The best Garmin watches are great health and fitness trackers, able to monitor your sleep, training, recovery and day-to-day life, and offer some actionable insights. They’re super popular, but they do suffer from the same problems most other fitness trackers do: a lack of context.
When you see a heart rate graph throughout the day, and compare it to your results over the last week, it doesn’t tell you a lot inside the contextless vacuum of the graph. It’ll determine when you’re asleep, characterized by a lower heart rate, and when you’ve exercised, generally characterized by a higher heart rate (unless, of course, you’re exceptionally fit).
However, sleep and activity don’t tell the whole story. What causes a bad night’s sleep? What about the effects of caffeine, alcohol, heavy and light meals on your heart rate? What about chronic disease flareups, or the effects of women’s cycles? Stats without context are rarely usable and helpful on an individual scale.
That’s where Garmin‘s new Lifestyle Logging feature comes in.
What is Lifestyle Logging?
Lifestyle Logging is a new instant-journaling feature added to the Garmin Connect app. Available via the Health Stats tab, it allows you to create a list of helpful tags, ranging from ‘caffeine’, ‘alcohol’ and ‘heavy meal’ to ‘eye mask’, ‘stretching’ and ‘sauna’.
Once your list of tags has been created, Lifestyle Logging allows you to add tags to your day at relevant times. You can set Garmin Connect to prompt you to add tags at certain times for consistency. For example, it might prompt you at 8am, so you remember to add tags for your evening behaviours, like ‘reading in bed’ and morning ones such as ‘coffee’.
Which Garmin users get Lifestyle Logging?
Everyone. You don’t need a specific watch to use the Lifestyle Logging feature, as it’s widely available in the Garmin Connect app. You just need a watch capable of measuring heart rate.
You don’t even need the AI-powered Garmin Connect+ premium subscription: it’s a feature available to users at every tier. Just make sure you’ve updated Garmin Connect, and you should be able to find the feature under More > Health Stats > Lifestyle Logging.
How to set up and use Lifestyle Logging
Once you’ve accessed Garmin’s Lifestyle Logging via the pathway above, you’ll be prompted to choose from a list of tags called “behaviors”. You’re recommended to just choose a few, based on your lifestyle, but there appears to be no upper limit. You may also scroll to the bottom to Add a Custom Behavior.
You can also set up and toggle on and off prompts to log behaviors by tapping the three dots in the right corner and tapping Reminders.
Navigate to the Lifestyle Logging tab during the day to log or edit behaviors.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
