Tracking Life With A Garmin Instinct Watch
One of the best purchases I've ever made is a Garmin smart watch.
I started with the original Garmin Instinct several years ago, and then earlier this year upgraded to the Garmin Instinct 2X Solar.
It was entirely a health-related purchase.
I've never been a big smart watch guy. About five years ago I tried a basic Fossil smart watch because I wanted to go on runs and listen to music or podcasts without lugging around my phone. I set it up with all the default settings and immediately hated the buzzing notifications that came to my wrist whenever I got a message, email, slack or some other notification.
I quickly turned off all the notifications. Then found out the watch I got couldn't actually store music or podcasts—it just served as media player interface. Which basically made the thing pointless for me. Back into the box it went.
Some time after that failed smart watch experiment I started to become more intentional about my health and fitness. I wanted to see how many calories I burned daily to dial in my diet. I wanted to track my workouts more intentionally to progressively overload, log my runs to force myself to see how slow I really was and force myself to train more effectively and get a bit less slow.
"Things that get measured, get managed" as they say.
Nothing has helped me measure my health and training more than a no frills, no-notifications Garmin Instinct watch.
The Garmin connect suite of data is easy to use and not overwhelming. The workout data allows me to focus on zone 2 training and use my heart rate to be more effective in the sort of runs I'm doing. Seeing my sleep data has allowed me to improve the quality and consistency of the sleep I am getting, and the same is true of having a daily step counter.
I have never understood—and still don't understand—the value so many people seem to find with smart watches as an extension of their phone. For things like messaging, emailing, and getting random pings from all sorts of apps. My phone does that more than I need it too already.
But I love my Instinct as a passive health tracker that simply works in the background, looks like an actual watch and can also get 30+ days of battery life between charges. It's one of the most useful tools I own, and a piece of tech that has been solely a positive in my life.