Ever since I got my first GPS running watch in the early days of fitness trackers, I’ve always had something on my wrist during workouts. The Garmin Venu 2 is just the latest in a whole load of trackers and smartwatches that I’ve cycled through since then.
But after wearing it for almost two weeks, I can honestly say it’s one that I definitely don’t want to take off.
My must-haves for fitness trackers started pretty basic: I’ve always looked for accuracy—both in heart rate and GPS, since I run outdoors frequently—ease of use, and reliability. Over the past couple years, however, as trackers added more and more capabilities, I’ve also tacked on health-monitoring features to my list, too, such as sleep and stress measures.
As fitness trackers become more complex, though, they run the risk of becoming too complicated to use efficiently, or they lose the intuitiveness I admire in slap-on-and-go watches. I’ve been wearing the Garmin Venu Sq, the company’s entry-level, budget-friendly option, and I love its ease of use and simplicity. So when a sample of the Garmin Venu 2 came across my desk—a more expensive, higher-end GPS model—I was curious whether added capabilities would mean any added confusion.
My concerns, however, were unfounded: The Garmin Venu 2 is a straightforward, user-friendly vessel for some really high-tech fitness information.
How I Tested
SELF’s panel of fitness experts helped us determine which criteria to emphasize when testing fitness trackers, including factors like accuracy, ease of use, battery life, and special features.
I kept this criteria in mind throughout my testing period. For nearly two weeks, I’ve worn it on outdoor runs (including hills, speed work, easy runs, and long runs), outdoor walks, and during at-home cycling classes and strength-training sessions. During my cycling classes, I also wore another heart rate monitor on my forearm for comparison. I also wore it each night I slept during the testing period. Here’s what I found out.
Ease of Use
The Garmin Venu 2 won huge points for me on ease of use. Its out-of-the-box setup was fast, and it immediately synced with my Android phone (an older LG G7 model) using the Garmin Connect app. Using it for workouts was really intuitive too: You press the top button (one of only two physical buttons), and it pulls up a “favorites” list of your top-four workout modalities (out of 25 different types), which you can set up on first use. Press it again, and it’ll start the workout.
The workout screens were also very easy to navigate. When you start a run, your four major metrics—time lapsed, distance, pace, and heart rate—all appear on one screen, and you can swipe the screen down for additional info, like lap times and lap distance. (Your screens are also customizable, too, so if you wanted to see things like cadence, elevation, or steps instead, you can set that.) The bottom button serves as a lap marker, meaning it’s so, so easy to start and stop running intervals you might be timing. (The physical buttons also come in clutch when you’re wearing gloves on chilly runs.)
Same concept applies to strength-training workouts: A press of the bottom button marks the end of your set, after which you’re prompted to enter reps and weight used. The watch will count reps for you based on your movement, though you may have to edit it slightly for accuracy. When I was testing, for instance, most of the time it was on target, though sometimes it would short me by a few reps, coming up with seven or so when I did 10. But correcting it was super easy—just tap a plus or minus on the screen to add or lower reps. After that, you can see your rest interval on the screen—a feature which I found super helpful in making sure I took the same amount of rest throughout my workout. When you check your app later, it also autofills the exercises you performed based on your movement (again, a feature which you can easily edit through a drop-down menu or a search function if they’re off a bit). The result: a complete weight-lifting log that takes almost zero effort.
Added bonus: The Garmin Venu 2 also offers a really handy HIIT workout modality, which you can set from your wrist based on your workout. You can choose Tabata—20 seconds on, 10 seconds off—or input your own individualized work-to-rest intervals. This makes doing time-based workouts (like our Spring Reset Challenge) so easy. Three seconds before your work period is up, you’ll get notification vibrations each second, followed by a longer buzz that lets you know it’s time to rest. That means no more looking at your phone to keep time, and definitely no more having to set a timer before and after each interval.
Accuracy
The GPS on the Garmin Venu 2 was on target for the majority of my neighborhood runs. I have a known one-mile marker on my regular running route, and my Garmin would beep its one-mile notification within steps of the marker each run. It did seem to go a little wonky in a heavily wooded trail area—my normal nine-minute-and-change pace would drop to a 10’30” or even 11’00” for the quarter-mile duration—but I’ve had that issue with several other trackers before too.
As for heart rate, it also stayed accurate the majority of the time, and was quick to pick up spikes during interval sprints and drops during recovery. One slight disappointment, though, I noticed a sharp drop in my heart rate chart on some runs that seemed to occur randomly mid-running. These drops only lasted for about 30 seconds to one minute before picking my real heart rate back up. I only noticed this when running, though. None of my indoor cycling classes showed an unexplained drop. (I’ve also noticed this with a couple other trackers while running, though my Garmin Venu Sq didn’t have the issue.)
Speaking of indoor cycling, the heart rate measured on my Garmin Venu 2 lined up exactly with my forearm heart rate monitor that came with my bike. My last two classes, for example, registered heart rates of 150 beats per minute both on my Garmin and on the forearm band.
Battery Life
The Garmin Venu 2 absolutely crushes here. Smartwatches are definitely not known for their battery life, but my Garmin challenges this: It lasted over three full days with heavy use, including almost two hours of GPS activities. I charged it up to 100% on Monday night, and by Friday morning it reached 17%.
Added bonus: If you happen to forget to charge your watch before a quick-approaching workout, you’re not out of luck. A top-off charge of just 10 minutes gave me 15 more percentage points of battery life, which was more than sufficient for my outdoor runs, usually about 40 to 45 minutes.
Comfort and Style
This watch looks nice. It has a simple, streamlined design, and a rather elegant gold bezel around the screen, which makes it stand out from many of the other fitness-tracking smartwatches out there. I don’t feel like I’m wearing a fitness tracker—more like a stylish watch instead.
As for comfort, no complaints there. Its silicone band fits my wrist firmly without digging into my skin. If you want a little more variety, you can purchase silicone bands in different colors ($30 each), or leather bands ($60 each) for less fitness-y wear.
Syncing
Workouts sync almost immediately from my watch to my phone, and also from my watch to my Strava app. Text, email, and calendar notifications from my phone are seamless too.
The only thing that gives a slight delay is the watch’s sleep info: I usually work out about 45 minutes after waking up, and I usually don’t see the sleep score (more info on that below) in my app before I get started with my workout. (After I return from my morning run, though, it’s there.)
Water Resistance
The Garmin Venu 2 has a water depth rating of 5 ATM (meaning it withstands pressures equivalent to a depth of 50 meters), making it suitable for everything from swimming to showering. I’ve showered with it every day during my test period, plus it’s gotten caught in a couple of rainy runs, and I haven’t noticed any problems.
Non-Workout Data
The Garmin Venu 2 offers a ton of non-workout data, including respiration rate, blood oxygen saturation, and sleep information. Within sleep, the Garmin measures duration of REM, light, and deep sleep, plus restlessness, awake time, and sleep stress (a stress score based on heart-rate variability—more on that below). It uses the sleep information to create a nightly sleep score on a scale of one to 100. I know I’m a restless, light sleeper, and the app picks up on that pretty well, though I think it misses some of my awake time. Using the sleep functionality is also seamless—you just fall asleep and wake—no button touching needed. Upon awakening (or in my case, a little while later), it’ll sync to your app to give you this info.
Another thing I found particularly insightful: Garmin’s real-time stress measurement (again, on a scale of one to 100), which it measures by heart rate variability, or the variable length of time between each heartbeat. When your acute stress gets too high (a common occurrence for me in my post-workout, drink-all-the-coffee work mornings), your watch will ping with a helpful relax reminder, and an invitation to start a five-minute breathing exercise. At the end of the day, you’ll get a daily stress score based on all that. It was really interesting to me to see how much higher my weekday averages were than my weekend’s, and a good reminder to try to decompress during times of work stress.
Garmin will also use your heart rate variability, along with your stress and activity levels, to give you a Body Battery score (yes, out of 100) to measure your energy levels. This was super helpful for my training recovery. On days when my Body Battery remained low, even after what should have been long-enough sleep, that was a head’s up for me not to push too hard during my workout (or maybe even skip one). My Body Battery also stayed so much higher on weekends, which was interesting to me since my workout duration was pretty similar to weekdays—showing to me, I think, the importance of managing mental stress as well as physical.
One thing I could do without, though, was the Fitness Age feature. It sounds cool in theory: A score that takes into account your chronological age, activity intensity, and resting heart rate to come up with a rating of how fit you are compared to averages for your actual age. But it also takes your body mass index (BMI) into account, which as SELF reported previously, isn’t a great measure of health. (For instance, among other things, BMI does not take muscle mass into account.) As a result, my watch offered me the recommendation of lowering my BMI just over two points to 19.5 (definitely on the low end of “normal”) to improve my fitness age by one year. Not cool—especially for someone who tries to keep weight out of my fitness progress for my mental well-being.
Bottom Line
Thankfully, the Fitness Age feature is hidden under a few menus in the app, so it’s not something staring me down each time I open the app—I don’t need to look at it if I feel like it’s going to niggle at me. As I mentioned in the beginning, this watch is a bit of an investment at $400 (compared to the Garmin Venu Sq at $150), so it’s probably only worth it if you like to work out consistently and track your metrics as you do so (and as you recover afterward!).
Other than that, though, I really liked this smartwatch: Its ease of use means I can devote that saved brainpower to my workout, not my watch. And then when I’m done, I’m left with some really helpful (and accurate) workout data to help me make the most of my training.