11 reasons to wear your Garmin watch to sleep
These 11 features work better if you go to bed with your Garmin smartwatch on your wrist.
Whether you realize it or not, a lot is happening in your body while you’re sleeping. Your nerve cells reorganize, your body repairs cells, your energy levels are restored, and molecules such as hormones and proteins are released — all as you cycle through different sleep phases.
It makes sense, then, that if you want the most complete picture of how well your body is operating, you’ll want to track your physiological metrics during sleep. That’s why it’s so important to wear your Garmin sleep tracking smartwatch to bed. Not only can you take advantage of features such as sleep score or the built-in alarm clock, but you’ll also see accuracy improvements for other data that require round-the-clock monitoring to give a true picture of how your body is functioning.
Let’s walk through some of the Garmin smartwatch features (which vary by device) that sleep impacts.
1. Sleep score
OK, so this one is obvious. Garmin smartwatches are good, but they aren’t analyze-your-sleep-quality-from-the-drawer-in-your-nightstand good. You must wear your watch for it to do its job. And we recommend that you pay attention to your sleep habits over time. Sleep is an essential function directly linked to physical and mental health, and consistently not getting enough of it is associated with high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, poor mental health and Type 2 diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Advanced sleep tracking uses your heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV) and body movement data to monitor when you fell asleep and woke up (even any times you were awake during the night). It also looks at when you were in the light, deep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stages and for how long. Plus, your baseline readings and age add context, improving the reliability of this feature. Select Garmin smartwatches also track your respiration rate and blood oxygen saturation1 (more on that later).
Checking your Garmin sleep score2 each morning will give you a rating of how well you slept during the night. Curious to see where you fit in with your peers in terms of sleep stats? We analyzed how well Garmin users sleep, and you can even compare yourself to the top Garmin athletes.
2. Sleep coach
Garmin sleep coach on compatible smartwatches uses 5 factors to estimate how much sleep you need in 10-minute intervals between 7 and 9 hours of sleep: age, daily and longer-term activity levels, recent sleep history, naps and HRV. Simply check your compatible Garmin smartwatch when you wake up in the morning and sleep coach will tell you how much sleep you’ll need for the upcoming night. What if you take a nap or go on a long, challenging run? Sleep coach will account for that and update your estimate.
3. Body Battery™ energy monitoring
A feature unique to Garmin smartwatches, Body Battery is a real-time look at your personal energy resources. Your Body Battery measurement reflects your physical activity, stress, rest and sleep — and how each impacts your energy levels. On a scale of 1–100, your Body Battery number will indicate how ready you are to tackle a challenge at any given point, or how ready you are to rest. And since quality sleep is the body’s most valuable time for recovery, you’ll need to wear your watch for it to monitor just how effective that recovery is for recharging your Body Battery.
4. Resting heart rate
Garmin smartwatches provide all-day heart monitoring data2 using an optical sensor built into the back of your device. It detects your heart rate by shining a green light through your skin, which is reflected by the red cells in your skin’s blood vessels. There are many important reasons to track your heart rate, and knowing your resting heart rate (RHR) is one of them.
Your RHR is the number of times your heart beats per minute (bpm) while your body is in a state of rest. Garmin wearables typically measure RHR while you sleep, usually not long before you wake up. For normal adults, the RHR can vary between 60 and 100 bpm, although Garmin data shows that the more active a person is, the lower their RHR tends to be. A lower RHR typically reflects cardiorespiratory fitness, quality sleep and low stress — but you must wear your watch during sleep to get the most accurate reading.
5. Heart rate variability (HRV) status
HRV is another meaningful metric that Garmin technology uses your heart rate to measure1. You may not have realized it, but your heart doesn’t actually beat regularly — it’s not a metronome. There are varying lengths of time between each heartbeat, and while those changes aren’t typically dramatic, they do provide significant information about your body. Your nervous system regulates these changes in time, and changes in HRV status can reveal how well your body is responding to stress and to relaxation. Analyzing these shifts helps provide a basis for stress tracking, Body Battery monitoring and sleep tracking, but an analysis takes time. For your watch to give you an HRV status, you’ll need to routinely wear it overnight for at least 3 weeks. This will establish a baseline HRV status from which future nights of sleep can be compared. Garmin wearables only measure your HRV status during sleep — so if you’re not sleeping with your watch on, you won’t get the benefits of this feature.
6. Pulse Ox
Compatible Garmin smartwatches can act as pulse oximeters, which estimate how much oxygen is in your bloodstream at any given time as it travels around the body in your circulatory system. While Garmin smartwatches are not intended for medical purposes, you can turn on your Pulse Ox function to measure your oxygenated blood while you sleep, giving you an idea of how well your heart, lungs and blood are working together. If you notice anything that seems odd about your Pulse Ox reading, you’ll be able to direct those concerns to a health care professional to determine if more investigation is needed.
7. Training status
The Garmin training status feature lets athletes see how effectively they’re training. Compatible Garmin watches take in a wealth of daily data, including your VO2 max, HRV status and amount of training, to give you a comprehensive picture of your personal fitness in addition to specific guidance to help you achieve your goals. You’ll be shown 1 of 8 status categories, which range from peaking to detraining (outside of the “no status” report when your watch doesn’t have enough information or you’ve hit pause). How well your body reacts to all situations — including sleep — is an important indicator of your overall fitness level.
8. Recovery time
The recovery time feature on compatible Garmin smartwatches provides personalized insights into how long it will take before your body has fully recovered from the work it’s done during an activity. Naturally, sleep tracking data is an important consideration here, as sleep is a big factor of how well your body recovers. An especially bad night’s sleep can extend the amount of recommended time before your next tough workout, while some quality z’s can help to get you back on track faster.
9. Daily suggested workouts
Available on select Garmin GPS watches and cycling computers, the daily suggested workouts feature aims to improve your fitness level and your optimal training load by selecting daily running or cycling workouts designed to provide the right level of challenge. Just exactly how challenging is challenging enough is decided by several factors, including your current training load, load focus, recovery time, the profile of recently performed workouts and sleep data. Sometimes a good (or bad) night’s sleep makes the difference between what’s appropriately challenging and what’s nearly impossible.
10. Training readiness
Even if your training status has started to decline, that doesn’t mean it’s time to start putting in 110% effort all the time. Using primarily the previous night’s sleep tracking data and the recovery demands of any recent activities as well as your acute training load, HRV status, sleep history and stress history, the Garmin training readiness feature on compatible smartwatches does exactly what it sounds like — it tells you how ready your body is for a tough workout. Pushing your limits before your body is ready can hurt you more than it can help you, so getting an accurate picture of your sleep data can be instrumental in determining what type of workout will best suit your needs.
11. Real-time stamina
The stamina feature on compatible Garmin watches helps to describe your capacity for a good performance — or a poor one. Measured on a scale of 0–100%, your stamina score reflects how long you can reasonably expect to keep going at your current level of effort. Naturally, where fatigue resistance comes into play, so does sleep. To calculate your real-time stamina, your watch considers your physiological metrics, including both recent and longer-term activity history and fitness levels.
With a Garmin smartwatch, a world of physiological data is at your fingertips — or, more accurately, on your wrist — as long as you choose to wear it. Next time you hit the hay, be sure to leave your watch on so it can do its job to the best of its abilities.
Used to charging your watch every night instead? You don’t have to worry about that with Garmin smartwatches, which should get about a week of battery life before needing to charge — at a minimum.
Don’t have a Garmin smartwatch yet? You can shop here to start learning more about your habits and how they impact your body. The more you know, the better you can train.
1Not a medical device. Jurisdiction restrictions may apply. See Garmin.com/ataccuracy.
