Garmin needs to make its indoor workouts as compelling as its outdoor ones

Sunday Runday(Image credit score: Android Central)In his weekly column, our Senior Editor of Wearables and Fitness Michael Hicks discusses the world of smartwatches, apps, and health tech associated to operating and well being, in his quest to get sooner and healthier (and enable you do the identical).When it involves monitoring indoor exercises, Garmin is extremely bold, attempting to trace reps for 1000’s of train varieties that the majority smartwatches cannot acknowledge. At the identical time, although, it would not do practically sufficient on the subject of indoor exercises. Garmin began to handle this final 12 months, however 2024’s the 12 months the place it must go additional.Most health watches use your wrist actions to research your operating type, observe steps, or robotically detect if you begin a exercise. Some manufacturers like Samsung even observe particular reps like squats and curls, although often not very nicely and never very many sorts. With Garmin, most of its focus is on outside actions. But it additionally helps you to obtain exercises to your Garmin watch that information you thru any of its 1,600 workouts throughout one exercise. It helps you to progress straight from burpees to mountain climbers to squats with a single button press, whereas your Galaxy Watch 6 makes you pull them up one after the other. It’s a cool idea, as you may observe pre-made exercises or create your individual. You may even pause a exercise when you see an unfamiliar train to see an animated GIF of the right type. It’s a robust basis for followers of HIIT, yoga, or weight-lifting, who won’t usually see Garmin watches as the best match. But Garmin’s execution of its indoor exercises is not practically as robust as its outside exercises, and it is a missed alternative. Finicky monitoring(Image credit score: Michael Hicks / Android Central)I initially examined Garmin’s train monitoring throughout my Garmin Venu 3 evaluate final 12 months. More lately, I made a decision to attempt finishing 100 totally different Garmin train units to see how correct the watch was for various varieties. I ended up stalling out round 50, as soon as I noticed my preliminary evaluate impressions of the function weren’t altering a lot — and my physique obtained too sore to proceed.Slow, deliberate workouts like squats or sit-ups, the place your complete physique strikes up and down, are tracked practically completely. The similar goes for one thing like leaping jacks, the place your arm strikes in a large arc that is straightforward for the Venu 3’s built-in accelerometer and gyroscope to interpret. For different workouts like push-ups, the place your wrist strikes a lot lower than the remainder of your physique, Garmin watches wrestle to precisely choose what number of you have accomplished. Even a lunge, which is a big movement, is not all the time registered as a result of your arm stays inflexible whereas your physique descends, not truly shifting that a lot.Tracking your entire physique’s actions through your wrist is an inexact science, however it’s nonetheless a enjoyable function.For difficult motions like burpees or mountain climbers, the Venu 3 grossly undersold what number of occasions I moved, freezing at a sure quantity and even subtracting as if it was monitoring me shifting in reverse. Then, in fact, there’s the easy proven fact that your Garmin watch cannot observe your entire physique. For workouts like Single-arm Kettlebell Swing, your watch will solely detect the swings out of your wrist arm. And it may well’t differentiate between lifting your entire physique and easily lifting your arm to test the watch face, resulting in false positives. Believe it or not, I do not maintain these points in opposition to Garmin. A smartwatch’s accelerometer and gyroscope can solely be so subtle earlier than you are asking for the unattainable; you’d want some form of good digicam system for correct full-body monitoring. Colleagues who use different watches on the gymnasium, such because the Galaxy Watch 6, report the identical points. So I’m pleased to make use of an train routine as a suggestion, not an actual depend; I simply transfer on to the following train once I know I’ve hit the goal quantity, even when Garmin would not understand it. Limited exercises and peculiar UI(Image credit score: Michael Hicks / Android Central)So what’s my beef with Garmin’s HIIT exercises, except for these unavoidable points?For starters, Garmin has about 80 pre-made exercises in its app. That might sound like rather a lot, however when you’re tired of particular actions like yoga (15) or pilates (14), or if you do not have the best gear for sure actions, that quantity dwindles quick.You’ll even discover some exercises are only one or two workouts time and again, like “40/20 Squat Thrusts.” As the title suggests, you do 40 seconds of squat thrusts, then 20 seconds of relaxation, then repeat 9 extra occasions. It’s a very good exercise, however doing that time and again will make train really feel like work. Garmin has over 100 kinds of squats, from sumo squats to air squats, most of which do not present up within the official exercises. It’s a missed alternative. You can, in fact, design your individual exercises. But as somebody who tried to create a bunch of customized exercises for this text, belief me once I say it may be gradual and tedious. Garmin had each day instructed exercises for runners and cyclists; why not for HIIT or the gymnasium?What I need is for Garmin to channel health apps like Fitbod, which robotically generates exercise routines with customized workouts based mostly in your present soreness, muscle map targets, and at-home gear. Garmin already offers each day exercise strategies for operating or biking, focused to your VO2 Max stage, Body Battery, and previous actions. Customized gymnasium, HIIT, or body-weight exercises that pull from its 1,600+ library of workouts appear to be a pure subsequent step. You may full some newbie exercises as a baseline and inform your Garmin watch on the finish how tough you discovered it, so it may well regulate your workload accordingly. There may even be Garmin Coach routines for attempting to hit sure energy benchmarks, like having the ability to do X variety of push-ups in a row or bench-press Y kilos. Garmin Challenges could be a pure match for, say, monitoring what number of push-ups you have completed in January, for people engaged on their New Year’s resolutions.(Image credit score: Michael Hicks / Android Central)My different grievance is that Garmin has chosen to bury its train animations — one among my favourite options — for some inexplicable motive.  First, Garmin deliberately disabled animated examples for customized exercises. Thanks to Reddit, I do know the workaround: you make a duplicate of an official exercise, delete the entire workouts, add your individual, and reserve it below a brand new title; that method, your Garmin watch registers the exercise as “official” and reveals the animations. But the truth that it’s important to do that within the first place is weird. Next, when Garmin added muscle maps to exercises within the September 2023 replace, it had the unintentional impact of constructing the animations more durable to search out. The muscle maps took the animations’ authentic slot; now, when you’ve forgotten methods to do a burpee, it’s important to pause the exercise, scroll to the final widget the place the muscle map is, then hit the Start button to see the animation above. Then you again out of that menu and scroll again to restart the exercise. It’s tedious, and I ended up discovering it extra handy to Google methods to do some workouts as a substitute. Especially as a result of not the entire 1,600 workouts even have animations. Personally, I’d desire seeing the train animation as a widget you may scroll to through the exercise with out pausing it. Garmin is catering to no-nonsense athletes who wish to end their cross-training or gymnasium reps with out watching an train video for steering. Putting its cool animations entrance and heart looks like a no brainer. Why am I nitpicking Garmin’s ambitious-but-flawed indoor exercises, when different smartwatch manufacturers do worse? Because I’m hopeful it will obtain one thing no different health model can. Apple and Fitbit provide enjoyable, motivational exercise movies with music and training; they’re generalized, not personalized, and most of its clients are nice with that. Other health smartwatches have by no means provided personalized exercises for any sport. A number of like Amazfit are beginning to attempt AI teaching, however that, too, solely pulls normal health information from the web.Garmin is the one model with the potential to drag off customized indoor exercises. Its 1,600 workouts and animations are a robust basis, as are its “daily workout suggestions” for outside sports activities. The query is whether or not Garmin’s crew of coaches and algorithmic specialists have the know-how to advocate gymnasium exercises the identical method they information your efforts on the observe or path.My hope is that Garmin would not squander this potential. By including exercise muscle maps in September and a brand new Workouts app within the December 2023 replace, it signaled that it desires to cater extra to indoor athletes. If it may well proceed to enhance on rep monitoring accuracy, provide extra exercises, and begin recommending customized routines to athletes, that might go a great distance.