What you need to know
- Garmin announced its major August 2025 update on Tuesday, and it's currently rolling out to most recent watches.
- The Garmin Fenix 8, Venu X1, Enduro 3, and other watches are getting running tolerance, speed step loss, running economy, and other new tools from the Forerunner 970.
- Other recent features like evening report, smart wake alarm, and rucking will come to a wider range of watches.
- The update also introduced a new feature: daily suggested track workouts.
Garmin has announced its August 2025 update, which takes the Forerunner 970's cutting-edge running tools and spreads the wealth to other premium flagship watches — though only the newest models.
The Forerunner 970 added several quality-of-life improvements for runners, most notably running tolerance. This tool judges the biomechanical load from each run and tells you how many "impact load miles" your body can currently handle, helping to prevent injuries.
Running tolerance is surprisingly accurate and provides additional context to Training Readiness's focus on cardiovascular recovery. And it helps you judge whether specific workouts (like hilly runs or track workouts) put extra strain on your body. I wish all Garmin Forerunner watches had it, but Garmin is still keeping it to its most expensive models.
While running tolerance is my favorite Forerunner 970 tool, it's just one of many features the Garmin Fenix 8, Venu X1, Enduro 3, and Tactix/ Quatix 8 will receive in this update:
- Auto Lap by Course Point triggers your mile or kilometer splits at GPS-based course markers instead of by actual distance run, in case they don't align.
- Add a race to your calendar, and Garmin will project your ideal final race time based on how long you have left to train.
- If you run to a track, Garmin auto-detects it and locks your route to that track, then goes back to free tracking when you leave it.
- Garmin Triathlon Coach gives you a variety of running, cycling and swimming workouts, personalized to your performance and fitness level.
- If you have a Garmin HRM 600 chest strap, Garmin will calculate your running economy (ml/kg/km) and speed step loss (how much momentum you lose per stride).
On top of all this, Garmin is introducing daily suggested track workouts, including on the Forerunner 570 and 970. It's a spin-off of your daily suggested runs, except that it cuts the easier stuff and ports your tempo, threshold, VO2 Max, anaerobic, and sprint workouts so that they're all visible in the Track Run activity.
And beyond running, some recent Garmin smarts like Evening Report, the smart wake alarm, rucking activity with pack weight, and a calculator app are coming to most models. You can see the feature list — and which watches will receive them — below:
And if all that somehow isn't enough, if you go to the Garmin Forums, you can find a complete list of updates and fixes, more than what's shown above. For example, the Fenix 8 17.28 update includes an emoji keyboard, a way to access apps by swiping left from the watch face, new notification types, and a couple dozen other tweaks.
The Forerunner 970 12.70 update includes some fun new tricks, like the ability to hear LiveTrack spectator messages over the watch's speaker during a race, a watch face data field for running tolerance mid-activity, and custom focus modes. It also fixes personal records so they are judged by elapsed time instead of logged time; that way, you can't cheat into a world-record time by pausing and restarting.
As for more affordable 2025 Garmin watches, the Vivoactive 6 is getting the Evening Report, Rucking activities, automatic rest timers for Strength activities, and a Tips app, while the Instinct 3 update mostly focuses on bug fixes.
Unfortunately, we don't see any major updates for older Garmin watches. Owners of last-gen flagships like the Fenix 7 or Epix Pro Gen 2, in particular, will feel aggrieved that Garmin is locking them out from new features.
