Five Life Hacks Every Fitness Watch User Should Know.
Whether you’ve just unboxed your first running watch or have been using one for years, you’re likely just beginning to understand its capabilities. Beyond simply tracking runs, modern smartwatches offer a wealth of features that, with the right knowledge, can truly transform your training. Here are ten tips to help you get the most out of your running smartwatch.
Try wearing your fitness tracker somewhere other than your wrist.
When it comes to placement, the wrist isn’t the only option . Placement on the forearm can actually improve the accuracy of optical heart rate measurement by ensuring better contact between the sensor and the larger part of the body and reducing noise from wrist movements. This is an underrated technique that can be especially useful during rowing, strength training, or any other activity where wrist movement interferes with the readings.
Display lap pace instead of current pace.
Current pace—the real-time speed your watch calculates using GPS—sounds like what you’d like to see while running. In practice, however, your current pace can fluctuate constantly, rising and falling sharply in response to GPS signal fluctuations or short-term changes in exercise intensity.
The general consensus among runners (at least on running subreddits) is that lap pace is a smarter alternative. It shows your average pace for the current lap or interval, smoothing out noise and providing a more consistent reading. During any workout where consistency is important, looking down and seeing a steady lap pace will give you much more insight into your actual performance than your current pace, which fluctuates every few seconds. Enable it in the 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 hotkeys and customizable buttons.
Most running watches allow you to assign keyboard shortcuts to physical buttons or gestures, but not all runners take advantage of this. You can assign shortcuts to display the weather or stopwatch, save your current location, enable “night shift” mode, and much more. If you regularly access the same submenus before or after a run, assigning them to keyboard shortcuts can save you time and avoid frustration.
Let’s use Garmin’s features as an example. By going to the Settings menu, selecting “System,” then “Shortcuts ” (formerly “Hotkeys”), you can assign functions to long presses or combinations of button presses. Beth explains that on her watch, she holds down the “DOWN” button to bring up the music controls and the “BACK” button to turn the touchscreen on and off.
Turn off the touch screen of your fitness watch during workouts.
Touchscreen running watches are the norm these days, but an accidental gesture while running can pause your workout, skip to the next screen, or—worst of all—end your session entirely. If your watch allows it, disable the touchscreen during workouts. This is especially important in rainy weather or when you’re wearing a long-sleeved shirt that touches the display. This setting may be hidden in workout settings or accessibility options. Find it, enable it, and you’ll never again accidentally pause your watch during the third mile of a rainy long run.
If your fitness watch is not working properly, perform a factory reset.
It sounds radical, but it’s a truly effective trick used by many serious runners. Your watch builds its fitness models (VO2 max, training load, recovery time) based on accumulated data over a certain period of time. But if you’ve recently lost significant weight, recovered from a long-term injury, experienced a period of illness, or simply noticed that your heart rate variability and sleep patterns have remained unchanged for weeks without explanation, this historical data may actually be tying your watch to an outdated version of yourself.
Solution: Log into your watch platform from a computer, export or record any data you want to keep, and then reset your device to factory settings. On Garmin, select “Delete data and reset settings” to clear all performance metrics. You’ll also need to delete the data in the companion app, as it’s usually saved there as a backup. Think of this as rebooting a computer that’s been running too long. You can start with a clean slate and let the watch restore accurate baseline metrics based on your current state, not what it was months or years ago.