After Thanksgiving, I was perusing the online Black Friday sales, and decided I was finally going to pull the trigger on buying a smartwatch. I resisted the smartwatch trend for years up until this point. I didn’t want another device flashing, beeping, and buzzing to grab my attention. I’ve kept my phone notifications turned off since the pandemic started, and I was concerned this would be unavoidable with a smartwatch. I’m still rocking the iPhone 6s so living without the luxuries of the latest tech products is very familiar to me. I kept telling myself is that my old Timex stopwatch from 2000-something was perfectly fine to run with. Usually I know the distances of the routes I’m running ahead of time anyway, so I figured nothing else matters but the time. If anything, I thought that being a data-lover and having data about myself would just make me obsessive with the smartwatch. These things couldn’t be further from the truth. The Garmin Vivoactive 4 smartwatch is improving my health and fitness, and it’s proven to be a great asset.

Two of the features I didn’t think I would care about, that I have actually become the most obsessed with are the Sleep and Hydration statistics. Hydration has to be logged manually, which is a little annoying and time-consuming, but if you make a habit of it, it’s not so bad. Keeping track of hydration has made me realize I wasn’t nearly as hydrated before as I thought. The app tells you how much watch you should drink based on your weight, and then it adds to the baseline based on your activity level for the day. The sleep feature isn’t the most accurate (in my opinion) when it comes to how it breaks down the different stages of sleep (REM/ deep/ light sleep), but the duration of sleep is a good approximation, and the way it determines the quality of sleep has felt pretty accurate. The watch tracks body stress somehow, and I’ve noticed that high body stress correlates to poor sleep. I noticed if I have more than one drink in the evening, I can see that the first few hours I’m asleep my body is stressed trying to deal with the alcohol. This inevitably leads to feeling tired and having headaches the next day.

Another thing I really like about the Garmin watches is how customizable they are. I didn’t want to connect the watch to my phone notifications, so I was able to completely remove those features. I didn’t want to watch to buzz or light up or be distracting in any way, so I configured it to be locked and show the clock face by default, even during workouts. That takes care of my concerns about the watch being annoying and distracting. I’m certainly not using it to it’s full potential, but I love using it daily to log workouts, hydration, weight tracking, sleep, and even see how many steps I had. I will also add that the battery life is impressive. Not only does the watch hold battery for an extremely long time, but it also recharges within 30 minutes or less. The watch face is very durable (I’ve smacked it on several things so far on accident), and it’s supposed to be water-proof, though I have not tried it. The only thing I don’t like about the Garmin is that you can’t share your watch stats with people that have Apple Watches. Overall, I’m very happy with the Garmin Vivoactive 4 smartwatch, and I’m seeing lots of benefits with it so far.