Five Hacks Every Fitness Watch User Should Know
Whether you’ve just unboxed your first running watch or have been logging miles with one for years, chances are you’re only scratching the surface of what it can do. Beyond just tracking your run, today’s smartwatches are packed with features that, with a little know-how, can truly transform your workout. Here are ten tips to help you get the most out of your smart running companion.
Try wearing your fitness watch somewhere other than your wrist
In terms of placement, your wrist isn’t the only option. Upper arm placement can actually improve the optical accuracy of heart rate by giving the sensor better contact with a fleshier part of the body, with less wrist movement noise. This is an underused tip that can be especially useful when rowing, strength training, or any activity where wrist movement interferes with readings.
Show lap pace instead of current pace
The current pace (the real-time speed your watch calculates from GPS) looks exactly like what you’d want to see mid-run. In practice, your “current pace” number can vary constantly, increasing and decreasing in response to fluctuations in the GPS signal or brief changes in effort.
The general consensus among runners (at least in the subreddits) is that lap pace is the smarter alternative. It displays your average pace for the current lap or interval, reducing noise for a more stable reading. During any type of training where consistency is key, looking down and seeing a consistent lap pace tells you a lot more about your actual performance than a current pace that bounces every few seconds. Swap it through your data field settings (most watches support it in all running profiles) and you’ll wonder why you ever ran without it.
Use your fitness watch’s customizable hotkeys and buttons
Most running watches allow you to assign shortcuts to buttons or physical gestures, but few runners bother to set them up. You can assign shortcuts to display the weather or stopwatch, to save your current location, to activate a “night shift” mode, and much more. If you find yourself repeatedly diving into the same submenus before or after a run, assigning them to a button shortcut can save you time and frustration.
Let’s use Garmin’s features as an example. By going to the settings menu and selecting System and then Shortcuts (formerly “Hot Keys”), you can assign functionality to long presses or combined button presses. Beth shares this on her watch, she holds the DOWN button to display the music controls and the BACK button to turn the touchscreen on or off.
What do you think of it so far?
Turn off the fitness watch touchscreen during activities
Touchscreen running watches are the norm these days, but an accidental swipe mid-run can pause your activity, move to the next screen, or worse yet, end your session entirely. If your watch allows it, turn off the touch screen during activities. This is especially important in humid weather or when wearing a long-sleeved top that skims the screen. This setting may be buried in activity settings or accessibility options. Find it, turn it on, and never again accidentally stop your watch in the third mile of a long, rainy run.
Perform a factory reset on your fitness watch if it seems outdated
It sounds radical, but it’s a legit tip that many serious runners swear by. Your watch builds its fitness models (VO2 max, training load, recovery time) from data accumulated over time. But if you’ve recently lost a lot of weight, recovered from a long-term injury, gone through a period of illness, or simply noticed that your HRV and sleep stats have been stubbornly bad for weeks without explanation, this historical data may actually be anchoring your watch to an outdated version of you.
The solution: Connect to your watch platform from a computer, export or write down any data you want to keep, then reset the device to factory settings. In Garmin, you select the “Delete data and reset settings” option to clear all performance measurements. You’ll also need to delete your companion app’s data, as it’s usually saved there as a backup. The purpose of this is running monitoring equivalent to restarting a computer that has been running for too long. You can wipe the slate clean and let your watch rebuild an accurate new baseline from where you are now, rather than where you were months or years ago.
