- Garmin Connect Rundown is the wearable company’s own attempt at Spotify Wrapped-style year-in-review
- It has all your health and fitness stats and trends for the year
- The Rundown is also behind a Connect+ paywall
This is the time of year when all the internet services drop summaries of your on-platform activities over the last year. The most famous, of course, is Spotify Wrapped, which (at the time of writing) we’re expecting to drop very soon. You can check out our Spotify Wrapped live coverage all about it, but it’s not the only game in town.
Apple dropped its Apple Music Replay, Strava’s Year in Sport is set to arrive next week, and Garmin is the latest service to jump on the bandwagon – but there’s a catch.
Users of the best Garmin watches, regardless of whether you use a slim Garmin Vivoactive 6 or a monstrous 51mm Garmin Fenix 8, accumulate an enormous amount of data on their sleep, recovery, and training habits, from heart rate to their Fitness Age (the age Garmin thinks your cardiovascular system is operating at, compared to your actual biological age).
It knows the routes you’ve travelled, the total distance you’ve run, swam, or cycled, the number of waves you’ve surfed, and how much weight you’ve lifted. All that is prime fodder for a Wrapped-style feature.
Unfortunately, the Garmin Connect Rundown, a “personalised annual report includes health, performance and activity stats, including total steps, average sleep score, totals of each activity type and more”, is only available to Garmin users who’ve signed up to Garmin’s premium Connect+ subscription service – even though other services like Strava and Spotify make theirs available to free-tier users as well.
Connect+’s disastrous first year
Regular readers and Garmin users might remember Connect+ and its disastrous launch back in March, in which Garmin users threw up their hands and complained on Reddit, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and in our email inbox, worried that new features fed to their expensive watches would be locked behind another arbitrary paywall.
Although a Wrapped-style Year in Review is hardly an essential feature, more of a nice-to-have, it is an example of this gradual shift taking place and Garmin attempting to drive existing users to Connect+.
(If you’re signed up to Connect+ and you get your Garmin Connect Rundown information, please do let me know in the comments below and tell us how you did!)
Garmin has also provided some general stats about its 2025 user base to us, however, which are pretty interesting. I’ve shared some of the highlights below:
- Garmin saw a 29% increase in strength training workouts, a 45% increase in HIIT, and 67% increase in racket sports (I reckon that’s the meteoric rise of pickleball and padel)
- Women recorded lower average stress scores than men
- Garmin users slept 1% better this year on average
- Garmin users in Hong Kong took the most average steps per day, with more than 10,000
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/JhEvRsrTmyWPgAedANm4aM-2560-80.jpg
Source link
matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
