Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar £549
Simon Richardson tests a multi-sport watch that’s got fitness tracking dialled
Garmin’s top Forerunner watch is not so much an activity tracker as a complete wrist-based diagnostics tool. Aside from tracking your riding, running or whatever activity you wish to do, it measures a staggering amount of data to feed back on your recovery, health, training readiness, optimal training zones, stress levels and more. All this information gleaned by just sitting on your wrist.
While GPS tech is clearly at the heart of Garmin products, it’s the green LEDS on the back and the heart rate data they capture that’s the really clever tech in this watch.
Tracking heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) allows the Forerunner 955 to precisely gauge the impact of exercise.
Construction
The 955 Solar weighs in at 53.2g, sits 16mm off your wrist and is 47mm wide, with the five buttons around the side each protruding another 2mm. The strap is soft rubber, with a metal buckle with holes in the strap every 2mm allowing for plenty of adjustment.
The 64-colour display on the touchscreen is excellent, with the Gorilla glass durable. It’s considerably clearer and brighter than my old Forerunner 255, but not as pinpoint sharp as watches with AMOLED displays such as the Garmin Epix.
The ‘Solar’ in the name means a 1.8mm solar panel ring around the outer edge of the watch face. If you live in the UK, don’t get too excited about this feature, especially during winter. My test unit went several months without measuring a single unit of solar charge.
The 955 is available without the solar panel, costs £70 less and has exactly the same functionality – and the battery life is good already without solar assistance.
On low-activity weeks I went over seven days without needing to charge it. The more you use GPS and heavy data screens (like mapping), the quicker the battery depletes.
First ride
Once you’ve set up the watch using Garmin Connect, using it is straightforward enough.
It comes ready to go with several activities. I had bike, indoor bike and gravel bike at the top of my list but there’s cyclo-cross, mtb, e-bike, bike commute, bike tour, run, trail run, track run, walk, pool swim, open water, golf, strength, snowshoe… the list goes on and on.
All of the data screens for each activity are fully customisable. I found I could happily have five metrics displayed without anything ever getting too squeezed.
It comes preset with the touchscreen disabled during an activity. The buttons are more reliable when you’re moving and you’re more likely to accidentally trigger the screen to move a sleeve out of the way, so I kept this setting.
“Even with a 1.3in display, mapping was easy to follow”
Mapping and navigation
Even with a 1.3in display, mapping was easy to follow. On a gravel test bike that required a specific out-front mount, I had to use the 955 instead of my computer and it was fine. A glance to the wrist isn’t as handy as a glance to the centre of the handlebars, but I was still able to follow the map.
I rode onto some new paths to try to get myself lost but was always able to zoom in and out, and scroll around in order to find my way back to where I wanted to go. I did of course have to stop in order to do this, but mapping on the watch is easy to use in this way.
Alternatively, you can upload routes onto it from Strava or a similar app.
Training
The 955’s training status function gives you a running update on your fitness and recovery. It’s built up using your training load and other metrics including sleep, recovery, stress and HRV status, from which it calculates a training readiness score. In general, this reflected how I was feeling, although the recovery time suggested was a little on the long side. That said, the watch would often suggest a daily training activity even if it showed over a day’s worth of recovery time.
Sleep and HRV
The technology to measure your sleep just from your wrist is not hugely accurate. It cannot tell whether you’re asleep or if you’re lying in bed with your eyes open, catastrophising.
However, each morning it will give you a report including a sleep score, made up of light sleep, deep sleep, awake time and REM.
It will also measure your HRV through the night. Heart rate variability is the difference in the amount of time in between beats and broadly speaking, the more variability (measured in milliseconds) the better recovered, healthier and fitter you are though, like anything, everybody’s baseline will be different.
Mine is fairly consistent around 74 but hit new lows when I was ill, measuring two nights in the low 40s. It’s important to note that the 955 is not a piece of medical equipment so even with all the data you’re given, you still need to be honest about how you’re feeling.
Other stuff
There is a huge amount of functionality in the 955 that isn’t related to riding or health, much of which I didn’t use, including music – a 64GB memory means you can upload music files to the watch and listen through Bluetooth headphones
Verdict
– and Garmin Pay (it doesn’t cover so many UK providers). And there are loads more wearable-style functions such as floors climbed, estimated calories, the weather and so on.
I ended up favouring the Forerunner over my bike computer. That it was always on my wrist helped (no handlebar mounts needed) but with the data screens easy to read and the fact that I needed the watch to track the physiological metrics that my computer didn’t, it was the obvious and easy choice. On occasions I doubled up as I still wanted to access the info on my bars, but I never left the 955 at home. Plus, the battery life proved to be excellent, lasting over seven days (with lower usage), even through the winter.
RATING
★★★★★