tactical operation running while not storing and sharing your GPS position and disabling wireless connectivity and communication, ‘Tactical Activity’ that allows time, pace, time of day, elevation and location in both coordinate types, ‘Projected Waypoints’, ‘Applied Ballistics Solver’ which offers aiming solutions for long-range shooting (sniping) in the field, and ‘Kill Switch’ wherein, if you find yourself compromised, all user memory is instantly wiped from the device. Yes, this is hardcore.
Also featuring a built-in torch and most of the fun features of smartwatches, such as Garmin Pay, smart notifications, smartphone music control, VIRB camera remote and even, wait for it, gaming modes that offer real-time metrics to measure your performance and graphical breakdowns to review after the onslaught, the Instinct 3, AMOLED, Tactical Edition is really something completely else in the field of smartwatches. Let’s face it, this is the smartwatch that James Bond or any fictional spy worth his spy salt would choose; and given some of the extra features, non-fictional ones too.
Buy now £500.00, Amazon
