Garmin announced several new features alongside the launch of the Venu 4 smartwatch yesterday, with one of the most interesting being Lifestyle Logging. This allows you to track behaviours each day and, over time, get insights into how they might be affecting things like your sleep and stress.
Lifestyle logging will be available via an on-watch widget on the Garmin Venu 4 when it goes on sale on September 22 and will be added to some other Garmin watches in time, but it’s already rolling out as a free update for all users in the Garmin Connect app.
As a Garmin user myself, I think the feature is significant for three reasons. Firstly and most obviously, it could be helpful in tracking healthy and unhealthy habits to see what effect they’re having on you.
It’s also great to see Garmin add a free feature to the Connect app, rather than one that’s locked being the Garmin Connect+ subscription. Finally, this is a feature that’s similar to Whoop’s journal, and could be another indication that Garmin is lining up a screenless tracker of its own.
What is Garmin’s Lifestyle Logging?
Lifestyle logging is a tool that helps you track your habits to see how they affect your overall health. It’s a simple feature that lists lifestyle factors, and each day you tick off whether they did or didn’t happen that day.
Garmin has a lot of behaviours you can use to build out your list at first like early caffeine, sunlight and exercises (light, moderate or vigorous), and you can also customize your own factors if there’s something you think affects your overall wellbeing that happens regularly.
Pretty much anything that affects you can be considered a factor worth tracking, so beyond daily habits like a morning coffee or alcohol intake there are also more substantial, long-term things like having an infant at home, or illness.
You log everything that does and doesn’t happen each day and once you’ve built up the data over time you’re shown four- and 12-week graphs that show how each behaviour might be impacting things like sleep, stress and your heart variability, either positively or negatively.
It’s a feature that requires a lot of input from the user, and you can set up reminders in Garmin Connect so you remember to log behaviours each morning and evening.
Even if you know that certain behaviours are likely to affect the body, sometimes having this data laid out so starkly can be very helpful in showing you that getting some sunlight in the day leads to better sleep, for example, or that alcohol plays havoc with your heart rate variability.
How to get Lifestyle Logging on Garmin Connect
If you download the latest version of the Garmin Connect app on your phone you should get access to Lifestyle Logging. When I updated the app it appeared at the top of the home screen as a new feature, but if you need to find it in the menus, it’s under More/Health Stats.
Once you have it set up, it’s worth adding as a tile on your home page so you remember to log your behaviours, as well as using the morning and evening reminders. For now, you have to not only tick any behaviours you did that day, but also cross any you didn’t — hopefully this will become automatic for any unticked behaviors in future updates.
Is a Garmin Whoop rival coming?
The Lifestyle Logging feature will be added to Garmin watches along with the Venu 4 in the future, but it’s a feature you can use entirely in the app and similar to the Whoop 5.0 band’s journal tool, so it could easily work with a screen-free tracker.
Garmin did launch the screen-free Index Sleep Monitor this year, which is an armband that just tracks sleep for now, but it has the technology and software to make a screenless tracker work 24/7.
The recent launch of the Polar Loop band shows traditional sports watch manufacturers are keen to rival Whoop in the screenfree market, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see such a device from Garmin over the next year.
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