Our fitness obsessed writer takes on our week long fitness week diary including running, swimming and more.
This is where I’m at something of an advantage over the other chaps in this diary, simply because I’ve already been using the Garmin Forerunner 935 for marathon training for a while – the sheer amount of things you can do with this watch is the reason I selected it for this test.
As TechRadar’s Running Man of Tech I’ve been running six or seven days a week for the last four years – along with failing at a couple of triathlons – so popping on a pair of trainers and heading out into whatever weather is second nature for me now – and I’ve long enjoyed using Garmin options on my wrist as a run-and-fitness tracker.
Garmin’s watches are performance-based, rather than relying on flashy screens and pointless features. It monitors my heart rate all day and night, provides info on my sleep, tracks my steps, assesses how hard I’m running each day and even spits notifications from my connected phone to my wrist.
All this on a seven day battery life, off six to seven hours a week run tracking too – that’s the best we’ve seen from any watch.
And the great thing is once you’ve downloaded the Garmin Connect app, you’re all set up once it’s paired to your phone for any activity you can throw it into.
What I also like about Garmin watches is the sheer amount of things I can monitor when running. The transflective display is so legible in all lights, and if I want to track anything from my average lap pace to my heart rate to the time the sun is going to set, it’s all available here and incredibly customisable.
Above you can watch our beginner’s guide to fitness tech, or you can jump to the diary entries you want to read here:
Day 1) Running
Day 2) High Intensity Interval Training
Day 3) Swimming
Day 4) Cycling
Day 5) Gym
So, spending a week with the Garmin Forerunner 935 taught me a number of things – one of which being that I’m really not very good at things that aren’t running.
However, there was definitely something comforting about having a watch that could monitor so many things comprehensively strapped to my wrist – there’s very little that I found it couldn’t do in terms of monitoring my sport.
And I haven’t even got onto to the other cool things that this watch can do: as a fitness tracker during this last week it gave me sleep analysis, set me up with dynamic step goals based on my previous weeks’ efforts (something so many others fail to do) and pings me little insights when I’m moving more or less than usual.
Using heart rate variability (HRV, the difference in pattern between each beat of your heart) it can not only tell you how tired you are after a run, and how long you need to recover, but even provide real-time feedback on how much energy you have left during a workout.
The watch can even tell you if you’re training too hard, and how productive your sessions have been
Heck, using HRV the Garmin Connect app can even tell you how stressed you are day to day – as well as monitor your calorie intake and weight if you use connected apps.
I’ve been hugely impressed by the whole system, and the fact that I only needed to charge it once in a week despite doing all these myriad things is testament to the battery life of the Garmin 935.
In terms of the week I’ve just had – I can safely say I enjoyed some things more than others. Running will always be my sweetheart, but the gym has become my mistress. I secretly get more of a buzz at the end of a strength workout, and I’m a bit sad that the Garmin Forerunner 935 couldn’t track my sessions there a little better.
HIIT workouts are nice when you need them, and the downloaded app was, well, basic but fine…. there’s definitely more Garmin could do there.
Cycling was perfunctory for me, but I was amazed at the amount of sensors that you could connect to on the go… a lot of my friends cycle a lot, and those that have this watch really love it during that too.
I’m not going to talk about swimming. I suck at it, I hate it, and it’s stupid. OK, it’s not stupid – and the Forerunner 935 is adept in the pool as well, despite not being quite as accurate as I’d like.
The amount of things you can track is brilliant
And I’ve not even talked about the other sports this watch can track – it’d be great for brick training in a triathlon (as the transitions, the bits where you move from water to bike to running, are uploaded so you can train at getting dressed quickly). There’s even a thing in there called Jumpmaster… I was afraid to find out what that was, as it had a picture of a parachute alongside.
I really enjoyed my week with the Forerunner 935 – if you’ve got an ounce of interest in taking a certain discipline seriously, chances are you’ll find a good range of tracking with this watch. In fact, I actually felt a bit guilty I wasn’t testing it well enough by letting it run free during a snowboard session or hiking up a mountain.
The price does reflect the functionality though – it’s $500 / £485 / AU$700, which isn’t cheap. But if it’s an investment in your passion, you could do a lot worse.
This is the session that I’ve been dreading. Not because I’m terrible at lifting weights (although I totally am) but because I thought it was going to be impossible to use the Garmin Forerunner 935 for gym work.
I’m no stranger to grunting with metal – I do some strength training to help running, so lifting lighter weights than the people all around me is something I’m familiar with.
In terms of tracking it on a watch, all I can normally do is monitor my heart rate and see the calories I’ve burned.
I set up a workout, and make 25 steps to monitor each of the exercises I’m going to do, taking in every part of the body to see where the Forerunner gives good results and where it doesn’t. I’m going to do 15 reps of everything, except pull-ups.
And yes, that’s because I have spent about a month learning how to do a single one. Poorly.
Setting up the workout takes a rather long time, as I need to find the exercise in a dropdown, enter the reps I want to do and the intended weight – but once done, I send it to the watch via the app and I’m ready.
I do a short warm up, which Garmin suggests – but it’s up to me what I do here, and that’s a bit of a shame. Surely the watch could guide me through some basic jogs, arm circles, knee lifts etc to make sure I stretch out the right parts of the body?
Anyway, after a bit of thrashing around, I’m ready to go – holding two weights and ready to bend, lift, thrust and pull in all manner of ways.
Setting up the workout takes a little time
I won’t go through all 23 exercises, but they included deadlifts, pull-ups, dumbbell flys, weighted squats, single arm rows and lunges… and off I went.
Of the 23 elements, eight were spot on and counted 15 reps, four were pretty close, six just gave a random number and five registered nothing. In fairness, two of those blanks were pull-up / chin-ups, so there’s no way for the watch to know what I was doing there as my hands were static.
But still not that impressive – I found that I was more interested in what I was supposed to be doing than actually knowing when I’d finished the set. Even when the counter was accurate, the watch didn’t beep to let me know I’d finished like it did with the warm-up timer.
It was nice to see a little instruction at the start of each set, telling me what I was supposed to do, but it was fleeting and there was no way to call it up again.
It meant I ended up standing in front of the weights, pressing the button to trigger the next exercise, picking them up carefully and stiffly walking over to the workout area like I was carrying a huge tray of drinks, lest I accidentally trigger a rep.
I decided to see if Garmin had any advice on its website on what I was doing wrong – should I have been lifting in a different way? It turns out… kind of. Apparently I’m supposed to only lift the weights deliberately – not too fast, not too slow – in a kind of Goldilocks and the Three Bears fashion.
Seems a bit tough to manage – in my mind, I was totally focused on the workout, so I don’t know what I was doing wrong. And here’s the kicker from the site: “Advice: do not stop to view the watch as this affects movement.”
So how do I know if I’m doing the reps in a countable way if I can’t look at the watch?
Then I did some terrible dancing around, something like a cross between an Irish jig and a father breakdancing, and I managed six reps of… something.
The heart rate monitoring was pretty good – and my temperature seemingly stayed static. *Shrug*
I tried to do a bench press, and while initially it picked up nothing it eventually worked out what I was doing and counted all 15, but it was a real, real effort to keep things to the right pace. If I wanted to do a faster-paced workout, this would be useless.
In short, the rep counting has far too many issues, but as a way to structure a workout, it’s pretty good. In Free Workout mode you get a rest timer to (guess I didn’t add that bit in to the workout I set up) so that’s useful.
Would I use this again for gym stuff? Only if I had a really technical workout and I needed guidance throughout… but even then, I’d like to be able to remind myself how many reps or what weight I’ll need.
I did have my body temperature monitored during the session though – that was nice to see.
I like cycling. I’ve got a pointlessly-nice bike that I ride to the station and back each day for work, meaning I pootle around 15 miles a week at a pretty slow speed.
However, I know that tracking my daily jaunt to the station isn’t going to cut it for this diary, so I need to push things up a few notches. Like with the running, I thought about setting up a workout to follow, but the impressive thing about the Garmin Forerunner 935 and cycling is the sheer range of sensors it can connect to – so I seek outside help.
My handsome friend, Captain Mike, is a great runner but (annoyingly) also a good cyclist, and is always banging on about his great home bike set up.
I don’t want to show you how much I was sweating.
His hideously expensive bike (a Planet X ex130e with Shimano 6870 di2 groupset, he tells my blank face) is attached in his lounge to a TacX Satori Smart turbo trainer, which in turn connects to the PC under his TV.
This static setup is what he uses to access the Zwift platform that allows him to ride virtual courses all over the world.
This appeals to me for a couple of reasons: firstly, this is essentially a video game where your whole bike and body is the controller. Secondly, the setup has so many sensors that it’s perfect for this diary.
I want to just look at three things: power, cadence and speed. I understand these: the effort I’m putting in, the speed my legs are spinning and my overall pace. But when I go to connect my watch to the turbo trainer, the amount of sensors I can use is dizzying.
I find the ones I want eventually, but I also accidentally connect to his other bike and am imbued with the power to turn his lights on and off. This Garmin watch is certainly fully-featured.
There are loads of metrics on offer, but these are the easiest to monitor.
I get cycling in the virtual Zwift world, and I’m instantly pedalling around the streets of London, the effort and gear I’m in translating exactly to the on-screen action. I thrust up and down a little harder, the avatar on screen responds. I stop pedalling, he freewheels through the city.
(There’s a time when I get a little overwhelmed when approximately a million Polish riders stream past me, while I’m just pootling past the Thames. I assume they’re having a lovely time).
You can see the important stats on the screen, from the power to the cadence your legs are spinning at, so you can tailor the effort accordingly, and Mike asks me if I want to try a workout.
I want to tell him that I’m already struggling with the effort of just pedalling now, but my bravado gets the better of me and I agree. He chooses a ‘nice, easy one’ for me to get me started.
Note the muscular similarities on show here. OK, then just look at the numbers.
