To cut a long story short, I’m a fan of the Garmin vívoactive 6. As someone who rarely wore watches growing up, I like how the slimline design sits inconspicuously on the wrist – it’s so light I often forget I’m wearing it – and having up to 11 days of battery life means I’m far less likely to be caught out than with my usual Apple Watch.
The round face doesn’t derail your style choices, I can record pretty much any sport I try my hand at thanks to the 80-plus tracking modes, and the general health insights around sleep and stress offer actionable insights to help me tweak my weekly routine for the better.
It can’t match the Apple Watch for apps and smartwatch features, the Whoop for lifestyle insights, or even more specialist Garmin wearables for run-tracking. But as a more affordable jack of all trades, it’s excellent value for money for generalists like myself.
I don’t have a sub-three hour marathon time, nor has anyone ever paid me to play any sport. I can lift weights that are heavy for some and a warm-up for others, while my Hyrox time is good-not-great. But I love moving and make a point of doing it in as many ways as possible.
This is where the vívoactive 6 excels. Whether I decide to climb a mountain with friends, pick up a padel racket or hit the water for some paddleboarding, there’s an option for that. The only area I felt it missed the mark somewhat was during my gym sessions. My general workouts contain a CrossFit-inspired blend of strength training, Olympic lifting, gymnastics and HIIT-style workouts.
On the Apple Watch, I liked that I could hit go on a “functional fitness” workout at the start of my session and let it run until the end. With the vívoactive 6, I had to record my strength training and HIIT workouts separately. The strength training tracking also tries to automatically count reps and sets, although I found this wasn’t too helpful for me. When I have my head down during a lifting session, I prefer to focus on the exercise at hand without looking at my watch all too often.
As you might expect from a Garmin, the running features are very solid – if not quite on par with the likes of the brand’s fenix and forerunner lines due to a lack of barometric altimeter to track elevation, and the use of the brand’s last generation heart rate monitor.
You can create custom interval sessions fairly easily on the app, setting target times and paces; there is a virtual coach available for a range of distances at no extra cost via the Garmin Coach feature; it provides race-day pacing strategies; and you receive in-depth running metrics on factors such as cadence, ground contact time and stride length.
However, perhaps unexpectedly for a Garmin, it was the non-exercise features I enjoyed the most. Where Apple challenges you to “close your rings” by completing a daily step, move (active calories) and stand goal, Garmin scores your sleep and body battery out of 100 to dissuade you from 2am social media spirals.
A snackable morning report reveals your sleep quality and how long you spent in each sleep stage (deep, light, REM, awake) then provides actionable advice on how to approach your day – this includes how much sleep you should aim for the following night, and the “recovery hours” needed before your body is back to feeling its best after hard workouts.
The app also has an “at a glance” section showing your heart rate, intensity minutes, steps, estimated daily calorie burn, heart rate variability status, stress, fitness age (calculated using factors such as BMI, levels of vigorous exercise and resting heart rate) and VO2 max. Several of these are presented on colour-coded graphs to signify whether your results are poor, fair, good, excellent or superior, and the app provides guidance on how you can improve them.
The sum of these parts is actionable takeaways I was able to use to improve my health and performance, which in my eyes is exactly what a fitness tracker is for.
You don’t get premium features like an ECG, skin temperature sensor, Garmin’s latest sensor technology or multi-band GPS, so data might not be quite as accurate as the likes of the most recent fenix and venu models. But for the vívoactive’s target audience – the everyday exerciser – these features are likely surplus to requirements.
I did find the Garmin Connect app a little less user-friendly than the Apple Fitness app at first. Being an iPhone user, the latter’s bright colours and blocky, almost childlike, designs came naturally to me, while the Garmin app was a bit more wordy and officious. But after a few weeks of wear, I was navigating the Garmin platform with relative ease.
