Review: Garmin Venu Sq

As the competition among smartwatches heats up, the lists of their features continue to grow. But this often comes with a not-so-welcome rise too—of their prices. Fitness smartwatches can now set you back several hundred dollars, which can be out of reach for many exercisers.

Enter the Garmin Venu Sq, the company’s new entry-level, GPS-enabled smartwatch. Priced at a base of $200 (the music version, which allows you to download songs to your watch, costs $50 more), the watch promises to appeal to those who are watching their budget, but still want access to a whole host of fitness metrics on their wrists.

I’ve tested a few fitness smartwatches recently, from the Fitbit Sense to the Timex Metropolitan, so I was eager to give Garmin’s latest offering a try. I was especially curious whether the entry-level price would limit the bells and whistles I’ve come to expect from a fitness smartwatch. But after wearing the Garmin Venu Sq, I learned that saving a few bucks doesn’t mean missing out.

How I Tested

SELF’s panel of fitness experts helped us determine which criteria to focus on when testing fitness trackers, including things like accuracy, ease of use, battery life, and other features.

I tested the Garmin Venu Sq for one week, taking it off only when it needed to be charged, meaning I wore it for sleep and showering, as well as for all of my exercise sessions (running, indoor cycling, and strength training) during that time. For comparison, I wore another fitness tracker on my right wrist, and during my indoor cycling workouts, I added a forearm-based heart rate monitor that synced with my class app.

Ease of Use

I was already pretty familiar with Garmin’s Connect app—the home base for all of your metrics and daily analysis—since over the years I’ve owned both its Forerunner 10 and Vivosmart HR+, and getting back to it was a welcome change from some of the more complicated ones out there: Garmin Connect is super intuitive to use, and it sets up very easily. My phone had no problem pairing with my watch.

Using the watch itself was super easy too. My favorite part, though, might be one of its lower-tech features: It has two functional buttons! The Venu Sq has a touchscreen for scrolling and clicking, but I found its two buttons to be a real boon for ease of use. With one press of the top button, I enter the exercise menu (where I was able to set my four favorite exercise types to show up as a shortcut, alleviating the need to scroll through a dizzying array of options each time, including everything from golf to skiing to elliptical). The bottom button serves as a “back” button, making it simple to retrace your steps on the watch face.

These buttons really come in clutch during cold-weather running, where clunky gloves—yes, even ones that promise to be touchscreen compatible—make it difficult to start or stop a workout. With the Venu Sq, though, I wasn’t limited by any type of glove: I just needed to press the top button to end my run or the lower button to mark a lap. No need to yank off sweaty gloves (and then try to squeeze them back on).

Accuracy

A not-exactly-scientific step test (where I simply counted a 50-step path throughout my apartment) showed the Venu Sq to be pretty much on target, though it tended to underestimate the total a bit—usually measuring around 46 or 47 steps. I consider its GPS-based distance calculation mostly accurate too: Whenever I hit an area on my route I know to be exactly 0.50 miles, my Venu Sq would clock it at about 0.52 or 0.53. For a recreational runner like myself, those extra hundredths of a mile aren’t deal breakers, though they do result in a final pace that seems a few seconds per mile faster than I really am.

Where Garmin Venu Sq really shines, though, is in its heart rate accuracy. Other fitness smartwatches tend to overestimate my resting heart rate, but the Venu Sq measures mine much closer to my manual reading. And it stays accurate during workouts: It catches the spikes during intervals within seconds of increasing my exertion, and then when I back off into rest periods the displayed heart rate follows suit. I also measured my heart rate with a separate forearm strap during my at-home indoor cycling classes, since it syncs with my app, and the two devices stayed beat for beat throughout the duration of my classes.

What’s more, with the Venu Sq, I didn’t notice any weird heart rate fluctuations during any of my exercise sessions. With other smartwatches, I’d sometimes see false drops or rises (which would soon correct themselves), but the Venu Sq stayed consistent.

Battery Life

Battery life is notoriously poor with feature-packed smartwatches, but I would consider the Venu Sq’s to be on the good side. I charged it up to 100% right before going to bed on a Sunday, then by Wednesday morning at 8:00 a.m., it was down to 10%. That gave me two solid days of pretty heavy use (including one GPS-based workout and three non-GPS workouts) before I had to charge back up.

Comfort and Style

The Venu Sq comes with a silicone sport band, which makes sweating on it no big deal. Thanks to its light weight and sleek design—it’s not bulky and doesn’t bulge out much from my wrist—I didn’t really notice it much when I was wearing it, which is exactly how I think a fitness tracking watch should be.

As for style, the Venu Sq is pretty unobtrusive: Its square shape with soft, curved edges is subtle, and I’d feel comfortable wearing the watch on nearly any occasion.

Syncing

Workouts from the Venu Sq nearly immediately synced to Connect, making them accessible right away. Connecting with Strava is seamless too, and that syncs nearly just as quickly. In fact, I’ve been noticing as soon as I walk into my apartment door after running outside, my phone will beep, first with a Connect notification and seconds later with a Strava one.

A fun, added bonus of the Venu Sq? The music version actually syncs with my indoor cycling bike, a Schwinn IC4, which allows me to import data like speed and distance to my Connect app.

The only sync-related bummer with the Venu Sq is that reading text messages on my device remained buggy: Only the name and numbers would come through, truncating the actual message (emails and other notifications came through in full perfectly fine). A rep from Garmin told me that this was a known issue with my specific kind of Android phone (LG G7), and that they are working on a fix.

Water Resistance

The Venu Sq is rated at 5 ATM, meaning it can withstand pressure equivalent to a depth of 50 meters—making it suitable for splashes, swimming, and showering. I’ve showered with the Veny Sq every day I’ve worn it and have noticed no issues whatsoever.

Other Features

One of my biggest curiosities with the Venu Sq was how its additional features would shake out—as an entry-level smartwatch, would it feel limited? After testing, I can honestly say: not at all. It crushes on cool features.

The Garmin Venu Sq boasts features that don’t just sound cool, but are ones that I actually use. This applies to both working out and all the other parts of the day. For exercising, the Venu Sq allows you to load running workouts on your watch, which is so helpful if you’re setting out for an interval day and don’t want to do the math to time on your watch. I’m rehabbing from a stress fracture, so I’ve been alternating some walk-runs into my running: With the Venu Sq, I was able to load rest and recovery periods (walk and runs intervals) onto my watch, which would buzz to alert me when each was beginning and ending.

As for strength training, the watch lets you use the lap button to mark sets and rest—and after each set, you have the option of editing the number of reps your performed (it’ll count them for you based on your movement, but those aren’t always accurate) and how much weight you lifted. Later, when you view the workout in Connect, you’ll see the watch’s guesses for which exercise you did for each set. And in many cases, it comes pretty close (it picked up on bench presses and deadlifts, for instance, though good mornings always threw it for a loop). If it was wrong, or you wanted to be more specific (think: “goblet squat” instead of just “squat”), you could simply choose the correct exercise from a huge, extensive dropdown menu in the app. The result? Your very own training log, which you can refer back to at any time. It even calculates your total workout volume, which is neat to see quantified—my latest upper-body day clocked in at 9,018 pounds.

During non-exercising time, the Venu Sq also had some pretty neat features. It uses heart rate variability (the time between each heart beat) to determine a stress score, which it measures cumulatively during the day and acutely at any given moment. When it senses you’re super stressed, it’ll send you a buzzing reminder to calm down—with an offer of breathing exercises to help you do so. (I’d get this notification pretty frequently while having my morning coffee and starting to dive into deeper things at work).

Perhaps my favorite feature, though, is Garmin’s Body Battery, a calculation used to determine your energy reserve based on heart rate variability, stress, and activity. It was really neat to see the effects of this—my body battery stayed high in the early part of the week, when I was coming off a rested, low-stress weekend, but really plummeted toward the end of the week, after a couple days of added nighttime workouts to my regular routine. I find myself using this feature to make sure I’m not pushing too hard with workouts and skimping on recovery.

Bottom Line

The Garmin Venu Sq does everything a fitness tracker should do, and tons of things you didn’t know it could do—but that you are really, really happy that it can. It performs all the necessary smartwatch stuff (text-reading bug for my phone excluded), but where I think the Venu Sq really outshines its competition is with its exercise tracking: This is a watch for people who work out and who want to make their workouts as effective as possible. The Garmin Venu Sq provides the added features to help you take it to the next level.