A published in the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science and Technology Letters is raising concerns about the pervasive presence of “forever chemicals” – also known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) – in something many triathletes have on their bodies 24/7: watch bands.

These synthetic chemicals, notorious for their persistence in the environment and human body, are now being found in common consumer products, with fitness tracker and smartwatch wristbands being the latest addition.

“These PFAS are pretty nasty chemicals as a class,” says Graham Peaslee, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and corresponding author on the study. “All of them that we found are toxic, a couple of them are bioaccumulative, and all of them are persistent.”

This group of chemicals, which comprise more than 14,000 individual compounds, is particularly resistant to heat, water, and oil, so they’ve been used in products like stain-resistant fabrics, food packaging, cosmetics, firefighting foams, and non-stick cookware. But it’s been well-established that PFAS are linked to serious health issues including multiple types of cancer, suppression of the immune system, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, and liver and kidney damage.

Forever Chemicals in Watch Bands Study Overview

For the study, researchers analyzed 22 watch bands, from a mix of brands and price points, for the presence of PFAS. The bands, which included brands like Apple and Fitbit, were all purchased from Amazon or Best Buy, or were donated. Of the bands, 15 of them had the presence of these “forever chemicals,” and all were in very high concentrations. The researchers found one particular compound, PFHxA, in abundance – many times higher than what has been found in recent studies of cosmetics, food packaging, and school uniforms.

PFHxA being found in such extremely high concentrations is bad news for people who wear these watch bands for 12-plus hours per day. It gives the chemical significant opportunity to transfer through the skin. In addition, with athletes wearing these bands during exercise means additional sweat contact and open skin pores. And showed that PFHxA can be dermally absorbed, especially in the presence of sweat.

“If you wear these daily, over long periods each day,” Peaslee says, “then you undoubtedly are getting some exposure.”

Should You Replace Your Watch Band?

Before you burn your watch band, rest assured that PFAS are already in your bloodstream – they are in the blood of 100% of people in North America, says Peaslee, “thanks to our pervasive use of it from the 1950s onward.” Whether or not you use consumer products with PFAS directly, once they’re discarded into landfills, they break down and make it into our drinking water, our irrigation water, and then into us.

“I’m not too worried about the exposure, in terms of, we’re exposed day and night to everything else,” Peaslee says. “This is one more, but the next time you buy one, you really want to read carefully.”

While the study’s authors didn’t disclose specifically how each brand tested, they did provide information to help you determine whether your current watch band likely has PFAS.

First, seek out the materials in your own multisport or GPS watch band, if they’re listed (sellers are not required to publish materials, but some do). If any publish that they’re made with fluoroelastomers, fluorine, or the abbreviations FKM, FEK, FEKK, and FEKM, steer clear – they very likely have PFAS. For Garmin wearers, the company has been working to (PFOA and PFOS) from their products, including watch bands, though that doesn’t mean all Garmin watch bands are currently 100% PFAS free.

If your watch is made of other materials, such as silicone, nylon, or leather, “those are presumably not PFAS treated,” Peaslee says – you should be safe to continue wearing and using them without risking exposure.

What to Look For in a New (PFAS-Free) Smartwatch Band

If you’re not sure what your watch is made of or you’re not confident it’s free of PFAS, Peaslee recommends being proactive. “It’s well worth trying to replace them as soon as you can,” he says.

And especially since it won’t be an expensive swap: The researchers found a correlation between the presence of PFAS and the price of the watch band. It was only the medium-priced ($15-$30) and expensive watch bands ($30+) that contained the chemicals – the bands less than $15 were unlikely to contain a fluoroelastomer, which the researchers presumed was due to the increased cost to manufacture using PFAS. You can also search for bands made from the materials silicone and nylon.

And hopefully, in not too long, we’ll see more and more “PFAS free” or “fluorine free” labels on watch bands. Europe actually proposed a ban on PFHxA, Peaslee says, and “I think there’ll be more transparency in the future.”

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When we put together a pool of reviewers, we want people who adventure big but also live normal lives—because that’s our true audience (very few readers are running 100-mile races or summiting Everest). Enter lead watch tester Meg Healy. There’s no one better suited to deliver real-world reviews of a watch that can track all of your workouts while integrating into your 9-5. As a runner, dancer, cyclist, and world traveler, she’s as active as you can get without being sponsored, but she also lives in the real world as a mom, PTA volunteer, and soccer coach.

Healy has tested a batch of watches for şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř over the past several years and says that the , at the moment, is her clear favorite. She’s now lived with it on her wrist nearly 24/7 for six months and found that, for her, the watch strikes the perfect balance of training coach and everyday companion.

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Suunto Race

Testing Stats

• Test Locations:
  • New Mexico and Brazil
• Six months of continuous testing in a wide variety of activities:
  • 450+ miles of running and hiking with more than 40,000 feet of elevation gain
  • 100+ hours of yoga
  • 60+ hours of martial arts training
  • Hours of rollerblading, stand-up paddleboarding, kayaking, horseback riding, swimming, and more

Suunto Race Training Tracking Performance

Healy said the Race became her favorite workout companion for a number of reasons. First, the watch, which works with all the major satellite systems—GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, QZSS, BEIDOU, and on both L1 and L5 GPS frequencies—grabs a GPS signal faster than any watch she’s tested. That was important for Healy who’s always busy and wants her workout to start as soon as possible.

“As you can imagine, people like me who like to run don’t like to wait,” she said. “It’s a pain to be waiting around on your doorstep, or at a trailhead in the wilderness of the Brazilian jungle before you can head out. But I never had that problem with the Race.”

She also loved the watch’s ability to track a wide range of activities. With other watches, Healy couldn’t always find the appropriate activity tracker for what she was doing, given her interests are as diverse as horseback riding, yoga, and martial arts. But the Race, which tracks nearly 100 activities, never left her hanging. Plus, on a day when she might do three or four different workouts, or a month where she does eight or 10 different activities, the watch kept up and, via the Suunto app, succinctly reported her overall fitness and provided useful feedback.

“I loved seeing that no matter what I was doing, there was clearly a time during my day when I felt best and had the best pace, no matter what,” she said.

Most of the time Healy knew where she was going on her runs, but she still appreciated the Race’s ability to download offline topo maps specific to where she was adventuring. Using the app, you can set a route that the watch will follow on screen and offer turn-by-turn instructions. If you get lost, the watch will point you back to wherever you started.

The battery on the Race is so good that Healy pretty much forgot about it. She estimates that she only charged it once every 10 days. According to official stats, Suunto says the watch will last up to 26 days if just used as a regular watch and give you up to 40 hours of continuous use with every tracking metric turned on. Or you can go for five days in “Tour” mode in which the GPS is tracking with lower accuracy.

Healy wore the watch at all times (except for the rare occasions when it was charging). She used the watch to track her sleep and said integrating that data into her overall fitness picture proved to be useful, helping her identify which days she was ready for a bigger and more taxing workout. (She did, however, say that the sleep tracking was not as accurate as some other watches she’s used, noting that the data occasionally said she was awake during times when she knew she was asleep.)

The only other problem Healy ran into with the watch was when she tried to track her blood oxygen. It’s not a metric she regularly monitors, but her dad had to check his for medical reasons so she decided to try the feature on the Race. Too often, however, an error code popped up saying it couldn’t provide any info.

Suunto Race Everyday Performance

Healy is 5 foot, 5 inches tall, and fit, so the 1.43-inch high-definition AMOLED screen sat a little big on her wrist (she might be more comfortable with the “S” version that has a smaller face). Nonetheless, she was glad to have all that real estate to display useful stats she’d check while working out. And over time she got used to the size and said it never got in the way when she was moving.

At night, Healy, who is light sensitive, liked that the watch could be set accordingly. When she raised her wrist to look at the screen, just a dim display of the time appeared rather than the full, bright screen. She also enjoyed using the watch as an alarm so that she didn’t have to sleep with her phone next to her bed, and found the flashlight feature helpful to navigate around the house in the dark.

Healy had nothing but praise for the watch’s durability. After months of using the watch hard without a care, she said it still looked almost new. “After looking this thing over I can’t see a single scratch on the face or a single mark on the body,” she said. One minor complaint: Healy prefers lighter colors, so she wished the titanium version she tested came in a white instead of just a metallic or purple colorway. Suunto does, however, offer a number of bright wristbands to liven things up.

Finally, she appreciated the Suunto Race’s price point. The titanium version Healy tested costs $549, significantly less than the $839 you’ll pay for the titanium and solar-charging top-of-the-line Suunto Vertical Titanium Solar or other comparable watches. For that extra money, the Vertical gets you a better battery life (up to 85 hours of continuous GPS use with solar recharging) and it’s made in Finland instead of China. Those differences are important, and will matter to some folks, but for many other everyday users, including Healy, they’re not worth the extra $300.

“The Race was everything I needed and it’s been an incredible training partner no matter where I’ve been,” Healy said.

See our full guide to the best sports watches we’ve tested.

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In the last few years, the gulf that divides smartwatches and sports watches has shrunk considerably. Pure sports watches have added smartwatch features like phone notifications, music, and bright OLED touchscreens, while smartwatches have gotten more rugged and put a greater emphasis on fitness and sport tracking. The closest option to achieve best-of-both-worlds status has been the Apple Watch, but that left Android users out in the cold with subpar substitutes.

Finally, the is here for the green-bubble crowd, promising to compete with the Apple Watch’s excellence at both day-to-day tasks as well as athletic tracking. As the name suggests, the Pixel Watch 3 is the third iteration of Google’s flagship smartwatch, and its second with all kinds of Fitbit smarts and tracking built-in (Google bought Fitbit in 2021). After testing the new version for five weeks, I can affirm that as a smartwatch, it’s pretty fantastic, but as a sports and adventure watch, it still has room for improvement.

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Updates to the Google Pixel Watch 3

Let’s start with what’s new, and there’s plenty. For starters, you can now choose from two sizes: 41mm and 45mm. Both sizes come in versions with and without LTE cellular radios. I tested the 45mm LTE version, and it sits beautifully on my wrist.

It’s perfectly circular and smooth like a river pebble, except for the dial that protrudes from the right side. The watch bands are easy to swap out, too, so you can quickly change between bands for high-activity or high-society.

The bezels have been shrunk down at the edges by 16-percent, which gives the 45mm size a 40 percent larger screen than the last version. It pumps out 2,000 nits of light, twice as powerful as the last version, the colors are bright and the contrast is excellent. That makes reading on it better than any watch I’ve used, by a long shot. Not only is a full text message likely to fit on the screen, sometimes I’ll skim a whole email on it, scrolling down with the mechanical dial as I go. I have no issues reading the details when stealing a glance at my stats as I run, either.

As with the previous version, the watch is equipped with GPS, a compass, altimeter, barometer, and it’s waterproof to 5ATM (50 meters deep), for all your aquatic endeavors.

On the back of the watch is an updated suite of sensors for monitoring your heart rate (active and resting heart rate as well as heart rate variability), breathing rate, oxygen saturation, and skin temperature (which can be useful for period tracking). All told, it’s Google and Fitbit’s most advanced sensor setup yet, and I found the accuracy to be excellent when comparing my stats to a chest strap and other wrist-based sports watch sensors. You can also use the watch as a heart rate monitor while using other exercise equipment such as stationary bikes, syncing the watch to display metrics on the other device.

You’ll also find some new Fitbit-powered health tracking metrics. The Readiness score factors in all of your body’s biometrics as well as recent activity levels and sleep to give you an estimate of your recovery, plus it advises you on how much activity you should look to do each day, based on your stated goals. This is basically Fitbit’s version of the Whoop Score or Garmin’s Body Battery, and I generally found it to be pretty well aligned with how I felt.

Two other new metrics are Cardio Load and Target Load. Cardio Load tracks your training and heart rate throughout the day (updating in realtime) to measure how much work your heart has done, using training impulse models (or TRIMP). Target Load is essentially the range of exercise the watch advises you to try and meet during the day. All these calculations are designed to work in tandem to help prevent overtraining or undertraining, and I was generally impressed with how they worked.

Every morning within half an hour of waking you get a Morning Brief on your watch, which gives you a quick snapshot of your sleep, recovery, exercise goals for the day, as well as weather and appointments from your Google Calendar. It’s a really nice way to get up to speed and prepare for the day ahead.

Standout smartwatch features

Where this watch really excels, however, is as a smartwatch. It’s simply a fantastic companion to your Android phone. You can read and respond to texts and emails (by voice or a surprisingly good onscreen keyboard), and download or stream music (using 32GB of built in storage). It has a fantastic Recorder app for voice notes, which can be automatically backed up to your phone and the cloud. It has a speaker and mic so you can even take calls in a pinch (like when I got an important call while I was in the shower), though you’ll probably want earbuds for longer calls because the speaker isn’t the loudest. It also features an excellent version of Google Maps, with turn-by-turn navigation and offline maps, and it integrates Google Pay, which allows you to pay with a tap of your wrist pretty much anywhere now.

One feature lets the watch work as a remote shutter for your phone’s camera (and even streams the live video to your watch so you can check your framing). Plus, the watch has fantastic smart home features. For example, if you use Google’s latest Nest Cameras, you can get real time video directly on the watch to see who’s at your door. You can quickly adjust your connected lights, thermostat, or speakers, and if you have a Chromecast or a TV powered by Google, you can use your watch as a remote control. It also has a built-in AI assistant so you can tell it to add things to your calendar or shopping list, start apps, timers, or activities, send messages, or just answer your dumb questions.

I tested the Pixel Watch 3 paired with the new Pixel 9 Pro smartphone, and while the Pixel Watch 3 will work well with virtually any Android phone, it works especially well with Google’s own Pixel line. You get a deeper integration of features–like syncing of Do Not Disturb, Bedtime modes, alarms, Recorder voice notes–and it’s pretty seamless. The Pixel 9 Pro is especially good for the outdoor crowd because it’s one of the first Android phones to offer Satellite SOS, enabling you to contact emergency services when you don’t have cell signal or Wi-Fi connection. Plus, it has the best low-light photo and video of any phone I’ve tested. And when I don’t have my phone with me I’ve found the LTE on the watch to be reliable, and even slightly magical feeling to retain so much functionality and messaging ability while phoneless.

How it fares on runs and other athletic activities

This year Google and Fitbit have put a lot more functionality into the new watch as a running companion. It now features daily run recommendations as well as a run-builder, so you can customize your workout. The Pixel Watch 3 will give you real time guidance as you go, alerting you to intervals, and keeping your pace or heart rate in the right zone. Once you’re done you get advanced stride analytics, such as cadence, ground contact time, stride length, vertical ratio, and vertical oscillation.

I will say, though, that the real time run experience could be improved. While you’re actually running it doesn’t display that much data. You get distance, elapsed time, heart rate, and current pace on one screen, and a heart rate zone page on the second—and that’s it. No real-time information about your elevation gained or lost, no info on your cadence until you’re done. You can’t add new fields or additional screens either. Most tragically, there isn’t any integration with that wonderful Google Maps app. It would be amazing if it had a track-back feature, or a way to load running routes, but there’s just no map screen.

Other activities are even more limited, with Swimming being the worst offender. You can input the length of the pool and it will keep count of your laps in the background, but while you’re actually swimming, the only data it shows you is your elapsed time. That’s it. You can’t even manually mark intervals to designate sets, and it certainly doesn’t count your strokes or differentiate types of stroke like most modern sports watches. And there’s no open water swim mode, either.

If you’re surfing with it, it tracks your total distance, it doesn’t know the difference between when you’re paddling, drifting, or surfing. It can’t count waves or integrate with Surfline to help you find webcam clips of your waves ridden, something which both Apple Watch and Garmin watches can do.

These limitations are very frustrating because this watch has all the right sensors and processors to go head-to-head or even exceed sports watch heavyweights like Garmin and Suunto, but nobody built the software to do so. The good news is that means Google/Fitbit could easily fix that with an update, but whether or not they will remains to be seen.

That said, I’ve found the daily activity tracking (such as heart metrics and sleep) to be excellent, and as a smartwatch it’s peerless for the Android crowd. The crowning achievement is that the battery almost always lasts me more than 36 hours, sometimes as much as 48 (if I’m using it less and not using GPS). It also recharges from 0 to 100-percent in 80 minutes (just 60 minutes for the 41mm version). This means that you will wear this watch more of the time (usually through two full sleeps before you have to recharge), likely resulting in better health metrics.

Is the Google Pixel Watch 3 worth it?

As it is, for Android users who want a robust smartwatch with excellent health tracking features, this is absolutely the one to get. For the more hardcore outdoors types, you’ll be left wishing that someone at Fitbit had just taken a Garmin Fenix 8 and copied all of the outdoor activity modes. Who knows, maybe they still will—and if they did it would probably be my favorite watch ever.

The is available in 41mm for $350 ($450 for the LTE version) and 45mm for $400 ($500 for LTE), in several color combinations. Personally, I think the LTE is worth it, as you can go phone-free and retain almost all the smartwatch functionality (though you will have to add it to your mobile plan, which will incur a monthly fee that varies by carrier). Ultimately, this is the best Android-powered smartwatch yet.

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Polar has long made some of the more affordable sports/adventure watches, but this year the Finnish company decided to swing for the fences and make a true flagship watch. It’s Polar’s most expensive wearable—starting at $750—but the has the nicest hardware ever featured in one of its watches. It’s just too bad the software can’t keep up.

The is being marketed as a “Premium Outdoor Watch.” You might think of it as a direct competitor to line. It features a 1.39-inch touchscreen display with a generous 454 x 454-pixel resolution. The case and bezel are made of sturdy and attractive stainless steel, and the screen is a an ultra-hard sapphire glass, which is known for its strength and scratch resistance. It’s water resistant to 100 meters and it features Polar’s latest for heart rate monitoring, pulse oximetry, and even skin temperature. Over three months, I put the watch through its paces running, surfing, hiking, swimming, and wearing it 24/7.

Here’s what I found.

Polar Grit X2 Pro Review

Weight: 2.8 oz (including wristband)
Display size: 1.39 in
Display resolution: 454 Ă— 454

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ĚýĚý ĚýĚý

Polar Grit X2 Pro at a Glance

Pros

• Good-looking hardware
• Accurate GPS tracking
• Excellent battery life
• Downloadable maps for offline use
• Comfortable to wear

Cons

• Menus and features aren’t intuitive to navigate
• Software has some major bugs
• Lacks powerful multisport functionality
• Expensive

Aesthetics

The watch comes together in a nice-looking package. The metal bezel looks absolutely great whether you’re wearing it on a trail or at a fancy dinner, and I’ve had zero issues with scratching despite scrambling over boulders and haphazardly throwing it into a backpack filled with other metal electronics. The screen has a high maximum brightness, with excellent contrast, and it’s easy to read even in blazing direct sunlight. You can choose low or medium brightness if you want to save battery-life, and you can also choose between having the watch face constantly illuminated or for it to just come on when you lift up your wrist to look at it or touch a button (which will save even more battery). Personally, I kept it in high brightness and kept “Display always off” turned off. Polar has a somewhat limited amount of watch faces to choose from (and you can’t download more, unlike with Garmin), but they’re attractive and they can be customized to display the information that’s most important to you at a glance.

User Experience

From the home screen, swiping to the left or right brings you to various widgets for your activity, sleep, cardio load, week at a glance, today’s training suggestions, navigation, sunrise/sunset times, weather, and media controls. These are generally well thought-out and display the information in easy-to-read layouts. There are even explainers for some of the metrics, which can be helpful because there’s a lot to sort through. The watch can give you suggestions for training or recovery, based on your sleep and the workouts you’ve had. It will also tell you if you’re overtraining or undertraining, and the workout suggestions will be specifically tailored to you. (Though, the accuracy of these kinds of technologies is still hotly debated.) I was testing this watch as I was just getting back into running after a knee injury. The workouts it suggested tended to be lower intensity than I probably would have chosen for myself, but it helped me get back on the horse without re-injuring myself.

I’m not a big fan of the way the buttons are configured. The watch features three buttons on the right side and two on the left, but I found it to be a bit unintuitive. For example, rather than the common start/stop button for activities, you have to start on the right middle, and stop on the left bottom. Pressing once pauses the activity. If you want to stop it you have to press and hold for another three seconds. I often found myself hitting the wrong button during activities, which could be frustrating.

The menu layout also took some getting used to, as did discerning which features are accessible via watch. Sometimes, I found myself zeroing in on the correct feature, only to have the watch tell me the thing you seek can only be found on the app, which sent me on another quest. Unfortunately, the app isn’t very intuitive, either, and overall you’re left with fewer options for customization than you get with Garmin or Suunto watches.

Activity Tracking

When it comes to activities, the watch can store 20 different sport types at a time, which sounds like plenty, but I found this to be a bit misleading. A lot of the activities have the same exact data fields, even when it doesn’t make any sense. Surfing, for example, includes elevation data fields. Why? It would be really nice if it could recognize the difference between when you’re riding a wave and when you’re paddling back out and give you different metrics on it, which the Apple Watch and both do. In fact, both of those watches will sync with Surfline which will allow you to easily find videos of you surfing (if you’re at a spot with a webcam). It also just doesn’t have as many activities to choose from as those competitors, which have more than 80.

That being said, if you’re running, specifically, the watch is really quite good. You can easily flip through current stats, maps, and music controls, and it even has some unique features such as , making it a sort of wrist-worn power meter. Running Power is a mechanical work rate, measured in watts, similar to what you’d get on a power meter on a bike. I also found Polar’s recommended workouts to be good, and the coaching (which comes through your phone) was helpful, too, which can help you set your pace and manage intervals based on time or distance. One really nice feature is that you can use the watch as a Bluetooth Heart Rate Monitor (HRM) and have it send live data to other apps or devices, like Strava, MapMyRun, or stationary bikes or treadmills.

TheThe watch’s heart rate monitoring feature also performed admirably, though not perfectly. I compared it on several workouts to my trusty Wahoo Trackr HRM Chest Strap and most of the time it matched pretty evenly, putting it on the upper end of par with other smartwatches I’ve tested.

Navigation

One of Polar Grit X2 Pro’s other banner features is navigation. The map is bright and colorful, and it’s easy to use your fingers to scroll around and zoom. It comes pre-loaded with very basic maps of North America, but you can download detailed maps in more specific regions through the Polar website. You just have to plug your watch into your computer to transfer it over.

You can download routes through Komoot and Strava Routes which work when you’re offline, which is convenient. But when using navigation modes this watch wants you to calibrate, and then re-calibrate the compass over and over again. This is liable to happen not just every hike, but sometimes multiple times per hike, and it involves twisting your wrist around into various uncomfortable positions until you have appeased the magnetic demons that live inside. Most other adventure watches do not ask you to do this ever, so this is definitely an oddity. (It’s also a known issue with the Grit X2 Pro, which means a software fix may be on the way.)

Guided Workouts

The Polar Grit X2 Pro doesn’t support importing workouts from apps like . That’s a pretty big deal for more competitive athletes, especially those working with coaches. You can export your workouts to TrainingPeaks and Strava after you’re done, but you can’t import them. Both Garmin and Apple Watches make this pretty seamless. Polar does have some of its own workouts pre-loaded that it kind of guides you through with animations, but if you need instructions it takes more button presses to get to the relevant info than you would think, meanwhile the timer keeps going. The animations aren’t as nuanced as those you find on Garmin or Fitbit watches, either. When in activity tracking, you’re limited to four data fields per page (e.g. elapsed time, distance, pace, heart rate, etc), which is fewer than most watches I’ve tested (the Epix allows up to seven). The numbers are large and easily visible, but I prefer information density to scrolling through pages while I’m trying to keep my pace up.

Storage and Battery LifeĚý

The watch is also somewhat more limited as an autonomous gadget than a lot of other flagship models. For example, despite the watch having 32GB of storage, you can’t download music to it and play it directly through a paired set of earbuds, which is unfortunate. That said, if you’re playing music off your phone the Grit X2 Pro does allow you to play/pause and skip tracks from your wrist, which is handy. Unlike other smartwatches, there’s also no mobile payment option—a bummer if you get caught out on a long run and need to grab a bite to eat or a taxi home.

I’m glad to say that battery life is excellent on this Grit X2 Pro. I kept the screen in high brightness and in the gesture-based wake-up mode (i.e. the screen isn’t always on, but it turns on when you raise your wrist or press a button), and doing that allowed me to average 10 days of battery life, which squares with Polar’s claims. Of course, that’s best-case-scenario. If you’re doing a lot of activities that use the GPS your battery life will drop considerably, but still, here it performed at least as well as my .

Polar Grit X2 Pro: Who Is It For?

Ultimately, this is a watch that I really wanted to like, and I did like it enough to wear it for three months, but I never came to love it, and the little annoyances never stopped being annoying. In my opinion, the UI and overall user experience falls short of other premium watches like the Garmin Fenix or Epix. And at $750 (or $870 for the that includes a leather wristband), I found the cost a little hard to stomach.

The hardware is really fantastic, however, and the watch is comfortable to wear. If you’re the kind of user who puts aesthetics first, want basic smartwatch functionality in an attractive package, and don’t mind the high price tag, this could make sense for you. But if you tend to prioritize function over fashion—and want even more features at a lower cost—you may want to look elsewhere.

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Here are some features I genuinely never thought I’d see on a watch: subaquatic topo maps; a dive-readiness tracker; underwater text messaging. Shockingly, all of these features exist on the , the most lusted-after top-of-the-line smartwatch and dive computer on the market. After two months of using the Mk3i for running, hiking, and diving, I can confidently say it’s the only watch I’ll ever need for the foreseeable future, and, apart from the significant pricetag hurdle, a no-brainer for anyone who spends time underwater.

How Is It as a Regular Smartwatch?

I’ve found that most dive watches that also profess to work as daily smartwatches are not worth the cost. There are almost always tradeoffs, like poor app integration, bulky or technical looks, and hard-to-read screens, especially underwater. (Luxury “dive watches” are not helpful for fitness on land or underwater).

The Mk3i has the same operating system and features as Garmin’s high-end smartwatches, like şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř favorite Fenix 7X, or the extra-fancy epix Pro. It has outstanding GPS accuracy and comes with preloaded maps, excellent fitness tracking, painless integration with third-party apps like Spotify, and easy-to-navigate menus. Importantly, it also looks sleek: apart from the larger, 51-millimeter face, the Mk3i wouldn’t look out-of-place at an upscale restaurant.

Welcome to the Future

As a basic dive computer, it does everything exceptionally well. Its BĂĽhlmann ZHL-16C decompression algorithm works as it should. Air integration (in the “i” models) using Garmin’s new T2 transceiver never skipped a beat or lost connection. Setting bearings and navigating underwater are easy with the compass. Critically, screen brightness and sharpness are next-level. The Mk3i has a 454×454 pixel AMOLED color touch-screen display, an upgrade from the , which had a light-reflecting MIPS display. Even for a far-sighted person, I had no trouble reading my watch sitting on a dive boat in midday sun.

Now to the James Bond stuff. Yes, you can send messages underwater. Six basic preloaded messages (“Are you okay?,” “Come to me,” etc.) travel via “Subwave” sonar to anyone else using a T2 transceiver. I didn’t have the chance to test it out since my dive partner was using an older Mk2 and T1 transceiver, but fellow divers tell me it works as advertised. It seems mostly helpful in low-visibility scenarios where hand signals are impossible, but for regular dive buddies who invest in the equipment, it’s a very cool perk.

Despite the inability to message my partner, I was still able to see his tank pressure, distance, and depth on my watch, which meant I never had to worry if he was running low on air or drifting too far away. The ability to track up to eight different transceivers is a game-changer for dive instructors with big groups.

Other futuristic features? DiveView Maps, a highly detailed topographic underwater map that lets you see exactly where you’re jumping in (it doesn’t track you below the surface, unfortunately). A “readiness score,” similar to a training recovery score on other tracking devices, judges your alertness and physical health for diving based on how well you’ve been sleeping, heart rate, jet lag, and other indicators. This was, however, the only Mk3i perk I found superfluous. If I refused to dive after every red-eye, I’d never dive at all. Lastly, the watch has a super bright flashlight that I initially thought was a bit gimmicky, but proved very useful for peering into dark nooks and crannies for octopuses and other reclusive creatures.

The most miraculous thing about the Mk3i is its battery life. Garmin claims up to 66 hours in Dive Mode. I spent three full days diving in Cozumel, Mexico and another day cave diving in cenotes outside of Mérida, and still had 89 percent battery life. For reference, the Mk2 had roughly half that battery life, and some competitors can hardly make it through a day of diving. If you took the Mk3i on a two week-long liveaboard and forgot your charger, you’d probably last the entire trip.

The High Price of Perfection

Predictably, the Mk3i has one major downside: price. At $1,600 for the 51mm version (or $2,100 if you need a new transceiver), this is one of the most expensive smartwatches Garmin makes. It’s far too expensive for someone who only goes diving once or twice a year. If you need a top-end fitness-tracking watch and you’re a regular diver, however, the exceptional performance in both use cases makes it a reasonable splurge.

Need a great smartwatch and only dip your toe in the water? The Apple Ultra 2 ($800) offers a very basic dive computer via the Oceanic+ app. And, if you just need a simple, reliable dive computer separate from your watch or fitness tracker, will do the job—just don’t wear it to dinner.

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As I sat through Apple’s Keynote presentation earlier this month at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, I held my breath when the Ultra 2 was announced. What I and many adventurers wanted most was for Apple to tell us that the new watch would have an amazing battery life that lasted a full week without any compromise.

Sadly, Apple said that the watch still has 36 hours of battery life at normal use, and 72 hours when you turn off features. That’s not bad, but it’s still dwarfed by the battery life of more robust adventure watches made by companies such as Garmin and Suunto.

Battery life, however, isn’t everything, and Apple did roll out several important updates that those of us in the outdoor world will care about.

Big Story: Small Footprint

The biggest story is that both the Ultra 2 and Series 9 watches—as well as Apple’s Sports Loop and Alpine Loop watch bands—are now the company’s first carbon-neutral products.

Apple says they made a host of changes in the manufacturing and shipping process of the Ultra 2 to make it carbon neutral. The Ultra 2 is made with 30 percent recycled or renewable content by weight, it is manufactured with 100 percent clean electricity, and 50 percent of the units are shipped by boat and train instead of planes. Those three changes equate to a 75 percent reduction in product emissions for each watch model, and Apple then uses high-quality carbon credits to offset everything else, according to the company.

The Alpine Loop uses 43 percent recycled content by weight and the Sports Loop is made of 45 percent recycled content by weight, and both benefit from the same clean energy, shipping, and offset strategies.

As other journalists have , we have to take Apple’s claim of carbon neutrality with a grain of salt because the company is still selling products, adding to waste, and using fossil fuels. Plus, the carbon neutrality claim is an obvious marketing asset. That said, Apple says it is committed to full carbon neutrality across all of its products by 2030, so they’re not stopping with their watches, or limiting its scope to within its own walls. Like Patagonia, which used its corporate muscle to push Gore-Tex to manufacture a PFC-free waterproof membrane (called ePE) and is now allowing everyone to access that material, Apple says that it’s on its way to full carbon neutrality by pioneering more environmentally friendly ways to build electronics and sharing access to those technologies with other companies.

Brighter, Handier

Like the original Ultra, the Ultra 2 is, by far, the best everyday adventure watch on the market. The giant, bright screen is great for outdoor workouts (the Ultra 2’s screen is even brighter than the original’s), the compass is easy to use, topo maps are easy to read on your wrist, the watch will track your hike and help you get back to your car if you get lost, you can see a waypoint where you last had cellular connectivity in case you need to make an emergency call, and more.

What’s new? In October, Apple is launching, via a software update, something called double tap on the Ultra 2 and Series 9. By just raising your watch arm and tapping together your thumb and index (or pointer) finger of that hand, you’ll be able to tell the watch to do a number of things. For example, in their Apple shows someone rock climbing and using the double tap feature to answer a call while on the rock. If I’m bike commuting, I can double tap to answer a quick call while leaving my other hand on the bars. When I’m walking my dogs, I can double tap to send a text without letting go of the leashes.

Apple says double tap is turned off while you’re running or using any of their present workouts, but you have to think that Apple will eventually find smart ways to use double tap in a workout to create a segment, scroll through metrics you don’t see on your first screen, etc. I could also see double tap being used to start a workout so that you can head out your door, tap your fingers, and your bike or running workout will immediately start tracking.

I’ve never geeked out about the wide variety of watch faces you can put on your Ultra 2, but this year I’m a huge fan of Apple’s new Modular Ultra watch face that has the compass front and center, shows elevation increase with a fun graphic, and has tons of customizations so I can easily access everything from my texts to my email to my fitness rings. It’s a perfect blend of my everyday and outdoor worlds and has made the watch that much more of my everyday routine.

Is the Apple Watch Ultra 2 Right for You?

There will always be people, like my friend who trains special forces search and rescue teams, who will only have a Garmin, Suunto, or Polar watch on his wrist. The minor updates on the Ultra 2 aren’t going to sway that decision.

If I’m being honest with myself, however, most of the time I don’t really need a Garmin with a battery that lasts weeks at a time. That’s because as a weekend warrior, I’m usually around a charger. I have a couple hunts coming up where I’ll take my Fenix 7X Pro, but most days I’m pretty damn happy with the Apple Watch Ultra.

I suspect many of you, even as şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř readers, will fall into the same boat. The Ultra 2 is a significant upgrade from the regular Apple Watch in terms of durability, battery life, and usability. And it has all the functionality needed to track workout metrics and navigate quick overnight hiking trips. As an everyday watch, I love that it’s comfortable to wear, easy to customize, keeps me on track with both my communication and workouts, and is oh-so-pretty to look at (in true Apple style).

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The Cheetah Pro ($300) is Amazfit’s best smartwatch yet—boasting a decent battery life, an AMOLED touch display, multi-band GPS, and a full slate of tri features—but it does have issues with usability and accuracy.

Pros

• Better-than-advertised battery life
• Surprisingly excellent and bright AMOLED touchscreen and watch faces
• Crazy amount of features/functions/sport modes
• Decent built-in run coaching
• Light weight
• Competitive price

Cons

• Hit-or-miss GPS/elevation accuracy
• Maybe too many functions
• Inconsistent touchscreen/bevel/buttons performance
• No running with power
• Very limited on-watch post-workout data

Amazfit Cheetah Pro Review

I’ll start this off by saying that this isn’t the first Amazfit watch I’ve tried out. I had a chance to check out one of their previous, super-affordable sport-focused smartwatches, but I didn’t rate it high enough to even warrant a review. It felt so unfinished and beta, I didn’t even know where to begin.

Amazfit is a Chinese brand, established in 2015 with very, very limited presence in North America. Most of their smartwatches are a little more “lifestyle” focused. Think: cheaper Fitbit.

As such, their limited traction in the U.S., coupled with limited interest in endurance sports—especially triathlon, with its open-water swim/tri/multisport features—means it probably isn’t on a lot of athlete’s radars. But with the release of the mostly capable Cheetah Pro, Amazfit is worth another look (with a few caveats, below).

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The Basics

Like many “endurance sports-focused” smartwatches in the $300 price range, the Cheetah Pro ticks the multisport basics—open-water and pool swimming, cycling (though not advanced metrics), running (including only cadence and stride length as advanced metrics), triathlon, and customizable multisport mode (for brick workouts, duathlon, swimrun, etc.). It departs from the typical $300 smartwatch feature list when you get into stuff like the super-bright (and quite pretty) Gorilla glass-covered AMOLED screen, multiband GPS, offline mapping, offline music, a built-in speaker and mic, and a battery life that in our experience exceeds the 14-day published spec. Features like this you usually find in the $450+ smartwatch range.

Granted, not everything is executed perfectly (or even well), but there are so many sports and everyday, “lifestyle” features on this watch—with limited documentation and iffy on-watch navigation—it’s actually difficult to find or use them all. Read on for what works and what doesn’t.

Amazfit Cheetah Pro Review: The Good

As mentioned, there is an absolute embarrassment of riches when it comes to functions, and, while we’ll get into a few that are missing, it’s tough to find something on your smartwatch wishlist that isn’t built into the Cheetah Pro. Tri-important functions like open-water swim, triathlon mode, and multisport mode all work well enough for 95 percent of a triathlete’s needs, and we found each customizable (enough) to present the data fields you want for most training or racing applications.

In terms of hardware, the touchscreen is definitely a pleasant surprise at this price. It’s tough to find a decent AMOLED screen on a sports-capable smartwatch for under $400—the Garmin Forerunner 265 series (which also has a Gorilla Glass AMOLED touchscreen) is probably the closest, and it runs $450. We can confirm that the screen is quite responsive, with minimal ghosting, and the colors are bright and vibrant, even in direct daylight, without completely tanking the battery life. On that note, though Amazfit advertises 14 days of basic use and seven days of heavy use (read: triathlon-level training), we actually found it exceeded these projections by a good amount. We got somewhere between 15–20 days using the always-on display for everyday use, and around 10–15 days with a good slate of workouts thrown in.

The Cheetah Pro also has physiological metrics, like “performance readiness,” recovery, and workout impact—as well as AI run coaching. Further testing could confirm the accuracy of these metrics (maybe), but they were oddly different than our Garmin Enduro 2 control. The important note is that you’ll again get functions usually found on $400+ devices, on a watch that costs far less—and they’re easy to use and understand.

One of the big drawbacks of Amazfit’s previous sports-focused smartwatches was their impossible-to-use user interfaces. The menus were tough to navigate, the settings abstract and not super useful. It’s worth noting that Amazfit has made amazing progress on their UI, and though it’s far from perfect, it’s at least competitive with brands like Suunto, Garmin. Polar, and Coros. The menus make sense, they’re mostly easy to navigate, and they pair well with the AMOLED touchscreen.

Amazfit Cheetah Pro Review: The OK

While the feature list is impressive, and on paper the hardware totally outperforms at this price point, a few lingering issues make the Cheetah Pro a little more “beta” than the finished product you’d see from top competitive brands such as those listed above.

To start, the multi-band GPS is somehow inconsistent when compared with other multi-band GPS smartwatches. On-land distance consistency wasn’t too bad, except in deep canyons, but in the open water we found variances of 10 to 20 percent both relative to the Cheetah Pro (same route, multiple laps, below) and when compared to traditionally excellent open-water smartwatches like the Garmin Enduro 2 or Fenix 7-series. While these variances might not seem like a lot, if you set your lap timer to go off every 500 meters during an open-water interval workout, you could be doing a 400 or you could be doing a 600 from lap to lap. That’s quite a bit.

Elsewhere, but slightly less importantly, we found the elevation gain to differ vastly from high-end smartwatches (below), with very unusual variances in steep terrain. At first, we assumed this was due to a lack of a barometric altimeter (common on smartwatches under $400), but the feature list says the Cheetah Pro is baro-equipped, so the discrepancy is a bit of a mystery.

We also found the performance of both the touchscreen and the buttons (which include a rotating bevel, oddly similar to much of ) to be slightly inconsistent—functioning most of the time, but not always. And after only a few ocean swims (with the recommended fresh water flushing), we had some rough play in the rotating bevel, though it still worked.

Finally, smaller things—like no run power (though it does have somewhat advanced running metrics like stride length and cadence), a very limited on-watch post-workout data screen (forcing you to use the Zepp app, which is actually very good), and intermittent issues with smartphone connectivity—might not be make-or-break for the Cheetah Pro, but it does show that Amazfit isn’t 100% there when it comes to their sport-focused devices.

Conclusions

When compared to the previous Amazfit models that I’ve tried (and hated), the Cheetah Pro might as well be from another brand. Clearly, Amazfit spent some serious time on this smartwatch, spoke to actual athletes, and did some R&D before releasing it into the wild. Also, more than a few menus and UI elements (along with the shape and button style) do look eerily similar to some of Coros’ stuff—if you’re going to “borrow,” you could borrow from worse. Most of the issues we had are pretty small, but some of the hardware problems—like GPS accuracy, elevation gain accuracy, and button/touchscreen inconsistencies show that Amazfit might have ticked the boxes, but still have some ways to go if they’re to compete with Garmin, Suunto, Polar, or Coros—excellent price aside.

Meanwhile, $300 is an absolute bargain for an AMOLED touchscreen smartwatch with a ridiculous amount of sports functions (and a surprising amount of great lifestyle functions that almost no one else is trying in a sports-focused smartwatch, like the speaker and mic).

We obviously only scratched the surface on all of the different features in the Cheetah Pro, but an exhaustive review would end up a tome—especially since the features and functions don’t always work quite as advertised. Bottom line: if you’re looking for a smartwatch under $400 and you need a nice, bright color touchscreen, you literally won’t find anything else that works for tri—but you might need to sacrifice some accuracy in the meantime.

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A month ago, one of the runners I coach contacted me in a panic. We’ll call him “Adam.” He’s training for a sub-three-hour marathon and is, consequently, pouring himself into his training.

So far, everything in his preparation has been going to plan. He’s healthy. His workout times are solid. He’s hitting overall mileage levels that are challenging but manageable. Adam has also been feeling good for most of his training, so he’s right where I’d like him to be.

But Adam was panicking over his cadence. Last week, he ran two of his easy runs with an average cadence of 169 steps per minute. Usually, his cadence lands at around 170 to 171 steps per minute.

Was Adam right to panic over his cadence slipping ever so slightly? Was this a sign of excessive fatigue? Would this trend keep progressing over time?

Having this immediate, ongoing access to so many metrics about your running is both a blessing and a curse. In this case, Adam had nothing to worry about, but let’s discover why.

Drawbacks to Data

Now that runners have such unprecedented access to robust training and bodily data, it can be tempting to pore over every detail to determine what can be optimized to ensure great performances, fewer injuries, and longevity in the sport. But therein lies the risk. Humans are not robots, and our data is often messy, which can cause us to interpret temporary changes as permanent.

Adam’s cadence, for example, might have been affected by his sleep, overall fatigue, shoe choice, the terrain he was running on, or a number of other variables. Let’s also consider that, at such a low variability from his “normal” cadence, there could have also simply been a measurement error. GPS cadence accuracy isn’t 100 percent accurate, anyway.

Alas, his cadence improved the following week, and we stopped paying attention to this metric. But that didn’t stop him from anxiously stressing out over it, likely spiking his cortisol levels unnecessarily and compromising recovery.

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In this case, access to data led to perfectionism, which has no place in running. Because we’re not robots, our progress is rarely linear. We experience setbacks, plateaus, and minor blips in our training as our ability to recover varies over time and life stressors come and go.

If we attempted to increase our mileage with unwavering linearity, run perfect workout splits, have the correct cadence at every moment during a run, or negative split every long run, we would usually fail.

Measuring the performance of our bodies serves as a constant reminder that our biological systems do not behave as neatly as we’d like them to.

Data Makes us Perform (for Others)

The other major problem with the data our smartwatches provide is that they often cause us to train performatively. Instead of training appropriately and strategically, many will train in a way that will look impressive on platforms like Strava.

This happened to me just yesterday. Instead of running an easy five miles, I relied more on pace so that I would have a nice round number to show off on Strava. While my body wanted to run five miles at an easy effort, in about 38:45, I sped up over the last two miles so that the clock was an even 38:00 when I finished.

Almost any runner with a smartwatch has dabbled in this data overload, pouring over charts and graphs to find the signal in the Eras Tour-level noise. But ultimately, that result is meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Besides the physical disadvantage of running easy runs too fast, there’s also a psychological component to this problem: it makes us feel like we’re not training well. Our runs feel inadequate, especially when we fall into the comparison trap on social platforms.

Do Smartwatches Impede Long-Term Development?

There’s also another major problem with relying too heavily on your smartwatch: it may hamper your long-term development of interpreting your body’s communication signals.

This plays out in two different scenarios. The first and most common is pacing ability. GPS watches are now more accurate than ever at displaying your current running pace. That helps us fine-tune our effort during workouts, races, and long efforts. The problem is that we now must rely on a watch to fine-tune our paces. It’s becoming more and more difficult to intuitively understand how fast you’re running and how to adjust your pace in real-time.

RELATED: One Runner Followed His Watch’s AI Training Plans for a Month. Here’s What Happened.Ěý

Certain GPS watches also provide runners with fitness and recovery scores, alongside specific suggestions on what workouts to run and how much recovery to take. This sounds great in theory, but over time it can erode a runner’s subjective judgment on their fatigue level and injury risk. Instead of listening to their body, they listen to their watch—informed by proprietary algorithms—and, therefore, are less able to learn what their body is trying to tell them.

This may keep you healthier in the short-term, but at the expense of better knowing your body over the long-term.

Three Smart Tips for Smartwatches

Despite this encroaching overreliance on our GPS gadget’s feedback, smartwatches can, of course, be incredible training tools. We now have the power to peer into the minute details of our physiology and performance to better guide our training. While misinterpreting or overanalyzing metrics is common, we can use these tools more effectively if we better understand them and our bodies.

1. Focus more on objective metrics than subjective metrics. The distance, pace, and overall time of your run is more important than an algorithmic “score” that tells you how many hours are needed until you’re ready for your next training session. It’s much more difficult to get those objective metrics wrong (and watch technology means these values are more accurate than ever).
2. Focus on trends over time rather than specific moments in time. Training is rarely linear, so don’t be upset if your cadence decreases temporarily, your heart rate variability is low one day, or your pace isn’t “normal” on a random Tuesday. Like Adam’s cadence discussed earlier, some “problems” are not actually problems at all; they’re simply reflections of the fact that you are a biological system, and variability is always going to exist.
3. Remember that subjective markers are estimates. Things like recovery scores, training readiness, or estimated finish times are simply guides and best guesses, rather than firm realities. Your watch does not know you better than you know you.

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A few months ago, I noticed an odd thing about my Garmin Enduro 2 watch. At the start of my Saturday run, instead of immediately searching for satellites, it displayed a new screen, an customized just for me. I was planning to do a long run, but my watch said I should do intervals instead.

Initially, I scoffed. How could this wrist device know what my body needs, better than me? The longer I sat with it, the more curious I got.

In the last few years, running watches have made substantial leaps forward. They are now able to collect and analyze a wealth of information, stuff like heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels, respiration rates, sleep cycles, stress, acclimatization, stride mechanics, and other metrics. Even midpack models offer a robust feature set that would’ve been hard to imagine a decade ago. Most major watch brands like Suunto, Coros, and Polar now offer a suite of recovery recommendations, load tracking, and basic workout suggestions.

RELATED: The Best Sports Watches 2023

Could my Garmin watch actually know something I don’t about my training progress? Could it, heaven forbid, replace a coach? I have had a handful of coaches over my running career, usually whenever I had a clear race or goal in mind, so needless to say, I was skeptical. Currently I have no coach, and no specific race I’m preparing for, so I decided to be a guinea pig, making a resolution to wear my Garmin for a full month, 24 hours a day, and do everything it recommended.

Who Is This AI Coaching Watch Function Made For?

In 2020, Garmin bought , a Finnish company, and started to release suggested workouts a few months later, crunching numbers on your recovery, sleep, and body strain to recommend what you should do on any given day. The goal? To use machine learning to help improve users’ VO2 max and lactate thresholds, or in other words, your short- and long-term fitness capacity.

It’s easy to be skeptical—even this publication is dubious of Garmin’s recovery algorithm—but the more I asked around, the more I realized how few people had actually given these suggested workouts, or even the Garmin Coach feature, a fair shot.

So who, exactly, are these suggested workouts for? Joe Heikes, Forerunner Product Manager, says that Garmin developed these recommendations for “the middle of running’s society.” The top quarter of the sport—highly competitive, elite, pro runners—likely have a coach already, while most new runners aren’t ready for a structured training plan as they ease into the sport.

“This feature is for committed runners who need a little help,” says Heikes. “They don’t need a ton of hand-holding, but do want a plan and to see progress.”

Herman Bonner, who works for Firstbeat Analytics, says the biggest challenge is trust. “Anytime you’re giving advice, you first have to prove you are trustworthy. This takes a lot of time and effort.” But Booner is confident in the algorithm. “As an analytics company, we sifted through all kinds of data, applied accepted training philosophies, and tested for years, but our customers don’t see that,” he says. “They have to use the feature to see the benefits, but it’s hard to commit before you trust it. So there is a loop.”

Heikes says they first identified the need almost ten years ago. Garmin was getting feedback from users who wanted guidance on workouts, something to push them in the right direction. “I was skeptical when I started testing it; so was Herman,” Heikes says. “The watch will never be perfect. It’s built on a specific coaching philosophy that’s not right for every runner, but it’s far better than nothing.”

Automated Training Plans: First-Hand Experience

Because suggested workouts are informed by the aggregate of all the data your watch is able to collect, I committed to wearing it nonstop. This isn’t normal for me—I typically wear watches only for runs—but I knew it would be more accurate (and presumably beneficial) if I was fully committed.

From there, Garmin took over. I didn’t have to log my workouts or figure out my baseline fitness, like you would with a new coach. All of this hums along in the background and only gets more accurate the more you use the watch—the strange beauty of AI tracking everything you do.

As I learned, there are seven different types of recommended workouts: a mix of recovery runs, base endurance, high-intensity aerobic workouts, and anaerobic training efforts. I found this to be diverse enough to stay interested for a month, but I wonder if it would get repetitive in the long run. I would later learn it’s designed as a step in the process of establishing a running routine, not necessarily something you would rely on for years.

The workouts scale as you get more fit, in terms of duration and intensity. My ramp-up started slow, but as the weeks flew by, I did notice an acceleration, especially in the duration of my harder workouts. My biggest pain points were in the first week when the watch served up some questionable recommendations. For example, on my second day, Garmin suggested a tempo workout, but I was feeling terrible after sleeping poorly, so I did an easy run instead.

Garmin acknowledges its own imperfection on their website: “,” implying that you can skip workouts as needed. Blips like this are part of the process—the watch is trying to learn your long-term patterns, and errors are much more likely early on.

On the plus side, right away I noticed how well the algorithm incorporates data from other devices, like my Garmin Edge bike computer. This is critical, as someone who keeps a relatively even balance between running and riding. It also incorporates big efforts in the gym, telling me to back off my next day of running after a hard kettlebell workout. I liked this multi-sport integration, which applies to many other weekend dabblers like me.

The Final Verdict

Overall, I found the AI behind the watch to be mostly accurate, suggesting base efforts in line with my expectations, threshold workouts consistent with past workouts, and anaerobic sprint workouts to be hard, as they should be. While it took time to build trust, I feel confident that the logic is sound, although not for everyone. If you already have specific workouts you like that focus on key running metrics like VO2 max or lactate threshold, you’re probably not the intended user of the feature anyway.

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While I enjoyed my month using the feature, I’ve already returned to my old habits of training by feel, an approach that offers more flexibility. But maybe this experiment says more about my personal preferences than it does about the watch and its algorithms.

Heikes says the suggested workouts feature was not developed to replace coaching, though he thinks they could certainly complement each other. “There is a lot of data for a coach to look at for high-level advice, while letting the watch operate as an AI training plan for day-to-day workouts,” he says.

Corrine Malcolm, who has been coaching since 2016 and founder of , sees an opportunity for coaches to work in tandem with AI coaching platforms.

“The biggest challenge of coaching is how to scale. If you’re doing it right, you can only support a few dozen people at a time,” says Malcolm, who believes a hybrid model could provide value to a runner who doesn’t want to pay a large monthly fee.

“Think of it like a low-cost, low-touch model. A weekly office hours to ask questions to a human, while mostly relying on the AI to give workouts.” Leveraging the algorithms ability to collect and analyze data, Malcolm says a hybrid model could help her coaching business scale while giving runners a new style of coaching to consider, and from which to benefit. “I could probably coach a few hundred people this way, which is a win-win for everybody.”

After my personal experiment, I can see the value of the data and suggested workouts to inform and simplify coaching. And for someone just a couple years into the sport without a coach, I’m confident that the suggested workouts will help improve fitness and variation, provided you stay consistent and (gasp!) trust the algorithm.

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Changes are coming to your Apple Watch, and they’re made with outdoor athletes in mind. At the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5, Apple unveiled its plans for watchOS 10, to the watch since its introduction in 2015. In addition to adding Smart Stack widgets, new designs, and even a face featuring Snoopy, the company announced new wellness and training features geared toward improving your physical and mental health. Here are the five you should know about before the update is available his fall.

1. The Launch of Cycling Features

If you’re a cyclist, you may often turn to your watch to track your ride. With watchOS 10, you’ll be able to sync your watch with Bluetooth-enabled bike sensors. This will allow new metrics, such as cadence and power, to appear on your watch. Apple also released a new workout view for cyclists, giving you better insights into your ride while you’re on the road.

Have trouble figuring out your (FTP)? Now, you’ll be able to turn to your watch for that. Using a combination of your heart rate, motion data, and power, the watchOS 10 will provide personalized power zones, in addition to your FTP.

If you choose to use your iPhone on a ride, you’ll be able to have workouts from your watch automatically appear on your phone. You can also select from a variety of different views on your phone to monitor this realtime data.

2. New Compass and Map Updates for Hikers

In the new operating system, watchOS 10 will generate a “Cellular Connection Waypoint,” which will note where you last had cell service, so you’ll be able to contact friends and family.ĚýAdditionally, a different waypoint will offer a spot on your hike where you can make an emergency call if needed.

When you’re out on the trail, the watch’s new map will be able to give you even more insights, including points of interest, elevation details and critical markers. Important information on nearby trails, such as their length, duration, and difficulty, will also be available through this app.

3. Data for App Developers

Motion sensors in the watch will be able to give more feedback to you. , Apple noted that this type of feedback could help evaluate your golf swing or better your tennis serve. App developers will be able to use these new features to be able to offer more robust and personalized workouts.

4. Logging Emotions and Moods

In addition to tracking your workouts and steps, you’ll now be able to monitor your emotions and mood with watchOS 10 in the Mindfulness app. Over time, you’ll be able to see what factors may be influencing or shifting your mood on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.

5. Taking Care of Your Vision

To combat , known as nearsightedness, watchOS 10 will monitor the number of hours you spend in daylight. that children who spend more hours in daylight are at a lower risk for developing the condition later in life. You’ll be able to view this data in your iPhone’s Health app.

In addition to this feature on the watch, Apple will now monitor how close you are to your iPhone or iPad and provide prompts for you to move your screen further away, in order to reduce the strain on your eyes.

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