The best Garmin watches are excellent health and fitness trackers, capable of monitoring your sleep, your training, your recovery and your daily life, and offer usable ideas. They are super popular, but they suffer from the same problems as most other fitness trackers make: a lack of context.
When you see a heart rate graphic throughout the day and compare it to your results during last week, it does not tell you much in the void without context of the graph. This will determine when you sleep, characterized by a lower heart rate, and when you have exercised, generally characterized by a higher heart rate (unless, of course, you are not in good shape).
However, sleep and activity do not tell the whole story. What causes a bad sleep night? What about the effects of caffeine, alcohol, heavy and light meals on your heart rate? What about chronic diseases or the effects of women’s cycles? Statistics without context are rarely usable and useful on an individual scale.
This is where the new Garmin Lifestyle journalization feature is at stake.
What is the journalization of the lifestyle?
Logging Lifestyle is a new instant functionality in search added to the Garmin Connect application. Available via the HEALTH Statistics tab, it allows you to create a list of useful labels, ranging from “caffeine”, “alcohol” and “heavy meal” to “eye mask”, stretching “and” sauna “.
Once your list of tags has been created, journalization of the lifestyle allows you to add tags to your day at relevant times. You can define Garmin Connect to invite you to add tags at certain times for consistency. For example, this could invite you at 8 a.m., so you remember adding labels for your evening behavior, such as “Reading in Bed” and in the morning such as “coffee”.
What Garmin users get the journalization of the lifestyle?
Everyone. You do not need a specific watch to use the lifestyle journalization function because it is widely available in the Garmin Connect application. You just need a watch capable of measuring the heart rate.
You don’t even need the Garmin Connect + Premium subscription powered by AI: this is a feature available for users at each level. Just make sure you have updated Garmin Connect, and you should be able to find the functionality under Plus> health statistics> Loggation on lifestyle.
How to configure and use lifestyle journalization
Once you have accessed journalization of Garmin’s lifestyle via the above track, you will be invited to choose from a list of beacons called “behaviors”. You are recommended to choose some, depending on your lifestyle, but there does not seem to be a higher limit. You can also scroll down to Add personalized behavior.
You can also configure and activate and deactivate prompts to save behavior by pressing the three points in the right corner and typing Reminders.
Access the lifestyle journal tab during the day to record or modify behavior.
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