Garmin Has Taken One of Whoop’s Best Features, and Now You Don’t Need a New Watch to Use It.
It turns out the “lifestyle logging” feature introduced with the Garmin Venu 4 watch isn’t limited to that watch—it appears to be available to all Garmin users, meaning the app has made a huge leap forward in catching up with competitors like Whoop.
What is lifestyle journaling?
This feature allows you to track various habits, behaviors, and factors that may affect your health metrics. For example, you can record when you consume caffeine or alcohol at night and monitor how it affects your sleep. (Garmin tends to call these “behaviors,” although some are more closely related to environmental factors or conditions, such as illness, but I’m open to the possibility.)
Whoop , a screenless tracker with an expensive (but arguably worth it) subscription, has long offered this feature . It provides detailed information on how your habits impact your recovery. The Bevel app for Apple Watch also offers similar functionality, and the Oura ring app has “tags,” though these are more for labeling than analysis.
Garmin uses your logged behavior data to create reports that show how the factors you log affect:
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Your sleep score
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Your nighttime HRV
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Your night stress
These appear to be the only results, so you won’t see whether these actions impact your running performance, for example. And, like any feature of this type, the app can’t say for sure whether your actions are causing positive or negative results.
For example, Woop told me that I sleep worse on nights when I take melatonin, but that’s just a correlation: melatonin probably doesn’t make my sleep worse; it’s more likely that the connection exists because I take melatonin on nights when I’m already going to bed late or expect to have trouble sleeping.
Which Garmin devices can use the Lifestyle Tracking feature?
No specific device is required to track your activities; I was able to activate the feature on an account that didn’t have any wearables connected. However, Garmin notes that to get meaningful reports, you’ll need a device capable of measuring heart rate variability (which also impacts your sleep score and stress level overnight). Most popular Garmin wearables support heart rate variability, including the Venu, Vivoactive , and Forerunner watches, as well as the new Index sleep monitor .
How to use Garmin’s lifestyle tracking feature
This feature is pretty hidden, so I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing about it. Make sure the Garmin Connect app is updated, then tap the three-dot menu in the bottom right corner. Go to “Training & Planning,” then “Health Stats,” and then “Lifestyle Log.”
When you do this for the first time, you’ll see several information screens explaining the feature and asking you to confirm that this is not medical advice.
Next, select the data you want to record. Garmin recommends recording “just a few” data points at a time so you can learn more about them rather than sifting through mountains of data. The app’s information screen wisely advises that recording many different factors “may result in conflicting data, making it difficult to determine what specifically affects your health.”
A partial list of what can be registered
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The lifestyle category includes alcohol, caffeine (morning or late), exercise (light, moderate, or intense), late meals, and intermittent fasting.
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The self-care category includes cold showers, journaling, and sunlight.
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The category of procedures includes acupuncture and massage.
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The sleep-related category includes using a CPAP machine, eye masks, reading in bed, and having a pet in the bedroom.
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The life status category includes allergy symptoms, caring for loved ones, illness, and vacation.
You can also create custom journal entries. You can specify the number of entries or simply set up yes/no responses. You can also specify whether the entry is day-specific or sleep-specific. After selecting the behavior you want to record, the app will ask whether you want to receive corresponding morning and/or evening reminders.
To see the results of any of your actions, you’ll need to accumulate five “yes” and five “no” responses for each action. (As with Whoop’s version of this feature, tracking behaviors you always or never do is useless—there’s simply not enough data.)
You can view your results in the “Training & Planning” menu, as described above, and also add a card to the “Overview” section on the Garmin Connect app’s main screen. The card will indicate whether you’ve recorded your metrics for the day, and tapping it will display your data for today and the past. The Venu 4 also has a widget for recording your lifestyle data directly on the watch.