How to use Garmin Connect to track your health and wellness
From wellness tracking to training tools, Garmin Connect is your one-stop shop for health and fitness data.
Millions of users rely on Garmin Connect™ as the tool for tracking, analyzing, and sharing health and fitness activities from their Garmin device every day. But Garmin Connect is so much more than just an app. If you dive a little deeper, you’ll find dozens of useful features, whether you want to track your wellness statistics, start training for a running or cycling race, or anything in between.
Wonder how to use Garmin Connect? Here are just a handful of the useful and surprising features you’ll find. Take a few taps around the app or click around the website, and chances are you’ll find even more ways that Garmin Connect can help you achieve your health and fitness goals
Your homepage
If you’re a regular Garmin device user, then you are no doubt familiar with Home, the Garmin Connect app’s homepage. This hub of your health and performance stats presents all of today’s (and the past seven days’) information in easily digestible cards. These cards may include activities tracked by your Garmin device, daily step count, heart rate, stress level1 and much more depending on your device’s capabilities. Even better? You can customize the In Focus and At a Glance sections that are displayed on your Home screen, allowing you to focus on the data you care about most. With a Garmin Connect+™ plan, receive personalized insights and suggestions to improve your health and activity data with Active Intelligence, an AI-powered feature.
If you want more information about a specific metric, simply tap the card to access daily details. Or by tapping into each stat, you can view charts and analysis of your stats over longer periods to monitor your progress.
View your activity details
One of the main reasons people turn to Garmin Connect is for a closer look at their activity details. Once you save an activity on your Garmin device and sync with Garmin Connect, you get an in-depth view of your activity that includes relevant performance metrics like time, distance, laps, elevation, pace/speed, heart rate and more. GPS-tracked activities include a map with a themed polyline that details the metric of your choice along your route. The mobile app and website also provide historical activity reports so you can track your personal records, training history, overall mileage and more.
To see charts and graphs of your fitness and health data over time, take a look at the performance dashboard with Garmin Connect+.
Monitor sleep and recovery
Research in recent years has shown just how important sleep is to our overall health and well-being. Garmin is at the forefront of sleep technology with advanced metrics that show you the duration and quality of your sleep over time as well as sleep stages, including REM1. Beyond tracking your total duration and sleep stages, Garmin Connect gives you a nightly sleep score (with compatible devices) that ranks the overall quality of your sleep and provides guidance. For extra sleep recommendations, Garmin sleep coach gives you sleep insights based on your age, activity levels, sleep history, naps and HRV. Garmin’s exclusive Body Battery™ feature also shows how sleep impacts your overall energy levels each day, and sleep is factored into several advanced Garmin training metrics as well. Enable features like Pulse Ox2 on your compatible device to track your blood oxygen while you sleep. By tracking blood oxygen, your device will measure your breathing variations for enhanced awareness of your sleep environment and wellness. Plus, see your HRV status to check in on your recovery status.
Proper recovery includes staying on top of your nutrition. Easily track burned1 and consumed calories and progress, log foods, set goals and receive Active Intelligence insights on how nutrition is impacting your health and training all in one place.
Track women’s health
Both Garmin smartwatches and Garmin Connect have several women’s health tracking features. Menstrual cycle tracking lets you log your period dates, receive future period predictions, track symptoms and more. During each phase of your cycle, you can learn something new about how hormone changes can affect your workouts and nutrition. You can also track pregnancies in Garmin Connect and receive insights, record baby movements and log blood sugar, among other useful features. On compatible devices, enable skin temperature tracking to receive period predictions for potential start dates and past ovulation estimates2. You’ll find women’s health tracking in “Health Stats,” which is located in the left-side menu of the website and the “More” menu in the app.
Train hard
One area where Garmin Connect stands above the competition is as a training tool. Whatever your goal, Garmin Connect likely has a workout, training plan, pacing strategy or performance stat to help you achieve it. Just tap on “Training” in the left-side menu of the website or the “More” menu in the app to get started.
The list of training tools hosted within Garmin Connect is lengthy, but one of the highlights is Garmin Coach training plans. When it’s time to train for an event, achieve a milestone or improve your fitness, Garmin offers training plans for runners, cyclists, strength trainers, triathletes and fitness enthusiasts. If you’re a runner, for example, choose your plan, select your race distance or other training goal, and start packing on the miles. With Garmin Connect+, get coaching guidance and videos for Garmin Run, Cycling and Triathlon Coach. Plus, check out PacePro™ for pacing strategies when running and advanced training metrics such as Training Status, Training Effect, Lactate Threshold and Functional Threshold Power (FTP) that help you track your training progress.
Follow friends
Maybe you want to compete in a step count challenge with your family members, or you want to follow and compare stats with your favorite athlete. If you do, keep up with the stats of your friends, family, and athletes and influencers on Garmin Connect. When you follow other accounts, choose to share logged activities, earned badges or steps. Plus, if you’re going toe to toe with one of your friends in the app, favorite their account to see frequent updates of their stats.
Earn badges
Nothing feels better than being rewarded for your accomplishments, and Garmin’s wide variety of badges do exactly that. For everything from recording your first activity to achieving a 30-day step goal streak to running a marathon, Garmin Connect will award you a badge and give you points for earning that badge. Plus, earn additional badges and points by joining badge challenges with your followers. Compare your badge achievements with your followers and climb the badge level leaderboard as you earn more points. Get exclusive badges and badge challenges, with a Garmin Connect+ plan.
And so much more
Whether using the app or the web, Garmin Connect also lets you create mapped-out activity courses to download to compatible devices, build custom workouts, manage your device’s music and a whole lot more. This may sound like a lot, but it’s really just scratching the surface of what you can do with your Garmin device paired with Garmin Connect. No matter what your health, fitness or training goals may be, Garmin Connect has you covered.
2The menstrual cycle tracking feature should not be used in support of conception, contraception or birth control. This is not a medical device and is not intended for diagnosing or monitoring any medical condition.
3This is not a medical device and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or monitoring of any medical condition; see Garmin.com/ataccuracy. Pulse Ox not available in all countries.
