Background
Back in January 2023 ish I picked up a Series 8 Apple Watch which I ended up using it mostly as a fitness tracker. When it died after a swim a few months in I took the refund and thought I may as well get a dedicated fitness watch and went for the Garmin Forerunner 265S.
What works
There’s a good level of customization for the screens to show various stats during an activity. You can add a vibration alert that triggers after a distance, and for running I set this to 1km whilst for swimming it’s every 4 laps as I do tend to lose count.
The swimming lap counter is mostly accurate, but I do get the occasional false lap which screws up all the stats because it thinks I’ve just swum a lap at twice my normal speed.
I like the display, it’s readable in daylight and even underwater with goggles on (at least if you limit yourself to a maximum of 2 data fields on the screen).
The GPS is good, notably better than my Edge 530 bike computer which struggles in built-up areas. It also works well with my bike sensors for cadence and speed. And being a proper fitness watch it supports Ant+ as well as Bluetooth.
Battery life is fine, I normally end up charging ever 2 or 3 days depending on how much I’m actually using it for exercise and not just wearing. I have the screen off by default and just wake it with a button-press.
The music playback (linked to Spotify) works well. In fact, once setup it’s been pretty much flawless in keeping up to date with my gym playlist. It is a bit fussy with headphones, and with the ‘wrong’ ones the playback gets choppy. Headphones that have worked well are the Jabra Elite Active 65t, Jabra Elite 7, SoundPeats S5 and SoundPeats GoFree 2 . Ones that haven’t: SoundPeats Air4 and some really cheap no-brand ones off Amazon.
The user interface is pretty good, especially compared to the Apple Watch. Having the five buttons makes everything quicker than the fiddly wheel. You can also customize button combinations, which I did to add a long-press for stopwatch and a diagonal press for contactless payment.
Speaking off which, the contactless payment does work, but bank support is a lot more limited compared to Apple Pay. I ended up getting a Curve virtual card which acts like a bridge to a real credit card. I did have to switch the backing card for my Curve account from one card to another after payments started failing. So I wouldn’t rely on it too much.
There are 3rd party apps but mostly uninteresting. Aside from Spotify, and a 3rd party watch face the only one I use is a Parkrun barcode display. To be fair, there wasn’t much interesting on the Apple Watch either, it’s just not a good format for apps.
The (nearly) fatal flaw
The biggest issue I have is that the heart-rate sensor is rubbish. I know that wrist sensors aren’t as good as heart-rate belts, but the Apple Watch was always within about 5bpm of my belt sensor whilst the 265S is all over the place. Gentle warm up on cross trainer? 160bpm. Pushing hard up a long hill on a bike? 110bpm. It really can be 50bpm too low or too high at any time, or it can just jump 30bpm second to second. Just absolute bollocks. In fact, the Apple Watch sensor was more reliable swimming than the 265S is running, and that’s shameful.
I’m happy to wear a heart rate belt for ‘proper’ workouts but there are times, such as cycle commutes, where it would be nice to have reasonable numbers without the fuss of a belt and the 265S just can’t do that.
In terms of belts I’ve used both a Polar H10 and Garmin HRM Pro. I switched from the H10 because it was eating batteries at a frightening rate. The HRM Pro is cleverer in theory but is buggy and the watch ends up double-counting stats, e.g. the calorie/hour graph looks like this:
The active calorie numbers do correct once you sync with your phone. But sometimes it seems to need two syncs and I’ve had a day where the watch face showed 1000 active calories, then 700 and finally 400. The calorie graph never corrects, not that it matters too much. Oh, and sometimes the number on the watch face doesn’t match the number you get in the glances.
The double-counting also applies to other stats that might come from the belt. There have been times when I’ve hit my steps goal for the day and then a few hours later hit the same goal again, since the double-counted steps were fixed in the meantime.
And it’s all just a bit crummy than I’m using Garmin’s best belt with a Garmin watch, and all the numbers are cockeyed. It leads to a feeling that the numbers are meaningless since they’re jumping up and down all the time. Which leads us to…
Numbers, numbers, numbers
You do get loads of stats. Total exercise load for an activity, plus an aerobic/anaerobic split, whether the exercise was recovery, base, tempo, VO2 max. And there’s cumulative load, recovery time and etc. etc.
Over time I’ve cared less and less about any of this for a few reasons. Firstly, anything based on the internal heart rate sensor can just be ignored because it’s based on garbage data. But even with a belt for everything the stats don’t represent my experience in any meaningful way.
Garmin’s algorithms seem heavily biased towards high heart rate activities, even short ones. Go for a quick run and it will shower you with numbers saying how well you did. But for anything in a lower zone you just get disdain.
The most aggrieved I’ve felt is from a day’s mountain biking. I cycled for 4 hours, covered almost 50km on trails, with over 900m of climbing. I was absolutely spent by the end of it and needed real recovery time. Garmin rated this with a score of around 140. By comparison a normal 5K run is scored at over 200. In fact, I ran as a pacer at a Parkrun at 90 seconds slower than my normal time so it was pretty comfy, and that run scored 170. And there’s no way that run was harder than the mountain biking.
And of course, strength training, which I’d argue should a part of everyone’s exercise diet, doesn’t really get captured in any meaningful way. I can do a full gym circuit, come out tired from it and the watch is telling me I need 0 hours recovery time and should be training.
There’s just not a case where I would go by what the watch is saying versus just listening to my body.
The only stat I find remotely useful is the load focus one which breaks down your balance of activities between anaerobic, high and low aerobic just because it shows that you getting a good mix.
Is it any good?
It’s a tricky question. I’m loathed to say it is good given the first job of any fitness watch is to measure your heart rate and it just can’t, at least not by itself. The analysis is all nonsense, but you don’t have to care about that.
But if you treat as just an exercise capture and music device (and use it with a belt), it’s fine. And if not this, then what?
The Apple Watch broke on me, and the UI on it was pretty terrible for a fitness watch with the one button. Plus irritations such as you can’t have a stopwatch displayed for more than 90 seconds (IIRC) if it’s off your wrist, which is annoying when trying to time a long plank. And it was always nagging me about stupid stuff or complaining because it thinks the gym showers are too noisy.
Polar watches don’t have any on-board music playback so that means a second device to have on hand. And I’d need another belt since apparently using the Garmin one confuses Polar watches to the point they turn off GPS when running. My experience of the Polar app with my H10 and a previous optical sensor wasn’t great either.
So it’s probably the best of the bunch.