I absolutely love this watch. Prior to buying it I was wearing both a Forerunner 45 and a Whoop Band to get far less information combined than I now get from the Forerunner 255. It has allowed me to cancel my Whoop subscription so after about 8 months it will have paid for itself.

The primary benefit of the watch is for running. It gives a ton of data I wanted it for – heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), sleep metrics, oxygen levels, running pace, stride length and cadence (steps per minute) as well as a lot more data I didnt even expect such as vertical osciliation, ground contact time, respiration rate, stress level, advised recovery rates/times, training load analysis. For someone who loves analyzing data like I do its amazing and it’s surprising that you dont have to pay a monthly fee to access everything on the app like you do with other brands like Whoop and Fitbit.

Another great running feature is that it allows you to input your upcoming races and it will plan your running workouts out leading up to the event, reacting in real time to your running and health data and intelligently building up your training volume and then tapering off before a race. Like earlier Forerunners, it also has the Garmin Coach program where you can set parameters and do a full coaching plan from a selection of three professionals. I’d like to see them introduce a bit more variety on those as its the same line up as when I got my last Forerunner a few years ago, but its still a good feature.

One unexpected feature that as a gym rat absolutely blew my mind was that it is fantastic for tracking weight training workouts. It tracks sets and reps, allows you to enter the weights used and is semi-reasonable at even guessing what exercise you are doing (maybe 40% accuracy on that but its easy to edit to the correct exercise). At the end of the workout it shows you the muscle areas worked, the total ‘work time’ (duration of the sets excluding rest time), the total amount of weight lifted as well as a load more data. I had no idea the watch did this and am really impressed. It’s also very useful if you are trying to stick to a certain rest time between sets as it displays this very clearly.

Another function I like is that it gives you a report every morning directly on the watch about the prior day (including sleep details and recommended training for the day). There’s a suprising amount of data accessible directly on the watch compared to other similar devices I’ve used.

I cant really be specific on how accurate the data is but it generally matches up to what I’d expect and have seen on prior devices. Probably the weakest area is the sleep recording as there’s some nights where I know I’m awake more than it is registering and also it doesnt seem to register if you wake up and then go back to sleep in the morning (or track naps like Whoop does) but that’s a minor grumble and sleep metrics are not a main reason why I use the watch.

There’s even more features than I’ve listed but these are the highlights for me. Its a really great watch that I dont hesitate to recommend, especially if you can pick one up when they are on offer like I did. The level of features included may be daunting to new users but its actually really easy to pick up as you go along and quite intuitive.