Sure, the Pixel Watch 5 has a bunch of other new features. Some of them notable, most of them shrug. However, there’s one feature that stands out from the rest: New algorithms that substantially increase the accuracy of the Pixel Watch 5 GPS tracks. So much so that I flew to New York City (arguably the most difficult GPS location on earth), to put it to the test against the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro and the Apple Watch Ultra 3.

So confident in their product and accuracy, the Google team literally handed me the watch (well, a few watches), and told me to go off and basically try and break it. So off I went, hour after hour, trying to find ways to break the Pixel Watch 5 in New York City. Running, cycling, walking, you name it.

And to be fair, I did (barely) manage to break it. But mostly I broke the Garmin & Apple GPS tracks. Over and over again.

So, let’s get right into it, with briefly covering what’s new on the watch overall, and then we’ll GPS geek-out for a bit (because it’s crazy cool), and then after all that I’ll circle back to hands-on with all the other new features.

Pixel Watch 5 – What’s New?

Now obviously, I’m focusing heavily on the GPS pieces, because in my opinion, that’s the most substantial piece here. But there are some other notable pieces, including the inclusion of a new strength workout feature that’s bundled with an expanded workout builder feature.

Here’s the full list of what’s new on the Pixel Watch 5, before I quickly go through some of those other features:

– Increased processor CPU power by 12%
– Increased RAM by 60%
– Claimed 20% faster overall operations
– Added GPS post-processing accuracy gains (for walk/run/cycling-based activities)
– Added weight and rep tracking
– Added workout builder (app)
– Added audio cues for structured workouts
– Added rest timers for structured workouts
– Added new Bedtime mode with face
– Added 11 new glanceable complication styles
– Added 2 new watch faces
– Added new generative watch faces (ok, this is legit cool, see below)
– Added ‘Raise to Gemini’ questions/answers in no-internet situations
– Added Gemini proactive text responses for automatic replies (requires Pixel 11 phone)
– Claimed 15% more accurate sleep tracking
– Added new smart wake alarm option
– Added new overnight sleep breathing quality metric
– Added ‘Health Guardian’ umbrella feature/concept
– Added Breathing emergency detection (will detect persistent loss of oxygen saturation)
– Added new Blood Pressure trends report (app-based, coming to Pixel Watch 3/4/5 this fall)
– Added new insulin resistance trends report (app-based, coming to all Pixel & Fitbit devices this fall)
– Same exact case sizes as before
– Orders as of today, August 12th, shipping August 20th
– Also added new Steph Curry special band edition, shipping Sept 3rd

Pricing has increased for the first time since the launch of the Pixel Watch series, now $50 more than last year for the non-LTE models, and a $30 increase for the LTE models, bringing it to:

41mm: $399 for Wi-Fi and $479 for LTE
45mm: $449 for Wi-Fi and $529 for LTE
Steph Curry Special Edition (LTE only): Starts at $579

Here are the color options, shown below (Obsidian aka black, Olive, Fog aka white, and Canyon):

Now, if GPS isn’t your jam, then slide all the way down to the end of this post, where I dive into many of these new non-GPS features in more hands-on detail.

Google’s GPS Changes Outlined:

Ok, GPS geekery time. First, let’s talk about what Google says they’re trying to solve for, then talk about how they’re doing it, and then talk about whether they actually pull it off.

To begin, Google says they’re focused on trying to solve for really three specific GPS issues. To consumers, these ‘issues’ manifest themselves as all assortment of wonky GPS track errors, but to GPS engineers, these are basically three specific issues. They are:

– Poor tracks in tall building scenarios: Commonly known as urban canyons, such as New York City, or really any building, tall buildings will not only block GPS signals, but more critically, as far as bad tracks go, they will literally reflect GPS signals (off glass & metal), which tricks GPS watches into thinking they are somewhere they aren’t. In GPS-lingo, these are called multi-path errors, because the path from the satellite to your watch can take multiple paths to the watch, only one of which is ‘real’/true (or even none of which are).

– Terrain blockages: This is a semi-similar bucket to the first one, except for natural terrain blockages, like cliffs, or mountains, or tree cover. These things are less likely to reflect the GPS signal, but can still present challenges due to limited GPS satellite views (remember, a GPS watch will normally be connecting to upwards of dozens of satellites at once).

– Atmospheric issues: This is probably the bucket you think of least, but still a very impactful part of the signal. This is mainly focused on weather, including heavy cloud cover, rain, thunderstorms, fog, etc… Basically, anything in the sky that’s dorking up GPS reception.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s talk about how they are making the tracks better. And now it’s important to note that they are doing this in post-processing. Meaning, it’s not fixing your exact position in real-time as you go down the street, but afterwards. And critically, it is very much not just road/trail-snapping (as some of their competitors do). In fact, I’ll literally demonstrate that over and over again, purposefully trying to trick it (and where the competitors will route snap). But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Google is using three specific fixes to post-process the tracks. They are as follows:

1. 3D Building Models: Here, they are using Google’s massive database of the entire world, mapped in 3D (think Google Earth), which in turn knows the exact building heights of just about everything on this planet. From buildings to mountains to bridges, it knows it all. By knowing there’s a building there, and the specific height, it can determine whether or not you (running on the street or wherever) can actually see the satellite your watch thinks it can see. Or, if instead, that GPS signal is being reflected off of a different building, causing a multi-path error/inaccuracy. By knowing which satellites can and cannot be seen by the watch, it can re-prioritize which signals to trust, and then re-process that file with satellites the watch can actually see. All of this also applies to non-building terrain too.

2. DGNSS Weather Correction: The next step is to use real-time reference stations to understand current weather and atmospheric conditions for your exact location. From there, Google will apply these corrections to your file, attempting to mitigate that rain or otherwise problematic weather.

3. Signal fusion: Finally, Google was already doing various on-device signal fusion like most companies (e.g., looking at accelerometer/gyro/etc to see if you were actually going the direction GPS says you are), but now, they reprocess that all again in the cloud, with the 3D building/terrain models and DGNSS weather correction.

Note that they are doing this for pedestrian-based walking/running/hiking, as well as cycling-based activities. They do not impact/help other sport modes at this time, such as openwater swimming.

So, let’s get into some actual tracks here, before and after differences. Note that for production Pixel Watch 5 units, you’ll never see these before/after tracks (just like you don’t for Apple when they process your tracks, or for Garmin, unless you creatively intercept them before processing). But in my case, I was able to go run/ride with two watches during all my NYC tests. One was a production watch, and one was a development watch, which let me see the files before they were processed.

Thus, in this section only, I’m just going to show Google Pixel Watch 5 before/after. In the other sections, I’ll show production tracks vs the others. Make sense?

Here’s the first one, showing how it processed this section, jumping straight into a building section. Purple is processed/fixed, yellow is raw upload from the watch. You can see how crispy the lines are now, shifting me to exactly where I ran in both sections (on the sidewalk, crossing the street, etc…).

The changes aren’t always massive; many times, they are reinforcing confidence in what you’re seeing matches where you ran. Here, the unprocessed track is wobbling its way along, yet the processed track is spot-on:

Next, this section here, which includes a ‘trick’ test that I did at the far right (more on that later), you can see it cleaned up the yellow to match where I ran, but equally, didn’t remove the trick-loop that I did at the far right. Again, super impressive.

The same is true here in Times Square, as it takes me out of the buildings, and instead, shows me weaving through the open plazas to find my way:

Still, there are some slight imperfections, like here where it has me running through the Times Square stands/steps (even corrected). It’s only a couple of meters away, but again, it’s not absolutely perfect.

Or here, a few blocks later, where it simply can’t overcome the buildings, and has me on the wrong side (and in buildings). In this section (as you’ll see later), Apple got it very correct, and Garmin more correct than Google.

Again, to me though, it’s streets like this. Where it takes a ‘meh-good-enough’ GPS track for 2026, and turns it into a ‘holy-crap-perfect’ GPS track.

I’ll stop doing the before/after for now, and instead, we’ll look at how it compares to the others.

But first, some of you are probably already asking: Will this come to other Pixel Watches? And the answer seems to be yes, though Google hasn’t fully confirmed that. Google (year over year) does this quirky thing when asked about new features coming to previous watches, where they always say some variant of ‘We always try and bring new features to previous devices, and will have more information in a future update’. Which is Google-code for “We’ll release this update to existing watches about 2-3 months after the new watch releases, but won’t tell you that now”.

They noted numerous times that their priority was releasing Pixel Watch 5, but equally noted there was nothing that prohibited it on Pixel Watch 4 (which also has multi-band GNSS/GPS). There are very minor antenna tweaks on the Pixel Watch 5, but practically speaking, they don’t make a major difference here (as a reminder: antenna design is arguably the most important part of GPS accuracy these days).

Ok, let’s get into the results.

GPS Accuracy Results:

Ok, let’s dive straight into things. In my case, I’ve got two different runs (focused on two different scenarios and areas of town), along with a ride where I went all over creation. As part of my full in-depth review, I’ll get more into comparisons in tougher terrain.

For the purposes of simplicity in this post, I’m going to focus on a longer run, and a bike ride. There’s also a shorter run in a different section of town available here.

So, to begin on this long run, things are pretty similar between the three watches, without a lot of meaningful differences at first glance. However, it doesn’t take long for the separation to begin. Here we can see the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro on the wrong side of the street, while the Pixel and Apple Watch are on the correct side of the street, with the Pixel Watch having me correctly on the actual sidewalk, versus the Apple Watch playing a tiny bit in traffic.

Next, as I enter this park, the Pixel Watch is a couple of meters off the crosswalk that I used. I mention this mostly to be fair, not because it’s a huge deal (since I was only a few meters off above with the Apple Watch).

In any case, more notably though, I did three loops around this small pergola of sorts, which was perhaps 3-4m wide. All three units actually tracked that surprisingly well.

Moments like this show slight differences. That again, might not be super obvious. Apple has me in the buildings and the street. Whereas Google shows a more clear crossing of the street. Garmin’s track isn’t bad, but again, isn’t exactly where I went.

Here on this turn, you can see the real advantage of Google’s multi-path algorithms reducing the errors, whereas Garmin is on the wrong side. While Apple is on the correct side, this is almost certainly automatic snapping to the sidewalk going on here (which Apple will do, more on that later).

Still, the Pixel Watch 5 is not perfect. Below (the vertical street), a perfect example of that. You can see Apple correctly keeps me on the sidewalk on this section, whereas Google put me into the side of the buildings across the street. Of course, one only needs to look at the street before (the horizontal one here) to see that Google nailed that.

Of course, my aim is to try and break things. And that’s exactly what I did below. In this case, I stopped for a cold drink, and then decided to walk through/under this bridge (not running), go about 25 meters beyond the bridge, then cross the street, and then turn back up the street. Google absolutely nailed this. Garmin got the general gist of things (vaguely), and Apple simply decided I wasn’t stupid enough to actually do that and ignored me entirely.

And as I approach the outer edges of Times Square, you can see bigger buildings equal bigger problems for Apple. For Garmin, they mostly aren’t in the buildings, but in the middle of the road. Whereas Google is exactly on the correct sidewalk side.

As I enter Times Square, with the massively tall buildings on both sides, the units actually don’t do that badly. Of course, I’m here to cause problems. So I do a tight loop around this building in the center. Google is the closest to correct, though still with some light building shaving. Garmin gives the 4-year-old-toddler version. And Apple just makes a mark across the building. To the right of the building, the Apple/Google squiggle is correct, as I stopped to take some photos there. Garmin has me on the wrong side of the street.

And one more moment on this run that I aimed to break things was this circle I ran in the middle of the street (it’s now a closed street). You can see Google perfectly hits that circle (I show it in my video, from the GoPro perspective). Garmin isn’t bad, albeit a bit tight. And Apple again decides there’s no way I actually drew a circle in the middle of the street, and thus puts me on the sidewalk.

But again, Google is not perfect. And just a block later, it throws me into the buildings, while only Apple correctly sails down the street on the right sidewalk.

Anyways, for the rest of the run, this pattern basically continues, though Apple did struggle a bit more at times in the buildings. You can view the whole track here, if you’d like.

Instead, let’s look quickly at a bike ride. Generally speaking, cycling is at a higher speed, and tends to mean that GPS tracks are better, since watches (and bike computers) have a higher sensor confidence that you’re going 20MPH/30KPH in a given direction, and aren’t instantly off to the side some other way.

Now, starting off on this ride, I will briefly nitpick the Google, as Garmin got this turn correct. There was construction on the turn, and I had to go well wide around it.

Meanwhile, for quite a ways after that, the Google and Garmin units are basically the same. Apple is incorrectly snapping me to the sidewalk (I’m in cycling mode), whereas you can clearly see Garmin/Google have me exactly in the bike lane. Some number of blocks later, Garmin disassociates itself from that though, putting me on the other side of the street.

Still, for big chunks of this ride, there’s no real meaningful difference:

Such as when I pedaled past the very tall World Trade Center, along with surrounding buildings; there’s no major difference here. A couple of meters one way or the other at most (especially between Garmin and Google).

For example, here I did a loop around this building with tiny streets. Apple overshot very slightly on one side, but so did Google, putting me on the sidewalk. Garmin cut in a bit too tight in one spot. All in all, mostly a wash.

Even when I have literally no visible sky above me, all three units get it roughly correct. Here I am below the highway, riding for a long time below it. Google is in the most correct spot below said highway, but none of them are all that far off.

Some time later, I head across the bridge. While all three watches have me clearly on the bridge, only Apple actually gets the position within that correct. The bike lane here is on the ‘upper’ portion of your screen in this scenario, whereas the red where the Pixel Watch 5 is, is the train lines.

As for the rest of the ride, it was mostly pretty good amongst all of them, with no major issues from anyone (again, cycling speed helps). You can see here how the Apple Watch cuts the corner a bit (I’m going from right, turning left onto this street), whereas both Garmin and Google correctly show me pausing a bit out further, waiting for traffic to clear before turning. After which, Apple puts me on the sidewalk, as opposed to Garmin/Google being on the bike lane.

And ultimately, DesFit and I  spent hours sitting in front of a conference room big-screen looking through hours of rides/runs we did together with the geekiest of Google Pixel Watch 5 engineers, comparing tracks from our Garmin/Apple devices, alongside both the Pixel Watch 5 pre/post processed tracks. Collectively, we judged literally every single block of every single track as to who was the winner at every moment on those workouts. On the rare scenarios that Apple/Garmin won, they would readily admit it, and then debate precisely why it probably won that half a block. The same goes for the even more rare scenario that the post-processed track was less accurate than the pre-processed track (it was almost never ‘less accurate’, but usually just ‘offset a different way’, where you’d say “I’d just split the difference instead”).

They will readily admit it’s not absolute perfection, but equally they are very confident the tracks are far better than their competitors. So much so that they are saying it’s “2X More Accurate Route Mapping in Tough Environments” along with “Our most accurate GPS route tracking for exercise, outperforming Apple Watch Ultra 3 and Garmin Fenix 8 Pro”.

How did they get to that 2X number, precisely? Well, with big fancy high-tech backpacks using centimeter-level GPS accuracy (note the head-sized pods sticking out the top). Two years ago I took this photo with that team. Oh, and that’s me at left wearing one.

From there, their claim is based on simply comparing the mean difference between each track point from each company (Garmin, Apple, Google) to the ‘ground truth’. These are the same backpack devices that all of these companies use for their own GPS testing.

Translated again, if they look at a specific point, and the Pixel Watch 5 (with post-processing) is off by 2 meters, and the Apple/Garmin watches by 4 meters, then they compare those differences. For every single point on the track. Which is how they get to the 2X claim.

Of course, I suspect that claim varies heavily based on environment. My guess is the number is higher in places like the buildings of NYC, and lower in places like the farmlands of Kansas.

New Pixel Watch 5 Changes in Detail:

Now, let’s take a closer look at some of the other Pixel Watch 5 changes that I outlined at the beginning. Again, there are a few dozen features, but I kinda want to dive into the more notable ones here:

1) Added workout builder (app)
2) Added weight and rep tracking
3) Added audio cues & rest timer
4) Added new Bedtime mode with face & Smart Wake Alarm
5) Added new generative watch faces
6) Added ‘Health Guardian’ umbrella feature/concepts

Let’s first dive into the workout builder portion, which allows you to create strength workouts in the app itself. You can do this by manually creating each portion via a library of movements (and then assigning reps/weights/times etc…), or you can also just straight-up ask Google Coach (Gemini) to create a given workout focusing on a given area, and boom, the workout is done.

From there, the workout gets pushed to the watch, where it’ll iterate through each set/portion automatically.

Notably, it can also do (new):

A) It’ll give you audio cues (voice instructions)
B) They’ve added a rest timer

Next, once it’s time for bed, there’s a new sleep watch face, similar to what most of their competitors have, to minimize/reduce the chance of blinding you in the middle of the night:

And then with that, there are new Smart Wake alarms, similar to what other companies have in terms of looking at the 30 minutes prior to the alarm time, and your sleep phases/stages, in terms of determining wake-up time.

Next, there are new generative watch faces. Simply put, ask the watch (verbally) to create any watch face with any theme you want, and it’ll do it. Des of DesFit decided to make a pizza watch face in our demo, and thus, a pizza watch face was born (it gives you a few options and theme choices):

Last but not least, there’s the new Health Guardian bits. This is an umbrella concept that covers a bunch of features, including both new Blood Pressure trends and Insulin Resistance Trends features (which are not medically certified). Those are new reports that’ll come later this fall.

Thankfully, this new Health Guardian feature doesn’t require a subscription or anything else.

Final Thoughts:

There’s no question that Google’s GPS accuracy improvements here are incredibly impressive. In my mind, this is a very similar generational leap in GPS accuracy to what we saw about 3-4 years ago when Garmin introduced multi-band GNSS on their Fenix 7 devices. It would be years before competitors got anywhere in the same ballpark as that (and even then, I’d argue only one or two other watches can get close to Garmin’s current multi-band GPS accuracy). Now, Google has very clearly taken the lead, at least when it comes to post-processed tracks.

Google is almost eliminating the rare ‘edge case’ bad GPS scenarios that Garmin still has left. Again, they are not 100% perfect, but they are really darn close (and that’s in arguably the hardest GPS environment on the planet). Of course, as anyone who has a GPS watch (Garmin or otherwise) can attest to, there are plenty of ‘fun’ places you might know in your area that cause GPS watches to drop a beat. Even the newest and fanciest of models. It’ll take time to see how the Pixel Watch 5 handles all of these special places.

As for the rest of the enhancements, they are interesting, though I’d argue most of them are ones that a good portion of their competitors either have, or long have had (e.g., sleep watch faces, workout builders, rep counting, etc…). Still, there’s some legit cool integration into the Google ecosystem around automatic text replies being more aware of the rest of your phone’s data (potential privacy concerns aside). For bits like the blood pressure trends and insulin tracking, I remain somewhat skeptical. We’ve seen companies like Whoop push the boundaries of what the FDA says is a medical device, with very little (read: absolutely none) medical certification or backing. What Google is doing here seems like basically the same thing.

Again, I’ll have a full in-depth review of the Pixel Watch 5 soon, once I can push it harder in places with more challenging terrain. Stay tuned for that, as that’s what’s on tap for this week here in Newfoundland, Canada.

With that – thanks for reading!

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This will probably be my rabbit-hole post of 2026, diving into the accuracy of not just Garmin Cirqa, but all of the screenless wearable bands currently on the market. And not just one Cirqa band, but both wrist and bicep/arm placement, as well as multiple people. And finally, not just heart rate during workouts, but across a slate of different categories and scenarios, spanning weeks of data gathering/comparisons.

As you might surmise, data accuracy is always important in a wearable, but frankly, even more important in a screenless band. After all, a regular GPS watch can have plenty of other smartwatch/sport/navigation/etc features that might counterbalance imperfect accuracy results; however, a screenless band has ‘one job’: Getting your data right.

But here’s the thing: There are actually a few different categories of accuracy you have to look at. And honestly, sport heart rate accuracy isn’t the most important one on Cirqa. Specifically, we have the following:

1) Accuracy of heart rate during workouts
2) Accuracy of workout/activity recognition
3) Accuracy/differences of sleep data
4) Accuracy/differences of step data
5) Differences in Calories

I’m going to dive into each of these things, including talking about how important each one is. Note that as always, I’m going to show you data from numerous other devices, both trusted reference devices as well as other competitors in the space. Specifically, virtually every section compares the following:

1) Garmin Cirqa (wrist, and 2nd on bicep same arm)
2) Whoop 5.0/MG
3) Fitbit Air
4) Polar Loop (bicep)
5) Amazfit Helio (bicep)

But I’m also not going to fake-science you. Instead, I’m going to show you how to properly evaluate accuracy of wearable devices, just like I’ve been doing for 18 years. Further, I’m *NOT* going to compare dissimilar day results. Every data point is compared at the exact same time/moment. It’s ludicrous to compare data gathered in winter, to data gathered in summer, and then plot those scores on the same chart. Those are different test scenarios/difficulty levels. Seriously, stop looking at charts that do that, it’s fake-science.

I will however, show you data gathered from both wrist and bicep, but I’m being super clear in labeling on that. Ultimately, I only have so many wrists/wrist space. As always, bicep bands will do better for workouts, and wrists will do better for sleep. Always remember that.

Sound good? Let’s cook!

A Quick Note on Placement:

For my testing, I’ve had 7 screen-less devices on me concurrently, plus two different chest straps (alternating each workout). They are as follows:

1) Garmin Cirqa (right wrist)
2) Garmin Cirqa (right bicep)
3) Whoop 5.0/MG (left wrist)
4) Fitbit Air (left wrist)
5) Polar Loop (left bicep)
6) Amazfit Helio (left bicep)
7) Oura Ring 5 (left hand finger)
8) Chest strap for workouts: Polar H9 or Garmin HRM-600

Further, for some of my wife’s workouts/data, she’s had

1) Garmin Cirqa (one wrist)
2) Fenix 8 (other wrist)
3) Chest strap (Polar H9)

A few quick notables:

A) Generally speaking, I don’t recommend two *watches* side-by-side on the wrist, specifically because the larger watch footprint will cause the watch cases to ‘tap’ into each other, triggering cadence-lock issues for heart rate during workouts, increasing step counts, and driving both watches upwards as they press together. However, with the Fitbit Air being so small, and the Whoop also being small and flat, this hasn’t been an issue. In fact, over the last three months I’ve tested both one per wrist and two per wrist on dozens of workouts and days, and seen zero difference in accuracy. This is because they are snug, so light, and fabric, they don’t bounce against each other, and have been producing virtually identical results. This is also in line with how numerous companies in this segment will use these lighter devices for comparisons.

B) Meanwhile, for the left bicep, they’re separated by about 1-2cm most of the time, and then usually slightly offset from each other. These two devices are a bit larger/chunkier, and thus I ensure slightly more separation. As you’ll see, because they’re on the bicep, they have a distinct advantage in this test. Simply put, accuracy isn’t an issue here.

C) On the Garmin Cirqa side, I’ve got one on the right wrist, and then one on the bicep (also right side). This way they are (in theory) beating to the same drum in terms of any per-side differences. While I could try testing different body sides (left vs right), over the last decade of optical HR sensor testing, I’ve virtually never found that to make a difference on my body. Further, my general stance is if a sensor can’t work on one specific side, then that’s a sensor problem, not a me problem.

D) For my wife, you can see her singular placement here of Cirqa against her Fenix 8 (non-Pro) 43mm watch, which includes the Gen5 optical HR sensor. She is also wearing a Polar H9 chest strap.

E) For the chest strap, I used both a Polar H9 as well as a Garmin HRM-600 chest strap. With many years of data on the Polar H9/H10, and more than a year on the Garmin HRM-600 (since it came out), there’s simply no meaningful difference there (including numerous dual-strap tests). Both are super accurate chest straps.

Finally, all of the data is pulled into either the DCR Analyzer (for workout data), or simply manually copied into Excel for general sleep/HR/etc data.

As you can see, I’ve attempted to make these tests as equal as possible, within the bounds of reality. Again, note that any device on the bicep will do better in workouts, and any device on the wrist will do better in sleep. The point is, I’m being super clear about where each device is, and not just comparing a Whoop bicep band to a wrist-based Garmin Cirqa band, and not overtly telling you those are in different places (as I’ve seen some do). That’s just sketchville.

Phew, let’s get geeky!

Accuracy of Heart Rate During Workouts:

In this section I’m going to look at the heart rate accuracy during workouts. This includes a variety of workouts, and critically, a variety of temperature ranges. During this time period I have workouts from home (Spain, temps in the 90°F/32°C range), and then workouts from travel to Newfoundland, where the temps are notably colder (in the 50°F/10°C range), which can absolutely impact accuracy of wrist-based optical HR sensors in certain conditions.

As always, I’m going to compare against a bunch of different units, including two different chest straps (Polar H9 and Garmin HRM-600, which I consider pretty much equal in their accuracy).

First up, we’ve got a simple indoor trainer session (cycling) to start things off. As a general rule of thumb, if sensors can’t get indoor cycling right, you’re hosed. There are no road vibrations like that of outdoor riding to complicate matters, nor pounding signals like with running. Likewise, there’s very little wrist deflection (well, usually). Here’s how that looked (Cirqa wrist is maroon color):

As you can see, it’s mostly really good here. No issues of concern, and it nailed all the intervals and recovery periods, as did all of its friends. The only two quibbles would be that it missed the first 7 minutes of the warm-up before auto-detect kicked in. And then it struggled for another minute or so after that. This is a good example of a workout type I’d do manually though.

Next up, we’ve got an outdoor road ride into the mountains, this one in warmer conditions in Spain (Cirqa wrist is green color):

As you can see, this is absolutely spot-on perfect. Really really good, which is even more notable as I was also shooting a bunch of video on this ride too, with both wrists. Same goes for the others. For the life of me, I can’t get the Whoop band to sync that workout out on the platform, so, it skips that journey. Note below that her Cirqa hadn’t arrived yet on this specific ride, whereas mine is on my right wrist.

However, now you’ll get to see the impact of temperature on wrist-based optical HR sensors while riding in colder temps. This day was a 3-hour ride, on mixed road/gravel (roughly the middle 1hr was gravel, the other ends were mostly smooth roads). The temps were maybe at best 60°F/16°C, but there was also notable wind, rain, and general crapiness. And as a result, all wrist-based units were often wrong, including Cirqa (Cirqa wrist in maroon color):

This trend continued on a different day that was also cold, showing the struggle is real for outdoor riding in cold temps.

Again, this is not a surprise, and is the same for virtually all watches while outdoor riding in cold temps. You can ‘address’ that a bit by trying to keep your wrists warmer, but the jacket I brought wasn’t really ideal for cycling, so my wrists remained exposed most of the time:

That said, a few days later in roughly the same temperatures (minus the rain), my wife had very solid results with Cirqa on a similar ride. In fact, Cirqa even beat the Fenix 8 (with Gen5 optical HR), in a very rough MTB-like section. That actually makes sense, because in massive vibrations the heavier Fenix 8 is going to bounce more on her wrist than the lighter Cirqa. Either way, solid performance here despite the temps (Cirqa wrist here in teal):

In any case, let’s shift to some running. First up, an easy steady-state run (in colder temps). Here, we can see things have no problems at all, and it’s very solid:

Again, I’d expect that, because…well…it’s easy and steady-state. No biggie, and it nailed it (as did everyone else).

So then, what about doing some 400m intervals? In this case, it was on a crushed/packed gravel surface, and as you can see, Cirqa on the wrist really struggled here, yet on the bicep was perfectly fine. Here’s the data set, with Cirqa wrist in bright red (Cirqa bicep in maroon, which is why it disappears into the line of perfection with others):

Again, while my wrists were cold, I’d have expected far better performance out of the Garmin Elevate Gen4 sensor here, so this is really surprising. In talking to Garmin about this set, they too were surprised, given that it clearly established lock during the warm-up, but then quickly fell apart during the intervals.

Out of curiosity, I then went out and did another shorter workout with 400m intervals, this time on a warmer day (62°F/17°C), and yet again, it really struggled here. I’m not sure what to make of this. Note the different colors, but all you need to know here is the red one is the bad one, and that’s Cirqa. That said, both the Fitbit & Whoop also struggled on the middle three intervals as well, just to a slightly lesser degree than Garmin. Also, in case you’re wondering why Amazfit has two files, it’s because it split the workout into two after the warm-up, as it often does the moment you slow down for 90 seconds. Cirqa wrist here in maroon.

Again, the unit is nice and snug, worn perfectly per 15 years of experience wearing optical HR sensors, and also how Garmin recommends. This isn’t a me issue anymore. Here’s a shot from the above run:

So then, out of curiosity, I swapped the two units I had (moving bicep to wrist, and wrist to bicep), just to see if perhaps there’s an issue with this specific unit and vibrations. Here are those results (same temps of 64°F/18°C), Cirqa wrist in purple:

Basically, just as bad for the Cirqa wrist(and bicep still perfectly fine). Though Whoop did make its own failboat for the entire warm-up, along with a partial warm-up failboat for the Fitbit Air. Still, aside from Garmin getting the warm-up right, the wrist Cirqa only got a single interval correct (middle one).

So then, I decided to sucker someone else into doing the exact same workout. In his case, his weather is considerably warmer, about 85°F/29°C. Cirqa wrist in orange.

As you can see, for him, with the warmer temps, it was spot-on. One bobble briefly on the 3rd interval, but certainly not the cargo-ship-sized failboats I’m seeing. My guess is that it’s some combination of the temp+terrain+pace that’s causing this failure. I haven’t seen this consistent of a failure on a specific workout in a long-long-long time.

Finally, here’s a bit of a strength training session. In this case, Des of DesFit has provided a bunch of sets of equal testing caliber, but focused specifically on strength training. He and I follow all the same methodology, and often work together on testing devices.

Here is a set that starts off with two sets of Lat Pulldowns (first two orange dots), and you can see the wrist Cirqa struggles at the outset of the first one, before settling down. On the 2nd set, Cirqa bicep struggles briefly, and then settles down. After that, for shoulder press, seated row, and lateral raises, things were mostly quite good for Cirqa, while Fitbit then struggled for a bit. On the whole however, given the relatively low BPM differences (at a lower intensity), these would be unlikely to have any meaningful training load or calorie implications. Cirqa wrist in orange.

In this next set, which starts off with bench press for the first two orange dots, then arm curl (3rd dot), shoulder press (4th/5th dot), and ends with row, you can see wrist Cirqa struggles in the first few minutes, but then settles down and is mostly pretty good. Later, the Fitbit Air struggles a little in the middle briefly. The Cirqa had no issue with the row intervals at the end, while the Fitbit on the wrist lightly struggled on the first.  Cirqa wrist in orange.

Finally, one more set of lat pulldowns, then shoulder press, then ending with seated row, here you can see Cirqa (wrist and then slightly arm band), gets off to a rough start, but quickly settles down within 2 minutes. After that, the Amazfit band yolo’s for a moment incorrectly. But beyond that, it was mostly fine/close-enough during the workout parts. That one brief moment around 16 minutes where the Cirqa wrist spikes was simply in between sets. Cirqa wrist in orange.

The general/overall look at all of his strength workouts (I have many more sets, he has even more sets) is that it was actually pretty good on the wrist, with only an occasional mistake that was sometimes meaningful, but usually not. Further, the Cirqa biceps/arm band was generally pretty strong across the board, save a few mistakes occasionally in biceps-focused movements. Again, because Garmin doesn’t really ‘reward’ strength workouts as much from a training load standpoint (which is driven entirely by higher heart rates), these occasional lower-heart rate ‘mistakes’ are far less meaningful than mistakes in running or cycling missing big intervals.

Thus, overall, where I stand for workout HR accuracy is that it’s mostly like what I see with other Garmin Gen4 sensors, which is largely pretty good, but it struggles with certain workout types or conditions. In my case, it struggled with cooler-temp outdoor cycling, especially off-road. Likewise, it really struggled for my 400m interval repeats, but was fine for Des on the same workout (he was in higher temps). For other workout types, including indoor cycling and strength, it’s largely quite good and in line with the others.

Accuracy of Workout/Activity Recognition:

Fun fact: I’d argue this is actually the most important category for a screenless wearable. Well, to an extent. You see, you can’t have accurate heart rate on Garmin Cirqa if it doesn’t first recognize you’re working out. You see, unlike Whoop (and frankly everyone else), Garmin keeps their heart rate sensor at a lower power when not working out. For Garmin, this helps save battery. Then when it detects a workout, it gives more power to the heart rate sensor, to substantially increase accuracy during highly fluctuating (heart-rate-wise) workouts.

But here’s the (effing massive) catch: If it doesn’t detect that workout (or a portion of it), you’re left with *NO HEART RATE* data for that portion of the workout. As a result, none of your training load and recovery stats are right, they’re all missing the data. Yes, you can adjust the timeframes on the Garmin Cirqa afterwards, but this *WILL NOT* magically get your the missing heart rate data back. This is unlike Whoop (and Google, and Amazfit), which allows you to seamlessly and endlessly adjust the times, and the full fidelity heart rate data is there.

Got it? Meaning, it’s really damn important that Garmin detects a workout upfront. Whether or not the heart rate is a few bpm off later on isn’t a much lesser deal than missing entirely.

So, let’s look at that from a few different workouts.

1) The Bike Commutes:

I did so many bike commutes, and as a general rule of thumb here, it struggled for almost all of them. Specifically, it never detected most of them. For example:

~ 70 minute cargo bike ride with kids [Detected properly by Cirqa, and Whoop/Fitbit/Amazfit]
~ 30 minute moderate intensity commute ride [Not detected by Cirqa, but detected by Whoop, Fitbit, and Amazfit]
~ 20 minute low to moderate intensity commute ride [Not detected by Cirqa, but detected by Whoop, Fitbit, and Amazfit]
~ 25 minute moderate to high intensity commute ride [Detected properly by Cirqa, and Whoop/Fitbit/Amazfit]

I did a bunch of other shorter rides, under 15 minutes (quick errands and such, usually 5-10 minutes), and none of these were detected by Cirqa, or other bands (Whoop/Fitbit/Polar) except the Amazfit Helio. The Helio band triggers auto-detect workouts for even just looking at your bike, let alone actually riding it. I think there’s a fair balance to be made here (as in, Amazfit triggers far too much/often), but on the whole Garmin needs to work on the bike commute algorithms here.

2) Road Bike Ride into the Mountains:

For this one, I had actually intended to manually start it, but totally forgot. Turns out, it handled the start side just perfectly. However, about 90 minutes into the ride, as I reached the top of the climb and turned back to descend, it basically ended the activity, assuming I was done. It skipped the last ~45 minutes, including numerous high-intensity sections and climbs upwards of 160bpm. This was, in my opinion, the most substantial ‘fail’ during all of my testing.

As you can see, when I went to extend it out to the finish time of 3:31PM, it didn’t have heart rate data for the extended portion. Though oddly, hours later it did show up (something that Garmin also can’t really explain). Note that for all my other ‘need-to-extend’ workouts, the HR data has remained missing.

3) Running Intervals

This detected near-perfectly for both bicep and wrist on the Garmin. It had detected about 5-6 minutes early, as I had walked to my starting point, and it ‘brought in’ that walking period. This is a notable difference to the Fitbit Air, which tends to do a good job of skipping those pre-run walk bits, especially when they are super casual.

With Garmin, it tends to include any pre-walking to a start location (even if super casual). This is easy to trim out, however.

4) Gravel Bike Ride (lower intensity, 2 hours)

This was probably one of the best auto-detects that it did. It nailed within perhaps 60 seconds, the start of the ride, and then also perfectly captured the end of the ride. Even better, is that despite us taking a number of photos along the way, getting distracted talking to some come-from-away tourists, and more, it kept it all as a single activity (Whoop and Amazfit both splintered it). That also included some easier intensity sections, descents, and so-on. So plenty of opportunities to screw up, yet, it didn’t. Kudos Garmin, on this one. (Notably, this was one of my more recent rides, see why that matters at the end of this section)

5) Indoor Trainer

In this case, it started about 7 minutes late, due in part to my relatively easy warm-up. That’s somewhat to be expected. It then did struggle briefly for accuracy for a minute or two, but once it locked on, it was solid for the rest of the ride. In terms of ending the ride, it perfectly stuck that landing, within 60 seconds of the end of the ride.

6) Walk (1hr)

While I’ve done many shorter walks on either manual or auto, I wanted to be hyper-specific about exactly how long it took for this one. So I went for a late-night walk, at a medium pace. In this case, it took 4 minutes until it picked up the walk and started GPS and workout HR. Upon finishing, it nailed it within 60 seconds. Of course, the finish was me simply sitting down, so it was a bit easier to identify than the start, which included playing Frogger across a road. Either way, good job here.

7) Strength Sessions

For strength, as above with the accuracy bits, I had DesFit do a bunch of different proper strength sessions, and none of them picked up in Auto, either on wrist or bicep. He says that could be due to his mix of strength+HIIT, but he did note that the Fitbit Air did pick these up (identify them). Obviously, like Yoga, this would be the key category/reason to use the button. That said, equally, if Garmin supported creating activities afterward with the underlying HR data (like Whoop/Fitbit does), then this wouldn’t be an issue. Unfortunately, they don’t; you can create an activity, but no heart rate/load is assigned to it.

8) Other random activities/workouts

I’ve done a bunch of other activities that fall under the ‘walk’ category and such, and generally speaking these matched my experience for the ‘walk’ above, which is that it seems to do a reasonably good job of tracking that walk.

Likewise, I did a bunch of ‘strength’ sessions where I was moving boxes (for moving house) for hours on end, with a ton of sweat (because it was 95°F outside), and it pretty much spot-on tracked all of these painfully FML moments. This is a good example of how these heavy-box moving moments were much higher HR sustained for a longer period of time than a traditional strength workout, which might not get as high of a heart rate (sustained).

One last auto detection note:

One thing I’ll note is that Garmin has made a number of notable changes (good ones) to automatic detection over the last 10-12 days, even without any firmware updates. In talking with Garmin, there are basically three portions that handle automatic detection:

1) On-device firmware portions
2) Garmin Connect Mobile (app) portions, such as lighting up GPS and looking at that data stream
3) Backend platform pieces that analyze both of those, to tweak the final result

This is pretty much the same as any other company, though Garmin’s ability to enable/engage GPS does give them more flexibility on this front. In any case, they noted that there have been numerous changes on #2 and #3 above over the past two weeks, which explains some notable improvements in my automatic detections getting better.

That said, if I had to rank them from an automatic detection standpoint, it’d be:

1) Whoop: Excellent, with very rare/few errors
2) Fitbit Air: Almost excellent with also very rare/few errors
3) Garmin: Good and getting better, but still a bit fuzzy with lower intensity bits
4) Amazfit: Really good at detecting elevated HR, but can’t detect workout types and often prematurely ends things.
5) Polar: Barely passable (doesn’t detect types either, and often misses things)

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly Garmin can iterate here. This is an area that Fitbit has improved substantially in the ~3 months since the release of the Fitbit Air, but it’s still an area where Whoop has years of experience and fine-tuning.

Accuracy of Sleep Data:

When it comes to sleep data, I’m specifically focused on two core things:

1) Times I went to sleep and woke up (and total sleep duration)
2) Heart Rate Variability (night average)

But I’m also going to show you these other two things:

3) Sleep score (for fun, all companies make up their own magical algorithms)
4) Breathing Rate (respiration rate)

Notably, you’ll see sleep phases/stages are missing there. Why? Because quite frankly, there’s no reliable or accurate way to compare sleep stages. Even so-called ‘gold standard’ devices are accurate at best ~80% of the time. And as a point of reference, we’d never use a heart rate strap that’s wrong 20% of the time as a point of reference, that’d be bonkers. Therefore, I’m not sure why we’d want to do it for sleep stages/sleep phases.

Plus, for the vast majority of scenarios, what matters here is ultimately duration of sleep (and whether you are sleeping). Yes, there’s obviously notable/meaningful benefits to being in certain sleep stages. But pretending that we can judge the accuracy of that against a pseudo-gold standard device isn’t benefiting you. It’s misleading you. So I won’t do it.

With that, let’s get into the sleep data, which is relatively simple, but obviously, a giant pile of data:

Oh, and a few more nights with the armband

Here are the key and consolidated takeaways from above:

1) Sleep times: The time I went to sleep and woke up were almost always spot-on (within a couple minutes), from not only Garmin Cirqa, but also the other wrist-worn devices. I do tend to see that bicep-worn devices are usually a bit less accurate for sleep, often including book/phone time in bed both prior to falling asleep and upon waking up. Whereas wrist-worn devices tend to be more correct there. I saw this with Cirqa, and have years of experience seeing this with Whoop.

First, the times I fell asleep. I’d argue that anything within 10 minutes of my estimate is good. I could have used 5 minutes, but realistically, my estimate could be off by a minute or two.

In the majority of cases, most devices picked these up within 5 minutes of falling asleep, with occasionally a few others pushing closer to 10 minutes.

And then, the times I woke up:

In general, most devices tended to stick the landing on wake-up times better, because it usually means I’m up and moving (walking around/etc), though sometimes I’m lazy in bed for a few minutes in the morning. Notably, with Cirqa, if you use the internal alarm (vibration alarm), it’ll automatically end your sleep at whatever time that alarm is set for, regardless of whether you hit snooze or not. The Garmin Sleep Index does the exact same thing.

Finally, here’s sleep duration. Note this is *not* ‘time in bed’, but rather, the ‘awake’ time total duration per night.

There’s obviously no reference on this, as each company assigns sleep stages differently, and since there’s no 90%+ accurate way to determine that, the amount of time per ‘asleep’ stages with any sort of pseudo-gold-standard comparison device could still be upwards of an hour off in terms of those stages and counting ‘awake’ time (which again, is crazy pants). Either way, you can see just how different some of these estimates can be, from all companies.

3) Sleep Scores: These all roughly trended together for the most part. Still, given that every company has different algorithms and there are no actual standards here, you see that at least once every wearable had a ‘weird’ day that just didn’t match the others. Most sleep scores are dependent on time in Deep/REM sleep, which is going to be hyper-variable.

4) HRV Data: The HRV data trended very similar to all the other devices. It’s very tricky to get really clean HRV data night after night from a Polar H10 strap (they tend to slide at night in a bed). Plus, due to the slightly different ways each company does averaging, there would be a difference here. Instead, I’m really focused on whether or not there are any outliers here.

The general trend here (that I’ve seen many times over) is really that the Fitbit Air tends to be the lowest of the group, consistently, and Amazfit tends to be one of the higher ones. Everyone else is sorta just in the middle-ground of ‘similar enough’. The only positive thing with HRV scores is that as long as that device is consistent to itself, HRV scores/ranges are different per person, and thus it doesn’t matter a ton since you’re scored against your own baseline.

4) Breathing Rate: Again, there are clearly slight differences in algorithms, but for the most part everyone was within 1brpm on any given night. Nobody was crazy-pants off, or meaningfully off. In this context, there’s just no difference between 13brpm and 14brpm in terms of your health stats.

Ultimately, in 2026, there really isn’t any meaningful difference between these companies for sleep data. I know people like to think there is based on things that happened a decade ago, but when comparing the latest generations of devices from each company, I’m getting super similar results. Equally so, I can point to wrong nights from every one of these companies. I’ve got literal years of data, but can easily pick out a single slightly offset night from every single one of these companies over the last month, where a given edge-case scenario threw it for a loop.

Accuracy of Step Data:

Perhaps this should be called ’differences in step data’, as determining accuracy in real-world situations is frankly quite tricky. Sure, it’s easy enough to count 500 steps and compare, and as I’ll show you, all activity monitors do that within a reasonable definition of perfectly fine. Instead, where things get tricky is navigating the wonkiness of your daily life. Washing dishes, taking a shower, pushing a shopping cart, partial steps while cutting/doing food prep, and tossing things in a garbage/compost bin half a step away. Does it count, does it not?

So instead, in this section I want to look at a simple 500-step test count, and then look at some daily total comparisons. As one who has been testing activity/step trackers for more than 15 years, the main thing here is consistency in numbers, rather than exact step counts. You’re never going to get a perfect counting of every single step (or half step), from any unit. Instead, you want mostly accurate numbers that don’t do too many crazy things (like counting while driving, or massive additions while doing dishes, etc…).

To start off, here’s a simple 500 step-count challenge. I just counted off 500 steps on pavement. Nothing fancy. I recorded the before values, then stopped and ensured everything was ‘synced’ before writing down an ‘end’ value. This was an out-and-back section of pavement, with two slight riser hills in each direction.

Fitbit Air (wrist): 500 steps (seriously, exactly spot-on)
Amazfit Helio (bicep): 505 steps
Garmin Cirqa (wrist): 509 steps
Polar Loop (bicep): 510 steps
Garmin Cirqa (bicep): 520 steps
Whoop (wrist): 530 steps

Fun but kinda useless tidbit: The Whoop band takes a *really* long time to reconcile steps, seemingly a ~10-minute interval. So you have to sit there a long time before/after to ensure it’s “caught up”. Fitbit is instant (live), Garmin is near-live, Amazfit is reasonable enough, and Polar sync takes almost as long as the walk itself. In any case, that’s that.

So, what about the entire day? Let’s look at a few days that were ‘clean’; in other words, all trackers were worn the full day, without any intermissions for charging. Here are three days’ worth that are interesting:

Day London City Tourist: This was an entire day spent with the kids on a day-trip to London during a connecting layover. So we started at the airport hotel in the morning, had a train ride to the city, London Eye, miles of walking, theatre performance, more miles of walking, a bike ride, more walking, a train, and more walking. A good variability to see how these trends emerge. Here’s those results

Day 3hr Bike & Such: This day included a lazy start, then a 3-hour gravel bike ride, some errands, and a bit of work/etc at home. Nothing crazy, but totally different activities.

Day Interval Run & Lazy: This day included basically a morning interval run (10KM), and then mostly nothing else except lounging around the house sitting and some work. Minor household things. Basically a mostly lazy day.

And thus, here are the results of those days:

As you can see, there’s about a 5-8% difference across the board for non-riding days. Yet, for riding days, we see both Amazfit and Polar substantially higher than the others. That’s because both companies ‘convert’ non-step workouts (such as cycling) into steps, using some magical equation. There’s plenty of debate to have about that practice; I’ve covered it numerous times before. TLDR: I think it’s dumb. But hey, it is what it is.

Either way, setting aside those algorithm decisions, all of these are in the same general ballpark of one another. Being off by 5-8% is not going to make or break any fitness plan here.

Calories Burned Differences:

Sometimes a chart is just easier. Below are basically two charts in one:

– A chart portion showing daily totals amongst the devices. I’d caution that Oura daily calorie totals are a hot mess, especially if workouts are involved. So…yeah.

– A chart portion showing a handful of individual workouts where all devices recorded ‘evenly’ (meaning, properly captured the workout with the same rough timings).

This is pretty straightforward really, so, here ya go (note my weight is set the same in all apps):

In general, across these values in the chart and others, I find the following:

– The Garmin Cirqa tends to err on the lower side of things, because (I suspect) in some of these specific workouts (like the interval run), it substantially undershot on my heart rate. Same goes for the gravel ride that would undershoot some of the quick HR spikes.

– The Fitbit Air tends to be the higher side of things. There’s no one specific thing, just…well…that’s where it floats.

– The Polar Loop tends to be even higher, often 50% higher than anyone else. There’s no obvious reason for this, but it’s been a consistent theme here.

– The Amazfit Helio somewhat interestingly has a static value for daily baseline, that doesn’t change at all regardless of how much non-workout activity you do. Meaning, active calories only trigger for things that trigger a workout (like a run, ride, or a long walk). Otherwise, there’s no additional calories awarded for a generally busy/walkable day that doesn’t trigger a workout. Instead, it just assigns a value of 2,139c per day for my baseline ‘being alive’. Kinda weird.

– Whoop’s daily totals are supposed to include your baseline rates, and it must, but man, its total calories are just super low across the board for the rest of the day, consistently. Its per-workout totals are in the ballpark of others, however.

Ultimately, I find these values are at least ‘consistent’. As I’ve long said, trying to compare exact calories or exact steps on any given day is mostly a recipe for disappointment. The same is true for looking at these calorie values and eating just below it, hoping to lose a bit of weight (or any other variation). Instead, you should be assigning an error margin buffer to calorie burn *estimates*, and likewise, if counting calories on food, do the same there as well.

Overall Accuracy Thoughts:

When it comes to accuracy, on the whole, things are pretty good and entirely in line with both other Garmin devices using the Gen4 sensor, as well as all of their competitors in this category. The exception here seems to be my running high-intensity intervals in cooler weather, which for whatever reason just isn’t catching for me on the wrist. Beyond that though, and more simply put: Nobody is really some top faraway leader or such. For Garmin/Fitbit/Whoop, they’re all roughly in the same bucket accuracy-wise. Each with their own quirks, as you might expect.

In the case of Garmin, while they have clearly made gains in the automatic workout detection over the past two weeks since launch, there are still some areas for improvement. And more critically, Garmin absolutely needs to figure out how to increase the heart rate fidelity, so that you can tweak those exercise times (before/after) to not be missing data (especially after). This simply isn’t an issue on Whoop or Fitbit. Beyond that, as you saw above, I had a few running interval workouts where accuracy just didn’t align with expectations (especially in cooler-temp scenarios). I don’t think that’s a Gen4 thing per se, since I’ve done gazillions of other workouts on other Garmin watches with Gen4 in identical conditions without any issue. Perhaps if I had many more weeks of data to figure out the nuances of why this specific workout keeps failing, I’d have different opinions, but that’s the cards I’m dealt.

That said, for most other categories, Garmin is right in the mix and perfectly accurate. Plus, having the ability to enable GPS behind the scenes for workouts can increase accuracy in areas like distance, which its competitors simply can’t do (especially for cycling, but also running/walking). That’s something I didn’t really touch on above, but is notable. GPS distance will virtually always beat wrist-based distance estimates in most environments.

In terms of bicep band or not, the answer is super simple (and identical to my years of testing with Whoop, as well as my year+ experience with Amazfit and Polar on the wrist and bicep band). For workouts, the bicep band will generally produce heart-rate strap level accuracy. In fact, it often exceeds it, since it’s not susceptible to various chest-strap quirks (such as dryness in cooler temps, heavy sweat artifacts in hotter temps). Inversely, for bed times, the wrist is better, as the bicep band tends to miscalculate sleep start/end points if on a phone/book. Again, all these companies are identical in this regard. Lastly, for daily usage outside of workout/sleep, it simply doesn’t matter; it’s a wash.

Hopefully this helps you figure out if the Garmin Cirqa is accurate enough for you and your needs

With that, thanks for reading!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

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Obviously, TrainingPeaks has been around a long time, as somewhat the de facto platform for coaches and athletes over the past decades. I started using it way back in 2008 while training for my first Ironman with a coach. I still use it today, albeit with less focus than I did in the past. My wife also uses it with her coach as well, for all of her training. Point being, I’ve been pretty familiar with the platform and its target audiences for quite a long time.

The Core Details:

First though, let’s just briefly throw the press release into this post, for historical purposes. Here it is:

SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland/July 22, 2026 — Garmin Ltd. (NYSE: GRMN) today announced it has acquired the TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic training platforms for athletes and coaches. The acquisition strengthens Garmin’s fitness ecosystem with customizable coaching experiences for endurance, strength and performance-focused athletes across every stage of their fitness journey.

 

“TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic share Garmin’s passion for empowering athletes and coaches around the world with world-class training tools, performance metrics and actionable insights. The addition of these highly successful platforms to the Garmin ecosystem will expand access to more authentic coaching experiences—connecting athletes with professional coaches who guide, motivate and inspire them to reach their goals.” –Brad Trenkle, Garmin Co-Chief Operating Officer

 

“We’re thrilled to join forces with Garmin to advance our shared mission of empowering coaches and athletes with science-based training. For over a decade, we’ve worked together to democratize coaching and performance insights, helping millions of athletes reach their peak through data-driven, structured training.” –Andy Stephens, CEO of Peaksware Holdings, parent company of TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic

 

TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic are digital services specializing in connecting coaches and athletes of all abilities who are looking to improve. Headquartered in Louisville, Colo., 120 combined associates from TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic will join Garmin’s global workforce. Financial terms of the acquisition will not be disclosed.

[Update/Added] Next, since publishing this post, a number of hours later TrainingPeaks has finally sent out a note to their coaches. Here’s what that said:

Hello There,

 

We’re excited to announce that we are now part of Garmin which you can read all about here.

 

Our objective is to expand access to more authentic coaching experiences – connecting athletes with human coaches who guide, motivate and inspire them to reach their goals.

 

As a valued customer we wanted to proactively assure you that TrainingPeaks will continue to operate as a cross-platform ecosystem, enabling athletes and coaches to use the devices, platforms and services that best suit their needs.

 

We are incredibly excited for the capabilities this expanded ecosystem will enable for you to continue to grow and develop as an athlete.

 

Thank you for your continued support.

 

All the best,
Lee Gerakos
Managing Director

Got all that? Good. As I said, there’s basically nothing in terms of actual details on what’s changing. The only detail is that seemingly all employees are being retained, assuming 120 employees was the total count (I asked for clarity there, but just got the press release numbers back). Of course, keeping the employees makes sense on multiple levels. First, to maintain and expand the TrainingPeaks/TrainHeroic platform, and second, because Garmin needs all the fitness-deep engineers it can find. It’s an easy decision.

Note that the musical platforms that TrainingPeaks umbrella company (Peaksware Holdings) has, aren’t included in the acquisition, and remain with them.

However, this acquisition does include TrainingPeaks Virtual, formerly Indievelo, which TrainingPeaks acquired a bit back in 2024. That’s the Zwift-like competitor platform that now integrates more tightly with the larger TrainingPeaks platform.

Now, when you look at the broader TrainingPeaks platform, you’ve got basically a few core things:

1) The TrainingPeaks website/app where athletes log their workouts, synced in from all manner of devices
2) The coaching side to that equation, where athletes’ coaches see those workouts, and manage full businesses using TrainingPeaks as platform for that
3) Training plans that are sold to athletes for all sorts of sports
4) Coaching directory, which ties into the coaching business above
5) TrainingPeaks Virtual, which is included with TP subscriptions, for indoor cycling
6) Licensing of TrainingPeaks metrics like TSS/NP/IF to companies, including Garmin, Wahoo, etc… for various metrics.

Most of these haven’t really changed over the years. TrainingPeaks as a company has done various smaller spin-off athletic projects here and there, but few of them have ever really caught on. There’s also the WKO desktop software, but best I can tell from the release notes, it hasn’t seen updates in 2 years, and even before that it was slim pickings.

Meanwhile, for TrainHeroic, they are/were mostly focused on the strength side of the question. They boasted some 500,000 users and 10,000 coaches, and have been around well over a decade.

What’s Valuable?

Anyway, looking at those pieces there, there’s a lot that Garmin could be going after, but I’ll be honest, I’m a bit puzzled on this one. If I look at the general trend here, it’s that AI coaching is eating into real coaching (substantially). Now, don’t get me wrong, I think AI coaching mostly sucks, especially compared to real (good) coaches. But that’s neither here nor there; a lot of people are just using one-off AI coaching plans and calling it done, especially at the more basic level.

Which is another way of saying that I question how TrainingPeaks was doing in terms of growth, faced with the headwinds of AI apps. They are obviously super well known and respected, but also not really pushing the boundaries of technology (nor have they for many years). Instead, they were/are really good at being consistent and stable, something that (notoriously finicky) coaches tend to appreciate. And in many ways, athletes too. The system ‘just worked’ day in and day out, even if it was rarely on the leading edge of technology.

If I look at what Garmin might want here, there are a few things, and my thoughts:

1) The structured training plans from TrainingPeaks: This is logical, though, Gamin already has many of these and can mostly cover the same sports that TrainingPeaks has.

 

2) The structured training plans from TrainHeroic: This is an area that has more potential for Garmin, especially as they try and expand into this area.

 

3) TrainingPeaks Virtual: This has value, potentially substantial value, but only if Garmin invests heavily in it, and wants to make a go at competing with Zwift. Ultimately, if they just leave like it is, I’m not sure what the value is by itself, however, with Garmin Connect+…more on that in a moment. This however, is a piece that Garmin could more easily ‘Garminify’, since it was just recently done when Indievelo came over to TrainingPeaks.

 

4) The TrainingPeaks platform for athletes: Hot take here, I think this is overrated for Garmin to try and integrate. In fact, as one who worked in IT integrations of acquisitions for a decade+, I think there’s virtually zero chance they could integrate TrainingPeaks into Garmin Connect at a native/structural level. They are just too vastly different and massive platforms that don’t really allow for a marriage. Instead, they’d be operated separately.

 

5) The TrainingPeaks platform for coaches: This is just a layer atop the athlete platform, so they are treated as one and the same. Again, there’s zero chance Garmin can integrate this natively into other Garmin things, instead, everything will be partnership type integrations (from a technical layer).

 

6) The data within TrainingPeaks: I don’t think this actually has much value to Garmin. Again, hot take, but Garmin has *far* more data already in every possible way than TrainingPeaks does. Sure, there’s some competitive device data in there from Wahoo and the like, but again, that’s a drop in the olympic sized pool compared to what Garmin has. In fact, I’d even bet that Garmin generates more data within its user base every day than TP does in a year (if not far more). We’re likely talking 50-100 million users generating daily data, and the vast majority of TP data is likely from Garmin devices anyway. Finally, Garmin has hardly been on the leading edge of using big data for training models, so going out and getting a slightly different bucket of data doesn’t seem to hold much water.

So what’s Garmin’s thinking here? I suspect finding a way to eventually make Garmin Connect+ a thing people want to pay for. As I outlined in my Garmin Cirqa piece yesterday, Garmin has a very legit problem where Connect+ simply doesn’t offer a compelling reason for people to pay for it. I don’t. In fact, I let my subscription lapse this past April; it just doesn’t add anything to my life.

Yet, if they add in TrainingPeaks in some sort of tier? Now we’re talking. Same goes for TrainingPeaks Virtual as an indoor platform.

In fact, while the pricing for TrainingPeaks as a user platform exceeds that of Garmin Connect+, I think they could split out access, and offer TrainingPeaks Virtual within the Garmin Connect+ membership as a really interesting way to immediately increase the appeal to at least cyclists. Keeping in mind we’re talking about a platform (TPV) that was free before the TrainingPeaks acquisition. We know that the software development team is super lean there (and super talented).

Which to me almost sets the stage for two different Garmin Connect+ tiers, one including access to the full TrainingPeaks analytics suite as an athlete, and one including other TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic features at a more normal price point. While Garmin might try to make the argument that adding too many features to Connect+ would ‘cheapen’ the platform, I’d argue the opposite: It strengthens it. Because right now, there’s no compelling reason for most people to subscribe.

The Concerns:

Still, I have some very real concerns here. Let’s get right into them.

First, will Garmin block access to 3rd-party companies, like Wahoo and others, from uploading to TrainingPeaks? If so, coaches will quickly migrate to other coaching platforms out there, despite how much coaches (rightfully) dislike moving platforms. The key aspect of TrainingPeaks that made it successful is being data-neutral. I asked Garmin for an answer to this, but I haven’t received a reply back on that question yet.

Second, will Garmin still allow licensing of the TrainingPeaks metrics to various device makers/platforms that leverage it today? Back when Garmin acquired FirstBeat, they said they would allow such licensing. But over time that slowly disappeared, and today FirstBeat doesn’t do any licensing to 3rd-parties for their metrics to new customers as far as I know. In the grand scheme of things, most TrainingPeaks metrics can be emulated (near identically) without the TrainingPeaks name, so this isn’t quite as critical as the others. Still, it’s notable.

Third, will Garmin actually maintain and improve the platform? Garmin doesn’t have any viable pathway to consolidating the TrainingPeaks platform into Garmin Connect. From a technical standpoint, even the most talented tech acquisition integration teams would struggle heavily to consolidate these very different platforms. Structurally, they are so fundamentally old and different. Further, Garmin themselves have a long history of being unable to integrate 3rd-party platforms. We can look at the original MotionBased platform (which became Garmin Connect), or things like the DeLorme platform (which became inReach). Both well over a decade ago. In the case of inReach, we’ve only recently seen some tech changes there to light up various new features. I suspect behind the scenes it’s still totally separate. All of which ignores Tacx basically running as-is (with improvements, to be fair), ever since. Point being, Garmin is going to have to effectively maintain TrainingPeaks forever, hopefully with new features. At some point, someone might see that budget line item and question it.

Fourth, what does this mean to coaches? At this point, there’s been no real communication to TrainingPeaks coaches as far as I know, on what this means to them (in any way). So that’s a big ticket item. [Update, a few hours later, TrainingPeaks has sent out a short e-mail to coaches, which I’ve added above in the post.]

All of these are fuzzy, and when asked for more detail, there are no promises or detail to be had. Usually acquisitions have slightly more information, though, Garmin does tend to provide virtually no information on acquisitions.

Wrap-Up:

Garmin has made many fitness acquisitions over the years, some really compelling (like Backtracker, which then launched and became Garmin Varia radar, well loved by many), others that fired a blank (like Alphamantis aero sensors), and some in between, like Tacx (which cost Garmin a boatload, but hasn’t really produced many new products since). But the vast majority are hugely successful (like DeLorme). For ones like the FirstBeat acquisition, there have been pretty clear benefits to Garmin users, even if at the expense of (many) competitors. In that case, such is business. Those companies had to go out and develop their own algorithms. And then there are more recent ones like MyLaps for timing, which it’s a bit too soon to see that one play out.

On the scale of user bases, the TrainingPeaks one is likely up there as one of the biggest, alongside Tacx. Sure, there were more people crossing a finish line with MyLaps hardware at that time, but that hardly counts as an end-user in this context.

One of the things that I think separates this acquisition from those, is I feel like in most other Garmin acquisitions, the company being acquired either has some unique new technology Garmin wants, or Garmin is buying it so someone else doesn’t. In this case though, I’m struggling to classify TrainingPeaks as either of those two things – especially in the face of a rise of AI training apps. I don’t see someone like Strava seriously fishing to buy TrainingPeaks. They already bought others, and adding more to their balance sheet ahead of an IPO doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Instead, it seems logical that Garmin is looking to see if it can increase its subscription revenue, possibly via putting coaching aspects (plans or otherwise) into some sort of Connect+ bucket, or perhaps just keeping it standalone. Ultimately, if there’s one truism of Garmin acquisitions, it is that they are very rarely wrong (from a Garmin business standpoint). Sorta like Garmin’s legal team. We just don’t necessarily see what the full picture is immediately, or even in the medium term.

Only time will tell, both in terms of the impact on Garmin, but also to consumers.

With that, thanks for reading!

After nearly a year of 100% incorrect rumor mill posts, Garmin Cirqa is finally here. About the only thing the rumors managed to get correct is the obvious: a screenless wearable. But the reality is, there’s little to be surprised by here with Garmin Cirqa. After all, they’d been laying this groundwork now for years, and more intensely in the last year. That included things like the screenless Garmin Index Sleep monitor last summer, which worked just fine as a screenless wearable 24×7 too.

The Garmin Cirqa comes in at $199, and has essentially every health/fitness tracking feature of any of Garmin’s sub-$500 GPS watches…just without a screen. And, without any required subscription cost. While you can certainly add Garmin Connect+, there’s little reason to for most users. More on that later down below.

Garmin has essentially delivered exactly what everyone has asked for, both in terms of features, as well as in terms of the no-subscription aspect. Obviously, there will be debates about the price being higher than Amazfit/Fitbit, but I’ll tackle that later. And in fact, they delivered one thing people didn’t expect: A button. Or more specifically, a button that actually has a number of functions. So we’ll dive into the hardware, the software/app, and everything in between. I’ll also have separate posts/videos with detailed comparisons to all the other screen-less wearables, which I’ve been wearing 24×7 since each of them has come out.

This post isn’t a full in-depth review; that’ll come shortly with a bit more details on accuracy, reliability of automatic workout tracking, and more.

Note that Garmin sent over a media loaner unit to poke at. As always, I don’t take any money from any companies I review, and I go out and buy my own units after launch, with media loaner units eventually making their way back across the pond to Garmin. Further, everything here is written by me, a real human. There’s no AI slop here (or any AI content). You can help support the site by becoming a DCR Supporter, which gets you ad-free access and a behind-the-scenes video series.

The Key Specs:

The Garmin Cirqa essentially has all the same health/wellness tracking features as any other recent Garmin watch (except ECG), so if you’re familiar with those features, then the answer is essentially ‘yes ’ to all of them. The key difference here to other watches is obviously the lack of a display/screen.

Price: $199USD/€199/£179/CAN$279
Battery Life: 10 days claimed
Weight: 20g
Sizing: Each color is offered in two sizes: Small/Medium, and Large/XL
Colors: 4 colorways, seen below, Black, Grey, Red/Pink, Navy Blue
Biceps Band Option: Yes (two sizes), $59 (or, $209 total with Cirqa pod if bought on Garmin’s site, instead of regular band)
Button: Yes, for manually starting activities, snooze, HR broadcasting, and more.
Daily Steps & Activity Tracking: Yes
Calorie Tracking: Yes
Sleep Tracking: Yes, including sleep phases/stages
Nap Detection: Yes
Smart Wake Alarm: Yes
HRV Tracking: Yes
Skin Temperature Tracking: Yes (nightly)
SpO2 Tracking: Yes
Respiration Rate: Yes
Stress Tracking: Yes
Women’s Cycle Tracking: Yes
Journaling/Logging: Yes
Health Status: Yes
Nacho Cheese Dispenser: No, due to size, this can only do parmesan sprinkles
Heart Rate Broadcasting: Yes (ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart)
Automatic Workout Tracking: Yes
Automatic Sport Detection: Yes, limited sports
Automatic Rep Counting: Yes
Manual Workouts: Yes, via button/app, 80+ workout types
Structured Workouts: Only with Garmin Connect+
GPS: Not in unit, with app as Connected GPS
Altimeter/Barometer: Not in unit, thus, no stair counting
Intensity Minutes: Yes
VO2Max Estimates: Yes
Live GPS Tracking During A Workout: Yes with app, sharable to friends/family
Combines data with other Garmin devices via App: Yes, Unified Training Status/Physio TrueUp
Training Readiness: Yes
Acute Load (Training Load): Yes, including Load Ratio & Load Focus
Recovery Time: Yes
Training Effect: Yes, including Primary Benefit, Workout Benefit

And lastly, here’s a look at all the color options you’ve got (plus more color options as standalone bands):

Got all that? There’s a bunch of other more minor features under/tied to some of the above, things like Sleep Coach & Sleep Alignment features, or the app-based Jetlag Advisor. But the above is the core of it all. So instead, let’s take a closer look at the hardware.

The Hardware:

First up, let’s look at the hardware itself. The band measures 27mm across, thus a touch bit wider than the Whoop 5.0 band, and comes in four colors as noted above:

The band covers up the pod that sits below the strap, which contains the sensor, of course, as well as the button on the side.

You can adjust the tightness of the strap by undoing the velcro and then simply loosening it. Complicated this is not.

The button allows you to start a workout manually, though again, it’ll do that automatically as well. This just ensures it catches the start of the workout, useful for activities that may be hard to detect initially (such as yoga, or even a walk). It can also be used to snooze an alarm.

The pod portion is detachable, allowing you to swap it to different bands. You can do this using the quick release mechanism:

The pod uses Garmin’s Elevate Gen4 optical heart rate sensor, which is their older module (Gen5 is the latest, found on their higher-end Fenix & Forerunner watches). The key difference between Gen4 and Gen5 is the inclusion of medically certified ECG on most Gen5 watches. Gen5 also has better accuracy in certain edge cases (e.g., running downhill on a cool day). In most cases, the accuracy difference between Gen4 and Gen5 is pretty minor (if anything). For non-workout usage, it’s totally negligible.

While much ink will be spilled about Gen4 vs Gen5 here, I don’t really think it’s that big of an issue. At this price point, Gen5 would have only given ECG (medical-grade Afib detection), which, while useful to some, Garmin seems to believe isn’t really that applicable to most. I somewhat agree there. The key thing that’s in Cirqa that has historically been tied to Gen5, is skin temperature. Garmin has included an extra hardware layer atop the Gen4 sensor in Cirqa, adding in skin temperature. Note that the underlying optical HR sensor is identical, according to Garmin.

In terms of charging, Garmin claims 10 days of battery life and uses the same proprietary Garmin charging port as other watches. The other end of that cable is USB-C:

Here’s how it compares side-by-side with the Whoop 5.0/MG and Fitbit Air:

Then how it looks on my wrist (17cm, 6.5″):

Now, with the hardware covered, let’s move to the most important part here, the software app. As with all screenless trackers, the app is really what matters.

General Daily Usage & Metrics:

The Garmin Cirqa device will largely act just like any other Garmin watch in terms of all the metrics it’ll pull in. Meaning that if you’re familiar with daily/24×7 wear/usage of a Garmin wearable from any point in the last few years, it’ll be the exact same here. The only differences come in the workout section. Thus, if this isn’t your first Garmin rodeo, you can probably skip ahead to that section.

In this case, I’m going to show it to you without a Garmin Connect+ subscription, so everything you see here is included. Because I have a Garmin watch, the data shown will be a blend of underlying Cirqa data and Fenix data. But everything here is included in Cirqa.

First up, you’ve got your dashboard. There’s a new ‘Essentials’ tile section that you can enable at the top, which shows you your…well…essential items. This update is available now to all Garmin Connect users (More > Settings > Home Settings > Essentials). This is lightly customizable, up to four pieces:

Below that, you’ve got your ‘In Focus’ dashboard. In my case, that’s Training Readiness, plus some other tiles to the right, all of which are customizable.

Then, below that, I’ve got all the ‘At a Glance’ bits, which are again customizable. Each of these are clickable to more details. This includes heart rate, body battery, sleep score, RHV status, and plenty more:

If we were to click on Body Battery or Heart Rate, for example, we can see details of my day thus far (including stress tracking and activity overlays). Additionally, all of these have changeable timeframes (e.g., 7-days/4-weeks/1-year).

The same is true for sleep stats, which will pull in your sleep data, including Sleep times/score, HRV trending, SpO2 (PulseOx), and more.

Further, there are sleep coaching insights, as found on other recent Garmin wearables, including Sleep Coach and Sleep alignment:

Speaking of sleep, you can configure sleep alarms in the Garmin Connect app, both standard alarms and smart-wake alarms. Smart-wake alarms will attempt to look at your sleep phases/stages, and wake you up slightly before your actual alarm time, in a sleep stage that hurts less.

And that button on the side? It acts as a snooze button. Or, if you long-hold it, it’ll turn off the alarm entirely.

Next on the data front, there’s the Health Status dashboard, which has your key vitals (mostly overnight) that show against your specific trended history (meaning, whether they are high/low/normal relative to your baseline):

Further, as you’d expect, you can see my steps for the day here, which shows a relatively calm morning, and then I went out for a 5KM run in early afternoon, which spiked my steps. And of course, I can trend that over longer time periods as well.

I’ll add in more data snippets in my in-depth review, but that’s just a quick look at those core stats.

When it comes to the device settings, there are nearly all the same options you’d find on a Garmin watch, such as alerts, alarms, user profile, etc…

Notably at the bottom there’s the ‘Find My Band’ option, which will show you the last place the band was connected to your phone. If you tap the ‘Find My Band’ button, it’ll start vibrating the band. Obviously this isn’t an audible beeper, but if it’s in a quiet room you should be able to find it. Finally, note that you can double-tap the unit to see your battery status, using the small LED light.

With that, let’s dive into workouts.

Workout Usage:

The Garmin Cirqa band will track your workouts automatically, or manually. When in a workout mode, it can also pair to your phone to get additional data, including GPS (useful not only for plotting your GPS track, but also for speed/distance/etc. in cycling).

When it comes to tracking that workout, there are essentially three core ways it can happen:

– Automatically: By default, if you do nothing, it’ll create an activity for you automatically and attempt to classify (detecting the sport type).
– Manually via the button: In this case, it tells Cirqa that you’re starting a workout and that you want to start tracking. This is useful for sports that don’t have clear signals (e.g., yoga) that you’re starting a workout.
– Manually via the Garmin Connect app: In this case, you not only start the workout manually, but do so specifying an exact sport as well, from 80+ sports. Further, there are app dashboards to see some of your metrics in real time.

So, starting off with a simple auto-detect activity, I went for a 5KM relatively intense trail run. Out into the midday heat and back.

My other Garmin watches synced the activity, but unfortunately, nothing from Cirqa. After an hour, nothing appeared. [Update: Garmin says that if another Garmin device is used where a manual recording is made, be it Garmin watch, Garmin bike computer, etc… it’s going to defer to the manual recording from those activities and basically disappear the Cirqa activity. This makes total sense from a user standpoint to minimize clutter.]

Thinking that perhaps it was tied to the other Garmin watches pushing activities, I went out for another short few-kilometer run, this time with connectivity turned off on the watches, and no phone. This time it did create an automatically detected activity, though it took about 15-20 minutes after the run to show up. It’ll basically push a notification to your phone that an activity has been detected, and then ask you to confirm the activity type (it was correct).

This is different from Whoop (and Fitbit), which just ‘own’ the decision and mark it as a run and call it done. I kinda wish Garmin would be a bit more ‘automatic’ here. [Update: Garmin says that over time, it’ll become more ‘confident’, and simply start auto-confirming those activities by itself.]

In any case, it seemed to start a bit too early while I was walking to my starting point, and it actually picked up my phone that I had left behind on the way out. In any case, there are stats here:

Now, Garmin has the option to trim the stats to remove the start/end bits that aren’t correct, but sadly, that didn’t work. I tried a few more times, without luck. Again, for a screenless wearable, this is a key feature that *has* to work. [Update: Garmin says a backend update pushing Wednesday, July 22nd, will fix this issue.]

Speaking of things that didn’t work, I somehow went from a training readiness of 73 (prior to my first run), down to 50 (after my first run), and then back up to 73 (after my 2nd run + a ride). And then 15 minutes after that, went back down to 54. So…yeah, something isn’t working there either. [Update: Garmin says this is a known issue they are working to address, but don’t have a time/fix estimate yet.]

Next, when it comes to a manually started workout via the button, you can configure what exactly happens when you press that button. First, it’ll always start a certain type of activity. That could be Running, or Yoga, or Strength. Or, you can just make a generic timed activity. Further, you can specify whether to leverage your phone’s GPS when the button is pressed, as well as specify any alerts (which is currently just AutoLap by distance, and a time-based alert). Further, you can define whether it’s on the wrist, or an armband:

When you press that button on the side, it’ll automatically start recording an activity, and give you a notification on your phone. Here, you can open up a tab that shows you incredibly limited information, as seen below:

There’s no way to customize this, or expand it. If you subscribe to Garmin Connect+, you also get a heart rate graph. Let me be clear: This is astonishingly disappointing. Amazfit, at $99, gives you a fully customizable live stats dashboard, complete with maps, charts, and more. Whoop does the same. Polar does the same (at $199), and Fitbit, while at $99, has admitted their first release of the live activity page needs a revamp and has committed to working on improving it.

I have no problem with Garmin upselling you on Garmin Connect+ to provide additional features. But this simply shouldn’t be an upsell feature. This is basic dial tone stuff that’s been in apps for 15 years. And even if I did subscribe to GC+, it still wouldn’t show maps or customizable data pages. But again, how on earth does a heart rate band not show me my actual current heart rate? Are you kidding me?!? C’mon.

In any case, when you’re done with the activity, you can press the button to save/end it. Or, you can use the smartphone to end it.

Lastly, on the workout starting piece, there’s the manual start with the Garmin Connect app. In this case, I started a simple workout while cycling to the grocery store to get garbage bags (seriously), with a bit extra for fun. This is useful here because I’m able to leverage GPS for the route (and distance), while the Cirqa provides the heart rate metrics. But again, same very thin information during the activity as above.

You’ll press the +  at the top to start a workout manually, choose the workout type, and then press start:

During the activity, you’ll see the same stats as the previous section. Again, no actual live heart rate.

Then you can see the summary stats of the workout afterward. Obviously, had this been a normal cycling workout, I’d have much more impressive stats. But, you can get the gist of things from a quick loop around to get some garbage bags.

In my full in-depth review, I’ll go into how well it recognizes cycling from an automatic detection standpoint, especially for commuting, where the more casual start/stops can cause some automatic detection algorithm challenges. And of course, detailed heart rate accuracy charts/etc…

Now somewhat surprisingly, none of my workouts have synced to 3rd-party apps such as Strava, TrainingPeaks, etc… Which…umm…is very surprising. [Update: Garmin says this is because they hadn’t toggled a backend switch yet to send workouts from Cirqa to 3rd-party platforms. That toggle has now been flipped, and I can confirm that as of the morning of July 22nd, my bike commute showed up on Strava/etc…]

Meanwhile, the button has a handy feature during workouts that’s worthwhile mentioning: Turning on heart rate broadcasting. You can long-hold it for two seconds, and it’ll start broadcasting your heart rate to 3rd-party apps/platforms (e.g., Zwift, Peloton, etc…), or things like a Garmin bike computer. The small LED on the side will flash yellow/orange when it’s doing so. Here you can see it in Zwift:

(Note: You need to enable this in Settings > Health & Wellness > Broadcast Heart Rate > Device Control & Status toggles)

Now, one workout-specific feature that’s unique to Garmin Connect+ is the ability to iterate through a structured workout on the app. This piece requires Connect+, regardless of whether it’s a Garmin Coach workout, or one that you created.

In any case, after your workouts (any workouts, of any type, structured or otherwise), you’ve got additional data as it relates to training load and training status. Training Load (specifically, Acute Load) will show load as it relates to your baseline over time. While Training Status will show the usual Productive, Unproductive, Maintaining, Recovery, etc… Acute Load includes aspects like Load Ratio and Load Focus. In my case, I’ve been doing lots of summer water things that aren’t really high-heart-rate activities (stand-up paddle boarding, eFoiling, etc.) that have me with a reasonably low training load the last few weeks.

Whereas Recovery will show up in both the activity itself (the recovery time needed from that activity), as well as overall Recovery time needed until your next hard workout, and can be seen in Training Readiness.

Finally, there’s Garmin’s Training Readiness feature. This is Garmin’s umbrella metric that looks at your training load (Acute Load), Sleep (last night, and recent nights), Recovery Time, Stress, and HRV status, and gives you an overall score. This score shifts throughout the day, usually starting off in the morning and declining if you’ve had a busy day, or increasing slightly for an easy day. Stress moments will drop the score down, as will workouts. You can see my score this morning:

Whereas before my run this afternoon it had slowly climbed to 73, and then after my run it dropped down to 50, due to the recovery need pushing the score down. The problem is, Garmin isn’t updating the second chart throughout the day, but does update it in Essentials.

Generally speaking, Training Readiness is one of the best things that Garmin has designed, mostly in the footsteps of what Fitbit did with Daily Readiness Scores years ago (now just called Readiness). It’s a key leg-up over Whoop, especially, which lacks any sort of continually updating score. In Whoop’s case, you have a Strain Score (effectively Training Load for the day), and then a point-in-time Recovery score in the morning. But that score doesn’t update over the course of the day (either up or down). Garmin needs to update their user interface to correctly show the value consistently across all parts.

Again, Training Readiness, along with all the components that go into it, is a key competitive advantage that Garmin has here. While Whoop has their own advantages (such as more accessory options, and better automatic workout type detection), the Training Readiness is hard to overstate. Especially if your goal is to have that type of guidance that so many people with screenless wearables want.

Finally, when it comes to your data and mixing it with other Garmin wearables, it all syncs in, just like any other Garmin watch. So you can use Cirqa 24×7, or just a portion of the data. The data will update accordingly on your other devices. For example, during this run, I took off my Fenix 8 Pro, and instead wore the Cirqa on one wrist, and then a Forerunner 170 on the other wrist. At the end of the day, the Fenix 8 Pro updated its stats accordingly with the Cirqa data (including steps, training load, etc…).

What Does Garmin Connect+ Subscription Add?

In short, very little. And more specifically, very little beyond what is already there over the last year.

As noted above, Connect+ isn’t required for the device, and instead, is only giving you a handful of extra features, mostly around coaching and nutrition tracking. Most of the coaching features seen here are usually free on Garmin’s watches with screens, but here they leverage the Garmin Connect app as your screen, and thus decide to charge you for it.

Here’s what Garmin Connect+ would add:

– Garmin Coach Workouts in app: Strength & Fitness specifically
– Additional Structured Workouts in app: Cardio, Yoga, HIIT, Strength, Pilates, Wheelchair
– Nutrition Tracking: Launched earlier this year.
– Manual Lap Creation: Via the Garmin Connect app during Live Activities
– HR graph in the app: For Live activities, it adds the heart rate chart/graph at the top
– Garmin Active Intelligence (AI) Insights: Very short couple-line snippets in the app dashboard
– Performance Dashboard (Web): Basically can create your own dashboard on the web
– Garmin Trails: Curated trail routes, not really applicable to Cirqa
– Enhanced LiveTrack Location Sharing: This will text (instead of e-mail, which is free), as well as a dedicated LiveTrack page
– 3D Maps in app: Again, for workouts with GPS only
– Discounts on Garmin accessories: Via app, very limited selection
– Extra Garmin Social Badges: Again, via app
– Annual Roundup of Activity Stats: At end of year, ‘Garmin Connect Rundown’ slideshow

As you can see, many of the features aren’t super applicable to Cirqa. Accessory discounts are things like Garmin cycling sensors (not applicable here), and Edge bike cases. There are also discounts on heart rate straps, but there’s an HR sensor here, and most of the time Amazon is still cheaper than the Garmin.com discount anyway.

I think the most notable feature here is just how limiting the live activity view is (on the mobile app) without GC+, but frankly, GC+ only adds the live HR graph metric, which is pretty limiting.

Instead, the most applicable Garmin Connect+ feature here is the Garmin Coach Workouts in the app, and then the manual lap creation. The Garmin Coach Strength workouts have been behind the Garmin Connect paywall since they were introduced. But here on Cirqa, any structured workouts require Garmin Connect+. But the lack of being able to do your own structured workouts without GC+, is pretty weird.

Meanwhile, aspects like nutrition tracking are very real, and if you were previously paying for some other nutrition tracking platform, this will generally be about the same price as that, plus you get all the extra bits outlined above. You can check out my full Garmin Connect+ nutrition post here, as well as my full Garmin Connect+ features rundown here.

A Quick Market Comparison:

(Above left to right: Fitbit Air, Garmin Cirqa, Whoop 5.0/MG, Amazfit Helio)

Next, here’s a not-so-short chart I’ve put together comparing how Garmin’s offering competes with others on the market today. I’ll continue to expand this, and do a full dedicated post with more analysis, but here’s the gist of it for now with the core metrics:

Again, I’ll dive into things more deeply in the coming days, from a comparison standpoint.

FAQ’s:

Here’s a quick listing of all the most common questions you’re probably going to ask, as well as any others I’m seeing asked a fair bit, I’ll include here.

1) Does Garmin Cirqa require any subscription?

No, it does not. While you can subscribe to Garmin Connect+ to get added features outlined above, there’s no core feature that requires it. The only feature that’s really applicable here would be the Nutrition tracing function released earlier this year. But for context, I don’t subscribe to Garmin Connect+, and don’t feel like I’m missing anything. All of the features it has without a subscription are more than competitive enough to Whoop & Fitbit.

2) What’s the battery claim?

Garmin claims 10 days of battery life

3) Are there any buttons?

Yes, one button to start/stop an activity manually. You can also just use automatic workout detection. Further, the button acts as a snooze button for alarms, can start heart rate broadcasting (by long-press), and can silence the vibration motor (alarm) if you used the Find My Garmin feature. Also, it’s used for initial pairing.

4) Does it have a screen, or any display/LED?

No, it does not have a screen of any type. It does, however, have a small pairing LED on the device, like others from Whoop, Fitbit, and more.

5) Does it have vibration alerts?

Yes, it has vibration alerts to be used as a sleep alarm.

6) Does it automatically create workouts without pressing any buttons?

Yes, it can (and will) automatically track workouts. This is grouped into basically two groups. The first is that for certain sport types (like a run/walk) it’ll create a run/walk workout in your workout log. For other types that it’s unsure of, it’ll still log the workout, and then you can manually assign the sport type. Additionally, you can always manually log a workout with the Garmin Connect App leveraging the Cirqa band, from those 80+ sport types.

7) Does it show Acute Load (Training Load)?

Yes, it records Acute Load, Load Ratio, and Load Focus. Basically, at the exact same Training Load status as any high-end Garmin Watch (even a Fenix 8 Pro).

8) Will those workouts sync to Strava and other platforms?

Yes, it’ll automatically send them to 3rd-party platforms, if you’ve configured it.

9) Does Garmin Cirqa Support ECG?

No, it does not have the correct sensor or internal wiring to do medical-grade ECG or Afib detection. That’s part of Garmin’s Elevate Gen5 optical HR sensor, and this contains a Gen4 optical HR sensor. While Garmin has some much older watches (the Venu 2 Plus) that did ECG on Gen4, that required additional internal wiring and isolation rings.

10) Does it monitor skin temperature?

Yes, it’ll monitor skin temperature at night. That’s mostly useful for female cycle tracking (predictions); for other scenarios, it doesn’t really tend to be all that useful because skin temperature monitoring at night is far more impacted by things like the room temperature.

11) Does it monitor your heart rate 24×7?

Yes, like all Garmin wearables, it monitors and records your heart rate 24×7. You can view that within the Garmin Connect app (both on the mobile app and on the website).

12) Does it have high heart rate alerts?

Yes, you can configure high/low abnormal heart rate alerts, for times outside of workouts.

13) Does it measure SpO2 (PulseOx)?

Yes, it measures PulseOx at night automatically. Further, you can do a one-off measurement at any time using the Garmin Connect app.

14) Does Cirqa measure Respiration Rate?

Yes, like other Garmin wearables, it’ll measure this at night and trend it over time. Additionally, it’ll measure this during a workout.

15) Does it have the Health Status feature/dashboard?

Yes, it does. Health Status isn’t technically a new feature per se, but rather, just collecting data points Garmin has long collected (many years), and putting them in a single dashboard and trending them. There are more details here.

16) Does it have journaling?

Yes, Garmin has journaling included (for free), since about a year ago. Details here.

17) Does it track steps?

Yes, it’ll track steps, as well as intensity minutes, and of course calories.

18) Is it waterproof?

Yes, it’s waterproof to 50m.

19) Does it have GPS?

No, it does not have GPS inside it, but it can use the Garmin Connect app with your phone to record a GPS track of your activity. Thus, you can use the heart rate portion from Garmin Cirqa, and then use your phone for the GPS track to get distance, speed, pace, and other metrics (seen on Garmin Connect mobile).

20) Does it have WiFi?

No, it does not have WiFi. WiFi would burn far too much battery here. It has Bluetooth and USB via the Garmin standard proprietary USB charging port. You can sync via Garmin Express on desktop as well.

21) Does it broadcast your heart rate to other apps/devices?

Yes, it broadcasts on standard ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart to any 3rd party device/app.

22) Does it connect to ANT+ or Bluetooth sensors like power/cadence/etc…?

No, neither the Cirqa device nor the Garmin Connect app will connect to these sensors from a data workout standpoint.

23) If I wear Cirqa and a Garmin watch at the same time during a workout, what happens?

The way it works is that if you record a manual activity on any Garmin device while Cirqa is worn, then the manually recorded activity will take priority, and disappear the Cirqa activity (if the other device’s manual one syncs first). However, if Cirqa syncs first, and you confirm that auto-detect activity (meaning, change it from ‘Maybe’ an activity to ‘Definitely’), then any other Garmin manually recorded activities during that timeframe will stay (just how it works today when recording on two Garmin devices at once). This is true for Garmin watches, as well as Garmin Edge devices.

Beyond that, for non-workout aspects, if you wear a Garmin watch + Cirqa, then it defaults to which device is set as the Primary Device in your settings.

24) If I switch back and forth between Cirqa and a Garmin watch, will my steps/etc be updated?

Yes, you should have full true-up of data, including steps, Body Battery, HRV Status, Stress, Training Status, training load metrics, Sleep data, sleep scores, etc…. Basically everything will sync seamlessly.

25) Is the bicep band simply a longer regular strap?

No, the bicep band has a substantially different and more elastic material on it than the regular strap. This is common for other companies like Whoop/etc, where you want the bicep band to have more ‘give’ than a regular watch strap.

—

I’ll keep rounding up the most frequent questions and sticking them here.

Wrap-Up:

So is this a ‘Whoop Killer’? Or a ‘Fitbit Killer’? Nah. Again, that’s just clickbait. Instead, it’s going to undercut both of those, but in different ways. This hurts Whoop more than it hurts Fitbit. In the case of Fitbit, it’s still missing some elements that target the hardcore athlete, such as better tracking data during a workout, a clear-cut user interface for data analytics, and deeper journaling. Whereas Garmin, they easily outclass Whoop on both the deeper data analytics side. The journaling isn’t quite as deep out of the box as Whoop’s, but you can also customize it to fill those gaps, so for most, it’s probably good enough. Where Garmin does lag behind Whoop is the simplicity of Whoop’s Strain/Recovery dashboard. Garmin has the exact same data (Acute Load, Training Readiness), but again, many people argue the way Whoop enumerates that data is cleaner. Further, Whoop’s accessory line is *far* deeper than Garmin’s (ironic, because that’s historically an area that Garmin has excelled at for other product lines, but seemingly dropped the ball here).

But having a ‘killer’ product is rarely about the best technical product. It’s also marketing. And both Whoop and Fitbit are immeasurably better at product marketing than Garmin is, especially when it comes to celebrities and influencers. Fitbit went deep in this area for the Fitbit Air launch, and as a result, the response has been borderline record-breaking. Equally, Whoop has a long history of doing the same across both celebrities and influencers (however you want to define that). While neither of those might appeal to the hardcore DC Rainmaker follower focused on data and science, the reality is they substantially move the needle. And Garmin simply doesn’t meaningfully engage with either.

Instead, I think the first step that Garmin has done here is to effectively stop the bleeding. Not just to Fitbit and Whoop, but also to Amazfit. With Amazfit priced at $99, for folks wanting a holistic watch+band solution, they were really the only other serious option (yes, Polar has a watch+band offering, but…). With Garmin’s offering on the table, they can be part of the competitive conversation when people are looking at any of these. With Garmin’s product, you pay once for $199, that’s it. Sure, there’s Connect+, but it’s hardly required. As a fun tidbit: My Connect+ subscription lapsed back in April, and there’s not been a single moment I missed it. For my needs (which are pretty darn data-heavy, mind you), it simply doesn’t provide anything. Perhaps Garmin can change that down the road, but for now, nah. That said, kudos to Garmin on sticking the landing on offering a biceps band at launch.

In that context, Garmin Cirqa is absolutely going to steal a number of purchases from Whoop. And not just purchases, but renewals. A single year of the cheapest Whoop device is equal to a lifetime of Garmin Cirqa. Thus, Garmin will take many of the more athletic-focused purchases, whereas Fitbit and Amazfit will take from Whoop many more of the budget-focused mainstream consumers. Where Garmin needs to think out of the box is how to convert those Fitbit purchasers to Garmin. Which, ultimately, gets back to marketing (starting with retailers, and all the way up from there). Garmin has solved the product problem; now they need to think about how they market it.

In any case, plenty more to come in the following days and weeks, so stay tuned!

With that, thanks for reading!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the Garmin Cirqa (Black) or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

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Here's a few other variants or sibling products that are worth considering:

Garmin Cirqa (French Grey)

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Garmin Cirqa (Blue)

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Garmin Cirqa (Muave)

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Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!

Suunto has just announced a pile of new features as part of their Q2 update, which includes both firmware updates for watches, as well as platform updates for their app/platform.

Diving into the hardware side first, this is only for the Suunto Race 2 & Suunto Vertical 2. This is definitely a bit of a shift from updates of recent years that have been more widely supported with older models, whereas the Race 2 & Vertical 2 came out less than a year ago. It’s unclear if this is a clear trend going forward for Suunto (probably), or just a one-off thing. This would be more in line with how Garmin handles things, and more recently Wahoo as well. While COROS tends to support things further back (such as their recent June 2026 firmware update going back to previous-generation units).

In any case, here’s what’s new on the watch firmware:

– Maps get easier water feature labels
– Maps get mountain peak labels
– Maps get layer selection option (including layers for contour lines, place names, street labels, and POI listings)
– Expanded route storage, from 15 routes to 200 routes (#@$@# finally!)
– Adds new vertical gain training target (ascent target in vertical meters)
– Adds tides forecast feature
– Adds QR code pairing option
– Increases syncing speed of new SuuntoPlus apps by compressing them

Above, in the header photo, you can see an example of the new layers option that lets you toggle various tidbits on or off on the map. Meanwhile, down below is the ascent target for vertical gain from within a given workout.

Meanwhile, for the tidal forecast, this comes from the Suunto app and syncs to the device. Some companies have a tidal database that’s kept locally, whereas others sync it from an app. This does require the app nearby. I do wish it were a wee bit more specific in the Tides header as to which exact city it was pulling from. Obviously, the tides for where I am in Mallorca (in Spain) are vastly different from those in the Basque Country up north. In this case, I know these are my local tides, but if I actually cared about the tides (and thus, most likely on a boat), I’d want to know they were for my exact location, not yesterday’s location far away.

Next, from an app standpoint, there are a few new things there:

– Added new shading option in 3D maps (e.g., seeing steep sections)
– Added new map type (City Map), making buildings with a 3d styling
– New sharing overlays and backgrounds for sharing completed activities to friends (e.g., power/distance/etc)
– Updated layout in profile details to show badges and personal records

Here’s an example of the new shading & city maps:

Finally, last week there were some updates for the Suunto Ocean, from a dive standpoint:

– Added CCR mode (like in EON’s)
– Added multiple tank pod support
– Added New TTS values
– Added heart rate belt support
– Bug fixes to map

Now, as with past Suunto releases, one of the program managers has put together a video that walks through all these features, step by step.

Got all that? Good.

As always, it’s good to see Suunto has maintained their quarterly release cadence, following the most recent one back in April. We’ve seen most companies in this space join that pattern over the last year or two, albeit at different intensity levels. In this case, Suunto has left off both the Suunto Race 1 & Suunto Race S, which did get the April updates (the Vertical 1 did not get the April updates, but did get the January updates). Undoubtedly, that’s going to give some people a bit of pause for thought going forward. Unfortunately, it’s just too soon to know if ‘this model year only’ will become the new norm for software updates.

In the meantime, if you’ve got a Suunto Race 2 or Vertical 2, go forth and get it updated! The updates were released today, but as always, it may take a short bit of time before all watches receive the update.

With that, thanks for reading!

Found This Post Useful? Support The Site!

Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the Suunto Race 2 or Suunto Vertical 2 or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

Suunto Race 2

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Suunto Vertical 2

Amazon REI

And of course – you can always sign-up to be a DCR Supporter! That gets you an ad-free DCR, access to the DCR Shed Talkin' video series packed with behind the scenes tidbits...and it also makes you awesome. And being awesome is what it’s all about!

Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!

The new Oura Ring 5 is a genuinely and significantly smaller ring than the previous Oura Ring 4 that was on my finger. That part isn’t really debatable. And the real-world battery life seems to be a *slight* improvement over the past, though most of the time Oura rings seem to slowly lose their battery life, so this could just be a case of new unit vs well-worn unit. And finally, indeed, there are some new features – but those too are available to all recent Oura ring owners, and aren’t specific to the Oura Ring 5.

Nonetheless, I’ve been putting it through its paces over the last near-month across everything from swimming to cycling to running to strength workouts, and of course, simply sleeping and daily life. After all, that’s frankly what the Oura Ring is best at: Things other than sports. In fact, to be really clear upfront, I’d argue that even with some minor new features in the sports realm, the Oura Ring 5 is now woefully behind even the most basic wearables when it comes to sports tracking. So much so that as I tried to do accuracy comparisons, I’d forgotten just how far behind they are in this realm (and that’s aside from the accuracy itself).

Still, there are reasons you want a ring (from any company), which is most simply summed up: You don’t want to wear a watch/smart band. If you already have one of those watch/band devices, there’s literally no reason to get an Oura Ring in 2026, everyone else is too good – even the budget ones.

With that, let’s dive into the details. Note that I purchased this unit myself, along with the previous few versions, and I pay for my own subscription to the Oura Ring service.

Oura Ring 5 vs Ring 4:

So, what’s different? Size: this is almost entirely about size – and size-related things (though surprisingly, not reduced battery life). Here are the core differences:

– Reduced width: From 7.9mm down to 6.1mm
– Reduced thickness: From 2.8mm down to 2.28mm
– Reduced weight: From 3.3-5.2g down to 2g
– Reduced size options: From size 4-15 to size 6-13
– Increased battery life claim: From 5-8 days to 6-9 days
– The Sensors: They’ve decreased from 18 to 12 light paths, but 4x’d the strength of the lights, otherwise
– Pricing: Increased by $50 from $349 to $399 (base price, other options)
– Subscription: Still remains the same at $5.99/month

With the sensor changes, the company says that despite reducing the number of light pathways from 18 to 12, it’s increased the light brightness by 4x, which in turn has resulted in a 12% increase in nighttime HRV accuracy, and up to a 19% increase in workout accuracy.

As for the size, the company claims it’s up to 40% smaller than the previous edition, and likely that depends on precisely which model they’re talking about. Here’s my Oura 3 vs 4 vs 5 (all size 10):

For the model types, here’s the full range of colors:

And the pricing is:

Base models – $399/429EUR: Silver, and Black (mine is the base silver one)
Premium models – $499/529EUR: Gold, Stealth, Brushed Silver, and Deep Rose

Ok, got all that? Let’s dive into the box.

In the Box(es):

One thing to remember is that before you get ‘The Box’, you get ‘Another Box’. Specifically, when you order an Oura ring, you first get a sizing kit box. That box is a package of fake Oura rings, simply sizing rings for each size. They recommend you wear the ring for 24 hours prior to ordering your actual ring. They also note that their ring sizes might not match other ring sizes, hence the sizing kit.

In my case, I’ve consistently worn a Size 10 Oura ring since many versions ago. Also, in my case, I wear it on my ring finger. Oura has noted over the years that you can technically wear it on any finger you want, as long as it doesn’t rotate/move around by itself (mine doesn’t). Their general suggestion is the index finger; however, I personally don’t like the look of the ring on that finger for myself. To each their own.

In any case, once you validate the size you want, you go onto their site and simply choose the ring size, and it’ll ship out the actual ring to you in the final ring box. Below are the bits inside:

In short, you’ve got:

1) The Oura 5 ring itself
2) The Oura 5 charging dock with USB-C port (note: this dock is different than the Oura 4 charging dock)
3) USB-C to USB-C cable
4) Some paper stuff you probably won’t read

It’s all pretty straightforward.

Daily Life Tracking:

The thing Oura does best is quietly and discreetly tracking your daily activity, without having to wear a connected watch or band on your wrist. And given the even smaller size of the Oura Ring 5, it arguably does this better than ever. Of course, since there’s no external lights, vibration motor, or other display on the ring, everything it collects ends up in the Oura app.

The Oura app has been redesigned over the past year, and for the most part you’re either gonna love it or hate it. The app design essentially splits your information into two pieces: A row of scores along the top (readiness, sleep, activity, etc…), and then a never-ending scroll of larger display information down below it. Personally, I find it dilutes the information too much, and doesn’t really make your actual data very clear, but hey, that’s where we are today.

Starting with the top row, you’ve got a lightly customizable row of scores including: Readiness Score, Sleep Score, Activity Score, Heart Rate (Current), Stress (minutes), and then the ability to add Resilience (or, to remove the others):

Tapping on any of those individual scores brings you to more details about that particular metric/score. For example, if we tap on the ‘Readiness’ Score, it’ll bring us to a timeline showing readiness over the past week, plus the contributors to today’s score:

Generally speaking for wearables, including Oura, the Readiness Score attempts to bring in all the factors that define how ready you are for the day (including workouts or other demanding tasks). This includes looking at trends like resting heart rate, HRV (heart rate variability), Sleep, and Activity. These trends are specific to you and your historical data, not the overall population (especially for things like HRV). For example, in the case of HRV within Oura, it’s trending that over a 3-month period, and comparing the last two weeks to that value. That’s a bit high compared to most wearables that trend the last 7 days versus the 3-month (90-day) period, but I don’t have any real issues there (you can debate both sides of that coin).

However, this is why most wearables, again including Oura, really require at a minimum 2-3 weeks of data to be useful for these types of scores, and realistically require 2-3 months to have a solid baseline to work from. After which, each of the 9 different metrics that make up the Readiness score will have differing trending lengths.

In any case, heading onwards there’s sleep tracking. You can simply tap the ‘Sleep’ score at the top of the main dashboard to access it. This is an area that Oura really developed its name on, back at its beginnings in the 2015-2018 era. It did a lot of work to be a leader in sleep data during that time, especially as other early sleep tracking wearables struggled to get accurate data. However, fast-forwarding a decade, and frankly, there’s no meaningful difference between Oura and other wearables for core sleep stats. It’s an advantage that has largely faded away, as others have gotten really good as well.

As an example, here’s how a few day time-slices of tracking compared:

The gist of things? Scores roughly trend, but how each one decides awake/sleep time (especially during the middle of the night) is kinda all over the place.

Of course, more challenging is the exact times I woke up each day. Let’s look at this morning (Friday the 3rd):

Reality/Actual Went to sleep at ~1:45AM, woke up at 7:50AM, and snoozed twice till ~8:09AM
Oura Ring 5: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 8:12AM
Whoop 5.0/MG: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 7:59AM
Amazfit Helio: Asleep at 2:11AM, woke up at 8:10AM
Polar Loop: Asleep at 1:54AM, woke up at 8:12AM
Fitbit Air: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 8:07AM
Garmin Fenix 8 Pro: Asleep at 1:37AM, woke up at 8:08AM

In any case, here’s what you’ll see on Oura’s page. Below you can see my sleep score, as well as its attempts to quantify sleep stages. Keeping in mind that most so-called gold-standard medical-grade sleep-scoring devices only hit about 80% accuracy rates, and this is at best below that. So I wouldn’t overthink sleep stage/phase components/accuracy.

Instead, focus on total sleep, sleep debt, and the sleep consistency metrics (roughly what they refer to as ‘Body Clock’). These are ultimately what will matter. Simply put: If you’re only getting 5 hours of sleep per night, no amount of supposed deep sleep phase/stage data is going to be getting you out of that hole. You can see these key metrics down below:

I actually really like Oura’s Sleep Debt feature (even if I’m probably constantly in debt), I think it’s honestly a better way of showing sleep needs than what most of their competitors show. Whoop also has sleep debt, but most other wearables don’t.

Anyways, below that you’ll find nighttime breathing, lowest heart rate values, and HRV trends. Generally speaking, I find HRV trending to be one of the best ways to predict upcoming sickness, especially 1-2 days out. My HRV values will drop considerably, just a night or two prior to visible symptoms of a cold. Keeping in mind, however, that significant evening drinking (or a massive workout/race) can also drive the same result, thus, it’s somewhat important to know if those other factors occurred.

In fact, you can even tag activities here, so you can see how they impact HRV. For example, I talked about alcohol and workouts, but even other factors like certain drugs (good or bad), can impact it. The same obviously goes for a red-eye flight, and many more factors. This helps you figure out those factors long term. The Sleep Health text you see above simply trends your sleep scores over time, which I’ll cover in the next section around ‘Vitals’.

Now, if we just glance at the lower bar, you’ll see it’s broken out from the original home dashboard bar with three buttons (Today/Vitals/My Health), to four buttons (Readiness/Sleep/Activity/Heart Rate + Stress). So, we’ll go with activity next. Here, it shows us total ‘activity’, where activity is defined as basically movement, including steps, workouts (confusingly also called ‘Activity’), and movement. You’ll also see training volume/frequency/recovery time, but as I’ll cover in the next section…umm…just ignore those.

As we scroll down, we can see activities pulled in from Strava. You can enable Strava sync (which is bidirectional, whether you like it or not), which in theory helps Oura classify activities (or, understand workouts you didn’t do with the Oura ring).

Now, that’s the end of the activity overview section there, but I’ll cover workouts in the next major section. For now, let’s wrap up with the ‘Heart Rate & Stress’ section:

This doesn’t really show a lot of new information, but rather, just summarizes existing information we’ve already seen at this point, and shows your heart rate values over the course of the day.

Meanwhile, looking at stress, it’ll plot that over the course of the day. You’ll notice how just after 18:00, it doesn’t have any white dots; that’s because during that timeframe I was doing a trail run. Oura puts these as high-stress events, rather than nullifying them like Garmin does. Yet concurrently, Oura doesn’t include this time in the ‘Stressed’ category. It’s kind of a weird halfsies decision. While from a medical standpoint, workouts are a ‘stressor’, they aren’t typically what most people would align to being ‘Stressed’. Especially since most people will do a workout to reduce stress (and most medical folks would recommend the same). Ideally, they’d just zero out that section of the chart, but I appreciate at least not plotting those points in the totals seen at the bottom.

Oh, and in terms of battery life, as a data point, on June 9th at 6PM, I was at 100% battery, and then by June 16th at 9PM, I was down to 7% and needing to recharge. So basically, 7 days of battery life for the size 10 unit, with roughly 1-2 hours of workout time per day (on average). On a second battery charge, it started that June 16th at 11PM on a full charge, but by the morning of June 22nd, it was down to 8% again and needed to be charged, putting it at 6 days this time. Then further again, the next charge after that also lasted 6 days before it was down to 10% and needed a charge before bed.

My Real World Battery Testing:
Week 1: 7 Days
Week 2: 6 Days
Week 3: 6 Days
Week 4: On track for 6 days again

That’s technically within the 6-9 day spec, but definitely not 9 days.

Vitals & My Health Sections:

Next, we’ve got two sections that essentially summarize all the other sections, and trend them a bit. Having a ‘Vitals’ section is the trendy thing to do the last few years, which basically looks at your stats in the other section and gives you a trend line. Here you can see this occurring for readiness, sleep, and others:

And yet more tiles:

Each of those tiles simply links back to one of the other previously discussed data points in the section prior. That said, I do need to draw your attention to that VO2Max score of 38, which is hilariously wrong/low. Most devices have my VO2Max in the 56-58ish realm these days. I was tested last year around 58 again, where I tend to float. The kicker here being I was even taking the time/effort to ensure all my multi-hour daily workouts were properly logged with Oura, and atop that, it has *YEARS* of my data to go on. Whatever they are doing here is just hard wrong.

Meanwhile, ‘My Health ’ is again more of the same, but now with color-coded trending for each section:

There is however, a Sleep Chronotype at the bottom, though that was already displayed in the Sleep section:

Now, the challenge with Oura’s sleep chronotype classification is that it’s not actually detecting my chronotype, but rather, forcing it. In my case, it shows my ‘Awake’ time each day at 8:03AM, and then simply adding 8 hours earlier to make it midnight. But in my case, I’m virtually never in bed by midnight (more like 1-2AM), and the 8:03AM? That’s simply me setting an alarm each day for the 7:50AM kids morning school rush, snoozing it once before finally getting up. On the weekend, it’s much later, and if there’s no school rush, it’s definitely not 8:03AM.

The point is, this is at best a useless categorization of your daily trends, but is definitely not your actual chronotype. Never mind the fact that since when did going to bed at 12AM classify as an “early evening type”? I mean, jokingly I’ll say midnight is ‘early evening’, but most rational people would classify an “early evening” bedtime as probably 9-10PM.

Sports Tracking:

Let’s be upfront about this: The Oura ring is not at all great for sports tracking. While the company did add some new features around activity tracking at the same time they announced the Oura Ring 5, they are pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.

Specifically, new app updates now allow you to see *slightly* more data than in the past when you start a manual workout. However, that does not actually include the ability to see the ring’s heart rate data during the workout itself, only afterward in a highly smoothed manner. Further, they don’t push that data to 3rd party platforms such as Strava.

In any case, when it comes to sports tracking, you’ve actually got three main options:

1) Let the unit automatically detect the exercise, and you manually tweak the classification (sport type) if need be
2) Manually start a workout on the run to get that counted as a workout
3) Sync in the data from some other wearable/device, to get it counted as a workout

There’s some solid irony in the fact that the best way to work out with an Oura ring…is to wear another company’s device. Technically speaking, there’s also a third option:

For the automatic exercise bits, it virtually never gets those right for me (except sometimes cycling), and that’s with years of Oura ring experience. So instead, I’d rely on the manual activity creation.

To begin, you’ll tap in the lower-right to start a Live Activity, which opens up the menu to select the sport type as well as heart rate source.

We’ll get to the sport type in a second. But as you can see above, there are two options for the heart rate. The first is ‘Live Heart Rate Source’, where you choose another brand/unit to act as your heart rate sensors. In this scenario, you can pair to not just any Bluetooth HR sensor, but also anything through Apple Health (such as AirPod Pro 3 or PowerBeats Pro 2). It’s important to note that if you don’t have such a device, you can’t see your heart rate data during the workout live.

I can see how Oura likely convinced themselves that by allowing pairing to a heart rate strap, it ‘solved’ their sports-tracking problem. I can totally imagine how that conference room conversation went, but in reality, it just exposes the gap to other wearables even more. After all, Oura is basically saying you need another $60-$100 heart rate strap (plus your $400 ring) to do what the $99 Fitbit Air can do. And that still doesn’t solve for the basics of not including heart rate data in the activity file to platforms like Strava and others, which is simply baffling (more on that in a second).

In any case, we’ll choose the ring itself for now, since this is a review of a ring, not devices you should buy instead of the ring. Likewise, we’ll choose our sport. To Oura’s credit, there are a gazillion sport profiles to choose. I never knew Finnish baseball was a thing, but…umm…here we are (Oura is a Finnish company).

With all that settled, we’ll start our run. At this point, this is the only data screen you’ll see:

It shows your pace (or speed, if cycling), as well as your distance and time. That’s it. No map pages, no heart rate data, no heart rate zone pages, no training load, or anything else that virtually all of its competitors show. It’s really, really, really basic.

If you were to pair a heart rate strap with it, then you’d see one additional data metric, your heart rate:

But there are so many inconsistencies here. If you do an indoor workout (with an external HR sensor), you’ll see a nifty HR zone gauge with full page zone coloring behind it. But, if you do an outdoor workout, you don’t get that gauge, you just get a value, and small text for the zone. Also, sometimes it’ll just randomly lose GPS too (as seen above briefly). Oura, you have all the space in the world on that page, there’s no need to skip the zone indicator/gauge when outdoors.

No matter with or without an HR sensor, once your workout is complete, you can see a summary of the workout, including the map page if you did track an outdoor GPS activity, such as my run.

But here’s where things get baffling: Despite Oura’s long-standing integration with Strava, they don’t send any heart rate data to Strava in the file. Mind you, apps that leverage the Oura API can access it, so this is just Oura being super-lazy with not putting that data in the completed workout file they send to Strava.

Here, we can see this same run over on Strava, missing all heart rate data (the first screenshot shows from Oura, the second shows Oura as the device type, and the third shows missing HR data):

How the heck is this even remotely possible in 2026? C’mon Oura, wake up. You added this nifty feature, yet didn’t add the one point of data that you actually collect from the ring: Heart rate.

But wait – it gets worse! If you took the step of connecting a HR sensor to the Oura app to record your heart rate data live, then Oura won’t even send the workout file to 3rd party apps (Strava or otherwise). Yes, you read that right: not only do you not get the HR data, but it won’t send *anything* (the whole workout is missing) to 3rd party apps. It’s baffling. I’ve tried both indoor and outdoor workouts, the latest app update, multiple 3rd party apps, etc… How Oura, how?!?

Sigh.

All of which simply solidifies my earlier statement: If you want something to track your workouts, the Oura Ring definitely isn’t it.

Heart Rate Accuracy:

Now, setting aside my lack of recommendation for using the Oura Ring 5 for workouts, I will go ahead and at least briefly look at accuracy during said workouts. In this case, I pulled the heart rate data using a 3rd party app (Athalyze), which receives the data from Oura’s API. From there, I can compare it to other heart rate sensors that I wore during those workouts.

Note that Oura doesn’t offer any meaningful workout export feature otherwise. You can request to export your overall Oura data here, but that doesn’t include the underlying heart rate data; rather, it’s just a simple one-line-item summary of each workout in a CSV file. Again, I don’t really understand how a company full of really smart data scientists has fallen so far behind in data basics here. Also, somehow this takes up to 10 business days for that export to be completed.

In any case, let’s look at a few workouts…

First up, an indoor trainer workout (cycling). This had basically five intervals in it, but wasn’t super high-intensity. Here, you can see the Oura ring listed in hot NEON GREEN, and for the most part it was basically close enough to the chest strap and other sensors. But the second interval it did get lost for a bit, upwards of 24bpm offset (which is quite a bit):

If we look at another indoor trainer workout, you can see it’s basically spot-on. Note here it’s in ORANGE, though that doesn’t matter much as it’s nearly identical. There are only a few minor variations for a few seconds that are just a couple bpm away. Good stuff.

Next, let’s look at some runs. The first one is a road run, and the Oura is in BLUE. In this case, there’s one brief moment it drops out, but otherwise it’s very similar to the chest strap and other sensors, with only minor deviations. Good stuff again.

Next, I head out for a trail run. This is where you start to see a few more variations as I descend. In this case, we’re still in BLUE for the Oura ring, but you can see it struggles a bit as I descend down one section. And then likewise, it skips a hard effort back up a hill around the 30-minute marker, just totally missing it. But the rest of the run, it’s pretty good.

Next, another trail run, this one quite a bit more challenging in terrain. It’s basically 40 minutes of climbing at 10-20% gradient, and then a steep descent back down from there. The terrain is sometimes smooth, and sometimes super rocky requiring jumps/leaps. The point being you can see that on that descent, the HR accuracy basically falls apart for the entire rest of the run:

For fun, here’s that elevation graph, matched to the HR graph. Somewhat notable that the HR lock was ‘good’ again around the 1hr12m marker, when I had a slight ascent again, and then lost the plot promptly after that.

I had also done some strength workouts, though with automatic exercise recognition, it won’t send those off to 3rd-party apps. And then equally, the one time I did a manual strength workout, it failed to save anything (appeared the app crashed). Sigh.

Still, setting that aside, what’s notable here is that the heart rate accuracy for workouts for me is largely pretty good actually. Really good in some cases. There are places where it struggles, such as descents while running (due to cadence lock likely, a common issue in watch optical HR sensors on the wrist). It’s really too bad that despite reasonably good heart rate accuracy for workouts, Oura doesn’t send this data to Strava, and then even worse being when you pair a HR sensor to it (to address these shortcomings), it doesn’t send that workout data anywhere at all.

Wrap-Up:

In a quirky way, I wonder if the Oura Ring 5 is ‘peak Oura’? Which is to say that it’s clearly the best Oura to date (in terms of size, and also some small accuracy gains according to Oura). But equally, if you’ve already got an existing Oura ring, the only tangible gain you’re likely to notice is the size. It’s very difficult to notice a 12% increase in HRV accuracy, and the claimed 19% increase in workout HR accuracy isn’t super functional given how limited the sports/workout features are (not even passable for 2008 phone workout apps).

In fact, I’d argue that Oura’s failure to figure out how to move the product forward from a workout standpoint actually helps to solidify its core reason for existing in life: General life/sleep tracking in a super-discreet form factor. Meaning, Oura really got its start with sleep tracking, in an era when other wearables struggled. But fast-forward a decade, and as I showed above, and have shown repeatedly over the last few years, the major brands are all mostly a wash for sleep tracking. They’re all getting the sleep times and HRV scores correct, and with roughly consistent sleep scores. But again, Oura does this in a tiny ring, with no other watch or band required. If you don’t want to wear a watch or band, this becomes a solved problem for you. And being smaller is certainly nice – I’ve got no complaints there.

That said, I feel like 80% of the app is basically just recycled trending charts of other parts of the app. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times they re-display readiness, sleep score, or activity score trend lines on different sections of the app. It all begins to feel rather circular. Certainly, other companies re-display attributes in other areas (including Garmin & Whoop), but those companies have vastly more unique metrics than they do duplicated metrics. It feels like they’ve kinda given up on innovating with actual new features, and just instead keep creating new charts of the same data they’ve had for nearly a decade. Yes, they’ve added new integrations to a variety of 3rd party platforms (with more planned), but the things within their own house haven’t really changed (if you don’t believe me, go back and look at my Oura Ring 3 review from 5 years ago).

To wrap up, I think the Oura Ring 5 has value for folks that want some of the core sleep/activity metrics in a simplified way, but don’t want to wear a watch/band. It’s quite good at doing that – really good. However, if you’re already wearing a watch/band (or care about fitness/sports tracking), the Oura Ring probably isn’t what you’re after.

With that, thanks for reading!

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Back a few months ago, I drove one hour from my home to the Zwift Community Live 2026 event, where I rode around on a slate of stunning Mallorca roads. During that time, I took approximately 2,186 photos that I have basically no use for. 41 of which were of a Zwift-branded watch sitting at the front of a converted foyer-ish conference room at the event. Oddly, virtually nobody else seemed to post photos of it.

I had intended to do so, but then I left the next morning for a few weeks of vacation across the pond with family, and it fell deep into the ‘never seen again’ dumpster that is my iPhone’s photo gallery. Alongside 240,086 other photos (for real, that’s how many photos are in my phone). Until last week or so, when Zwift and Bravur, apparently, announced said new watch. Thus, in an effort to salvage the 8 minutes of time I spent actually taking these photos, I present them to you.

Of course, I have zero plans to review this watch. There’s no point; it has no tech in it whatsoever. I’m not a classical timepiece guy; I’m a ‘What features does it have?’ guy. Maybe some day I’ll retire from this and go cold turkey, reverting back to tick-tock-clock, but for now, that’s not the case.

The Tech Specs:

Here are the main specs of this watch, as written by a company that knows these sorts of things. All I see are ‘blah…blah…blah…no Bluetooth…blah…blah…blah”. I added a line or two at the end.

Case: 37 mm diameter, 44,6 mm lug to lug, stainless steel 316L, 18 mm lug width. Screw down crown.

Crystal: Domed sapphire, inside anti-reflective coating.

Case back: Stainless steel

Movement: Swiss Made Sellita SW200-2 Power+, 26 jewels, self winding, no date

Power reserve: Up to 62 hours

Frequency: 28 800 A/h (4 Hz)/8 beats per second

Dial: Black with lava texture at the centre, luminous “Tron” ring, applied indices infilled with Super-LumiNova with Zwift symbols at 3, 6, 9 and 12H. Racing-inspired minute track.

Hands: Rhodium plated hour and minute hands infilled with Super-LumiNova, orange lightning shaped second hand

Strap: Integrated black FKM rubber strap and orange FKM rubber strap included

Water resistance: 10 ATM

Limited Edition: 100 pcs, individually numbered

Manufacturing: HAND BUILT IN BÅSTAD, SWEDEN (this was ALL CAPS in their specs, so I LEFT IT)

Price: $1,195USD+import fees/taxes, 1,395EUR VAT included

Random other things: Includes a leather cycling bag, also doesn’t have Bluetooth

When it comes to Zwift-specific elements, you’ve got the Zwift power-ups at 3/6/9/12hr markers, as well as Ride On and Zwift logos on the back. Supposedly the luminous ring around the outside is designed to mirror that of the Tron bike. The second-hand has a lightning shape to it, and the seconds themselves are “racing-inspired”. Also, Zwift orange. All the orange.

The Gallery:

Here ya go, I slimmed down those 40 shots into the handful that weren’t duplicates or otherwise dorked up. Above, you can see the back of it, with the Zwift logos, as well as Ride On (and Ride On thumbs-up). The unit they had floating around had the orange band, but it also comes with a black band. You can see the front of it on the green watch holder (as opposed to my wrist) in the next section.

Meanwhile, here it is on my wrist. As you’ll see in a second, it felt quite a bit smaller than the watches I’m used to wearing, but nothing wrong with that.

My wrist size is 17cm (or about 6.5 inches). Here it is on an angle:

And tilted some more. I’m not sure if you were expecting fancier captions than this, but how else do I say “I turned my wrist so you can see the coveted underside of the band.”?

Now, for context, this watch is 38mm. That’s pretty small by smartwatch standards. Most smaller watches from Apple/Garmin/etc start around 40-42mm these days. That said, I was wearing an Apple Watch Ultra 3 and a Garmin Fenix 8 Pro MicroLED (51mm) on my wrists that day, so here’s how that compares for funsies.

And finally, in an effort not to waste this photo either, I give you more angular action:

Regrettably, as a smartwatch photographer, I failed to notice in the above image that the Apple Watch screen had gone to sleep. Thankfully, this isn’t a smartwatch post, so…shrug. Also, in the above photo you can basically see that the Garmin MicroLED beefcake variant can reasonably eat 2-3 Zwift watches for breakfast.

Wrap-Up:

Look, I think it’s a pretty watch. Legit, I do; it looks really nice in person. It’s just not my jam in any way/shape/form. The Bravur folks kindly asked if I’d like to review it. But I’d have literally nothing more to add beyond what I showed above. Sure, I could take prettier pictures – maybe find a yacht buddy somewhere on this island (realistically, it’d probably just end up in my inflatable two-person kayak I bought). But I wouldn’t add anything extra to this conversation.

As always with fancy fashion things, they rarely make sense to 95% of the population (including me). Just like $10,000 bikes don’t make sense to 95% of the population, and $500/person Michelin-starred dinners don’t make sense to 95% of the population. But I’ve also long-ago learned that for every silly-expensive hobby, there’s a market, even if I’m not that market. To each their own.

With that – thanks for reading!

As I walked towards the main entrance to Eurobike, it was desolate. The slate of temporary bike parking spots that in previous years would have been overflowing with hundreds upon hundreds of bikes was empty. After passing through the doors, I walked nearly a  kilometer through virtually empty connecting hallways to get to the show areas. Again, in previous years, these too would be slammed wall-to-wall with people trying to get to the main floor on the show’s opening day.

But ultimately, the most ironic part of this opening day sequence was the very first thing I saw as I walked into the main hall. It was not a bike, but rather, a small 2-person Fiat electric car. Next to it, the above quad. Many have said it was this very thing that ultimately killed Eurobike – the show owners’ attempt to turn it into a combined micro-mobility show, rather than a bike show.

Eurobike claimed the number of exhibitors in the 2026 edition was 800, a fall from 1,500 exhibitors the year prior (2025), and 1,800 in 2024. I’d also take a wager that the number of exhibitors that actually showed up in 2026 is notably less than that 800 figure. There were a lot of random empty booth spots floating around.

I figured I’d take a moment to preemptively write an obituary of sorts for a show that I’ve attended 14 years’ worth of editions of, across both Friedrichshafen and Frankfurt. And later on, I’ll explain why it’s dead, despite their half-hearted claims that it’s not.

Why It’s Fallen Apart:

In reality, it was a confluence of things that have killed Eurobike. Many big industry trade shows were already in decline even before Eurobike added cars, but their inclusion came as part of the avalanche of changes that killed the show. I won’t make this a super long post, but I do want to highlight the main areas:

A) The shift from Friedrichshafen to Frankfurt: Look, too many people have rose-tinted glasses about Friedrichshafen. It was a nightmare for everyone involved. Seriously, it really did suck logistically. Hotels were booked a year in advance, and even then, you often had to commute 60-90 minutes each way each day to get to the show from said far-flung hotels (even across the lake on a ferry). The buses from the train station to the show were bafflingly bad at doing the one task they had to do: Transport you 2km. You could almost always walk faster because of horrible traffic (but you’d be drenched in the sweltering heat). Still, once you managed to get to the showgrounds, the show was really good. There were reasonably nice places to ride in the apple-filled countryside. And the party-like atmosphere was good too. Frankfurt has none of that. There’s no soul to the show in Frankfurt. Which isn’t to suggest going back to Friedrichshafen. Rather, finding some middle ground between the concrete jungle of the Frankfurt convention center and the logistical nightmare of Friedrichshafen.

B) The big brands leaving: I’m not even talking about American bike companies like Specialized or such, that happened many years ago. Rather, more recent brands are leaving. SRAM in the last year or two, Shimano & Bosche this year, and far too many to count. By itself, no individual brand is super important to a show this big (after all, companies like Apple aren’t on-show at massive events like CES), but when many big brands are missing, it starts to make a dent. Especially when the gist of the show was that all the cycling brands were at it.

C) The medium-sized brands left too: Let’s just take a look at the sports tech segment I cover. Obviously, there may well be journalists covering other segments that still get value out of the show (for example, covering eMTB gearboxes). But, in my realm, let’s count my usual suspects that are not there this year:

1) Garmin/Tacx (was there all prior years)
2) SRAM/Hammerhead (was there until last year)
3) Shimano (was there all prior years)
4) Wahoo (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
5) Elite (was there all prior years)
6) Magene (was there in recent years)
7) Bryton (was there in recent years)
8) Stages/Giant (was there all prior years)
9) Power2Max (was there last year)
10) 4iiii (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
11) SRM (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
12) All the smaller power meter companies (virtually none there now)
13) All the smaller aero sensor companies (I don’t think any this year)
14) Lezyne (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
15) The major trainer apps: Zwift, Rouvy, MyWhoosh, TrainerRoad, Kinomap, etc… All these teams were onsite, even if only some of them had official booths, most had off-show booths for meetings. None were there, only icTrainer.

And again, that’s separate from other companies I’d be personally interested in talking to, like many (all the major?) cargo bike brands and such that disappeared. And beyond that, this skips over all the random sports-tech startups that sometimes made for interesting stories, too.

D) Product launch shift: As I’ve talked about for many years, for medium to bigger-sized brands, having a product launch at a trade show is mostly a dumb PR strategy. Your launch news is now shared amongst a gazillion other companies also announcing things. I remember back in 2019 at Eurobike, and having something like 14 full in-depth reviews, I had to somehow finish the morning of Eurobike launch (trainers, bike computers, power meters, even some watches). It never happened; some simply didn’t make the cut. And they were big-name companies that didn’t make the cut. Thus, companies shifted towards launching their products either at small private media events, or just by sending loaner units out.

E) Seasonality doesn’t matter anymore: It used to be that companies launched their products tied to the seasonality of Eurobike/Interbike, ahead of buying for the next season. For example, 10 years ago, you *always* launched new trainers in the August/September timeframe. Always, without fail. These days? You launch them whenever the heck you’re ready to ship. Consumers will buy it when they’re ready. People ride year-round, unlike skiing, which happens only a few months of the year.

F) The inclusion of non-bike micro-mobility: I’d actually argue that, as dumb as it was to have cars at a bike show, this was not what killed Eurobike. Nobody sat in their office and said: “The only reason I’m not going to Eurobike is because I saw an electric Fiat in a booth”. On social media, perhaps, but not in real life. Instead, it was all the other items above that killed Eurobike first. Having quads in booths, or 90KPH-rated electric vehicles on the bike test track (as I actually saw yesterday) was just the icing on the cake.

Finally, I’d suggest going and reading Suvi’s piece over at Escape Collective on a lot of other factors. There are also some intra-Germany trade group organizational factors that contribute to it (though, I’d argue that by the time these groups got in on being upset, the above items were already the core factors).

And of course, there are aspects like how COVID ushered in more companies doing meetings and such digitally, but I actually don’t buy that as much here. After all, some other cycling shows/events are still just as popular as in the past. Escape noted the Rouleur Live show as a good example. And indeed, I went there a year or two ago, and it was fantastic. But you know what made it fantastic? I didn’t write anything about it.

I went, I met with everyone I knew in the industry to catch up on all the things. But there was no big product launch tied to it. Instead, it was the networking-like event that the industry wants, without the baggage of Eurobike. Consumers are welcomed, which gives it a marketing reason to exist for companies, while the tight confines of the venue means that individual booths are tiny (reducing costs).

Going Forward:

Now, about now, some of you may be saying, ‘Wait, Eurobike isn’t dead yet?!? They announced next year’s 2027 dates!’. And that’s true (now back in early September 2027). But equally true is that they quietly announced the show won’t be coming back for 2028, and instead will attempt to shift to an every-other-year format starting in 2029. Of course, they didn’t issue that in a press release on their site, but rather, via a daily show notes that doesn’t go into the main press release feed.

The reality is that’ll likely never happen. Sometime later, fall or early winter, I can near guarantee you the Eurobike will quietly announce cancellation of the 2027 show as well. Companies won’t have signed up for it. Especially after they get word of this year’s event. Short of them managing to convince all the biggest brands, plus companies like those medium-sized brands, to come to the show (and announcing this), nobody else will fall in line. This is exactly what happened to Interbike years ago.

Almost everyone I talked to at the show felt it was a “giant waste of time” (that’s an exact quote from one company in the list up above). And had it not been for the interesting Canyon concept bike I covered yesterday, I certainly would have been in the same camp. There are perhaps a few other small things I could cover from it that I had some chats with, but most of that was minor updates/etc, rather than something I’d normally write a whole piece on. Effectively, stuff worthy of a quick gallery mention, rather than a deeper piece. Again, media or retailers covering other product segments might have still found some value this year.

Still, it’s a shame, because the best part of Eurobike wasn’t the product launches or new tech – it was meeting with the people behind the products. The engineers, product people, and founders who put together all these cool pieces of tech, and understand how the products came to be, and their thinking on the future ahead. Most of the time, I already had the unannounced products in for review anyway. Instead, my time there was spent in meetings with people about cool new things coming out down the road, or sometimes, just hearing the industry gossip. Perhaps Rouler Live is the place for that next, or perhaps somewhere else. We’ll have to see.

With that – thanks for reading, and all the RV rental memories!