Upgrade your workouts with Garmin’s affordable tracker
• Dedicated followers of fitness fall into one of two camps these days: those who track and those don’t. Among those with a one track mind, monitoring metrics like heart rate and calorie burn is motivating, with the promise of scoring a personal PB powerful enough to tempt you out from under your duvet on a dreary mid-winter morning. For the rest of you, reams of data delivered alongside timely reminders to exercise has the opposite of the desired effect. So thank Garmin for playing peacekeeper in this wellness culture war. The Venu Sq has all the usual bells and whistles: round-the-clock heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking and 20 in-built sports apps for everything from strength training to golf.
But it pulls away from the pack with extra features that promote a more holistic approach to fitness tracking. These include a built-in series of mindfulness and breathing exercises (‘Tranquility’ to promote sleep, ‘Coherence’ to encourage balance and calm, and ‘Relax and Focus’ for stress relief), as well as Garmin’s ‘Body Battery’ – energy monitoring based on cumulative data on your activity levels and heart rate variability, which helps guide you in when to rest and when to schedule workouts. Want the really good news? While other premium Garmin devices would set you back upwards of £400, this new entry-level watch packs in all the tech but rings in at under £200. Metric shy? We’ll make a tracker of you yet. From £179.99, Garmin