Garmin Forerunner 970 problems & delights – a negative review

This is probably the review of the Forerunner 970 that Garmin dreads.

This review highlights all the negative bits so that you can make an informed decision rather than relying on just about every other review, which only tell you how wonderful the watch is (which it is).

Heads up: I have zero links to Garmin and bought this watch with my own money. No media freebies here. People almost always only buy from positive reviews, so if you want to support the truly independent work here, then please buy the FR970 from this link or Buy Me A Coffee.

As you already know, Garmin’s best-ever triathlon watch is the Forerunner 970. It has every tri-related feature and is improved even over the Forerunner 965. I rarely would say upgrade from the previous generation model of Garmin, but if you are a tri gadget lover (me), then the upgrade is worth considering.

There’s always a but.

 

Usually, the ‘but’ is that Garmin is the butt of jokes about reliability and bugs. Once again, that is the case. Once again, you are expected to pay an awful lot of money for a sports watch that has quite a lot of bugs. Admittedly, the situation with the FR970 is better than the last time round, when the bugs on the FR965 were more frequent.

This year’s crop of FR970 bugs is mildly annoying. If you contrast the current situation to well over 5 years ago, you would often hear cries of anguish from fellow athletes, “The £%^$%& Garmin has lost the workout.” Those kinds of catastrophic errors are rare nowadays, although you may encounter the odd unexpected mid-workout reboot from which Garmin should recover your data.

My Experience with the Forerunner 970

I’ve had the 970 from day 1 and have used it extensively as my daily driver for triathlon and HYROX training. It is a really good, well-featured watch but…

 

Initial Setup

Garmin has a great system to transfer previous settings to a new watch. But. It often doesn’t work. At least it didn’t for me on the 970 nor its FR965 predecessor nor my last Edge 540.

Garmin Connect just couldn’t find any backup. This is pathetic.

I also have multiple Apple Watches and iPhones. Transferring phones and watches between family members takes a bit of time, but usually Apple only requires a handful of taps at the start before it goes off and does its thing, and always works reliably, provided the same software version is used.

With Garmin, I had to start setup from scratch not a backup, and when you have as many sensors as I do, some disabled and some not, then manual setup is a complete nightmare.

• Setup, did not find backup. They should just ‘be there’ and automatically be found for every device, like how Apple works.
• I had to go through the setup twice as there was an error at the end of the first attempt.
• The setup process took over 2 hours
• During the slow setup, at times, I had no idea if the process was slow or had hung. It needs an improved way to indicate progress.
• After setup, it found an old backup that it couldn’t find earlier. #sigh
• Garmin PAY credit card details had to be re-entered twice to make it work.
• Garmin Connect IQ app settings were, of course, not passed over either; some of the settings are very specific, and it was a PITA to research, rediscover and reenter them
• Multiple account logins were required to get Garmin Express (PC) working correctly
• The default setup language for me was French; others on the net found it to be Latvian. This causes lots of problems later if inadvertently tapped. Luckily, I can get by in French. Latvian…less so. You would have thought that the default language would be linked in some way to the customer’s shipping destination. Silly you, this is Garmin. You don’t become a multi-billion-dollar company by knowing which language your customers speak. How ridiculous.
• Multiple Connect IQ apps failed to work at launch or were unavailable. This is a design issue. Although there is a concept of device families/types, it’s broadly true that Connect IQ requires that 3rd party developers compile their apps and data fields to work on each new watch model. For smaller developers or forgetful ones, this can mean you have to wait weeks or months or never, until your favourite app/data field starts to work on Garmin’s latest watch. Certain developers are very good at getting their data fields to work within days of launch, eg Core and Stryd.

• The new secure accessory pairing is very peculiar. Garmin seems to enjoy finding new ways to add more options, clicks, and checks to any process to annoy you and make things take longer. After annoying you once, it repeated the annoyance again for most new sensors. Why am I continually asked if I want secure connections? I don’t. I’ve told you. Don’t ask me again.
• In my gym, the FR970 occasionally automatically detects a new accessory to add, presumably it’s a gym station (eg last week and week 1 after launch). It tells me that only a non-secure pairing option is available but i can’t leave the screen. Mid-workout, I’m stuck on that pairing screen to a device I don’t want to pair to. There is no way to get back to the running workout. Ridiculous, the pairing feature clearly hasn’t been anywhere near properly tested.
• Why does Garmin seem to pair to BLE by default? I don’t want that. I want ANT+.  I just want to pair stuff and get on with my life. The whole process is way too complex. But set against that, there are very specific things I want control over and Garmin is the only company that can do that properly – for example, I might want to have an accessory paired, specially named, but inactive. With Wahoo, I have to unpair such a sensor.

Hardware

• Garmin cables/ports work fine for a couple of months and then stop working. The connection is poor. It usually makes a connection for charging, but the connection for data transfer/synchronisation to a PC and/or Garmin Express is appallingly bad and unreliable. I have to wiggle or hold the cable to get the connection – why isn’t the cable exactly the right size? This has been the case for years with these stupid cables/ports. It’s a pathetic situation for such an expensive/premium product.
• The new speakers sound odd to me. The audio quality is not great. The speakers just can’t handle mid or high volume without distortion. If I didn’t know any better, I would say mine were simply broken or damaged.
• Thank you, lawmakers everywhere –  Garmin’s new USB-C ended cable doesn’t fit anywhere, at least not for a few more years in my household. Sigh. I guess it saves people from buying new cables, but I had to go out and buy some adapters instead. #Eco
• The buttons and screen are super nice. Gone is the nonsense from a few years ago when watches leaving Garmin’s factories weren’t quality-controlled to ensure buttons worked. Now the buttons work. and the screen, too. Although, why I even have to mention that for a multi-hundred-dollar watch is a bit odd. That said, that were reports of ‘Ghost Touches’ which were later addressed through firmware updates.
• There are a couple of reports on Reddit with users showing manufacturing defects (Aug 2025) with excess glue on some case joints.
• Then there is the yellow bit on the right side – the sensor guard. I wanted a black bit. There is no ‘black bit’ option. What idiot designer thought of this bright idea? It is the most aesthetically stupid call Garmin has ever made. Some people obviously like yellow on watches. Good for them. I would very strongly suspect that the majority of people do not like yellow bits on their watches. If it were for a $50 watch I only used for 3 runs a week, I wouldn’t mind, but I want to wear my watch all the time. I don’t want a stupid yellow bit, FFS! There are even stories on some of the forums (with the Fenix equivalent) of people buying hard, enamel paint to paint over the sensor guard. I’ll probably end up doing that. If it were a user-changeable part, that would be a different story and would present a nice customisation option.
• One of the key, recurring themes with Garmin hardware is that it is underpowered. You’re paying a premium price for a beautifully rich veneer of features that overlay a Sinclair ZX81. To be fair to Garmin, they are masters at designing around the tech; thus, during use, you don’t really notice the slowness too much. In the past, you might have had issues with the slow rendering as you page between screens. Not so now. The only remnants that are badly impacted by the old tech are
  • Saving a workout – this can very easily take 10 -20 seconds as the workout saves and you wait to see your summary data. That is a bit embarrassing when you are there with a friend waiting to show them how wonderfully you just performed.
  • Panning and zooming on the maps screen is not great. It can take 5-10 seconds to fully render some zoom levels. If you add a heatmap layer, it can take longer to render, over 15 seconds. It can take so long that the screen AOD times out (15-sec setting). You can easily buy a $100 Amazfit watch that performs better with map rendering. Still, that doesn’t matter much as Garmin isn’t really a map company. Oh. Wait a minute. That’s exactly what it is!
  • Zooming in to see street names can add 2 seconds to show the street names
  • Zooming out to a previously viewed tile can take 2-3 seconds. Why isn’t it cached?
• Another recurring theme is the constant stream of bugs. Garmin is good at fixing many bugs, better than almost all the competitors. But as soon as two are fixed, another is introduced. For example, the 970 no longer crashes when used to answer calls on my iPhone but the map orientation is too sensitive to my arm movements to show the correct direction of travel.
• Battery Life as a 24×7 watch feels less than the older FR965 in real-world usage. I have a 15-second timeout on the AOD with minimum brightness (Normal Power Mode) and SatIQ. I use a 3rd-party watchface, but it is one that has a proper power-saving mode. Calculated GPS battery life with these settings over multiple workouts is around 24 hours, which I am happy with – the example on the chart below shows a battery life of 29 hours during cycling.
• ECG. I enabled ECG, and this requires 2FA password authentication and is not reversible. I now have to wait for Garmin to email a PASS code when I want to use Garmin Connect on a PC. Note that the ECG feature only permits active, manual readings, so you will only find an unusual beat pattern if you just happen to catch it in the 30 seconds of the reading or if your heart issue is constant. ie this headline ECG feature is mostly useless, never enable it as it could mess up the ease of access to Connect!

Garmin Connect – Data and widget Data

Years ago, Garmin Connect was a bit rubbish, disorganised and lagging behind its competitors in many respects. Garmin definitely improved it with a concerted effort, and it got to the stage about 6-12 months ago when I thought it was poised to leap further ahead in usability, even though its latest dashboard was a bit odd-looking on the app. However, over the last 6 months, some very odd things have happened. Despite wearing a Garmin almost 24×7, huge chunks of my data have gone AWOL. This manifests itself on Connect and on the watch itself via the widgets. My problem might be linked to having duplicate data from HRM 600. I can’t think of any other cause, as I’ve often had duplicate data in the past.

 

Garmin Connect

Don’t forget, Garmin has started to add a subscription paywall to its features.

Not only do you stop getting new features on your FR970 2 years after you buy the most premium-priced sports watch out there, the $100 paywall subscription, has, for now, has about one feature and is really worth about 50c a month. But the enshittification of Garmin Connect  is only going to end one way. And it’s a very expensive way…for you.

 

Other than token gestures, where are the influencers? Influencers influence brands, right? Whose interests are they working in? Yours or the brands?

The last thing to annoy me with Conenct was on holiday in 2025. I only had access to Garmin Connect mobile. When crating a route I was stuck with following it on my FR970, it’s not easily possible to export the route GPX to use in non Garmin hardware or to send to friends – all you can send is a link which the friend needs a Garmin Connect desktop account to uopen and then export the GPX file and use on their non-Garmin device.

Watch software

At least Garmin now has an improved process for quality checking software before launching a product. Even better, the company has an improved process for sharing beta releases with customers to iron out bugs ahead of a launch.

It’s all brilliant, right?

So much for the beta process. This image shows a rather unexpected message on live software, admittedly, just after the launch.

A further issue is that Garmin builds in feature obsolescence. Let’s see how Garmin does that compared to apple.

With an Apple Watch, its owner might decide to upgrade rather than replace the battery after 4 years, they last 3-5 years because they go through more charge cycles than Garmin. That natural degradation of the battery prompts an upgrade decision.

Garmin does not share the same issue (opportunity!) as it has far fewer charge cycles because battery life is so much longer, market-leading in fact. Your Garmin battery will be good for a long time, provided you don’t endlessly leave it on the charger.

10.5 Garmin C*ck Ups – What’s going on at Garmin HQ?

 

Instead, and perhaps more annoyingly, Garmin effectively stops adding major new features about 2 years after launch. It uses features to prompt you to make an upgrade decision.

So, if you wait for a year to buy a FR970 to save a bit of money in a sale, you will soon be horrified to learn that you only get meaningful new features added for another 12 months. That’s it. Of course, Garmin will still keep the bug fixes and other trivial stuff coming.

You might want to consider how happy you will be having spent multiple hundreds of dollars.

Limiting new feature availability is Garmin’s strategy – it almost wants to annoy you into upgrading, whereas Apple, to a degree, can shrug and say, “Ahh, batteries. What can we do? It’s just the tech.” Garmin deliberately chooses to restrict the features available to you.

My latest bug was using round trip routing (Aug 2025). After about 15km of road cycling the routing and directions just stopped. End of.

The next day the next bug was that at the end of the ride the watch totally hung on the screen before it says ‘save’. I had to reboot the watch to let me actually choose save. Luckily the rebooted watch did recover the workout and offered the save option as i hoped. It was ‘worried’ I’d lose the workout though and this sort of thing jsut shouldn’t happen 3 months after launch.

I use the Apple Watch beta software which generally works but has some issues. I would rank Garmin’s launch software as about at the same standard as Apple’s Developer Beta level ie at the stage before it goes through a public beta process. I kinda don’t mind ‘playing’ with my sports gadgets and quite enjoy it. However, if you just spent hundreds of dollars and want a proper sports tool, you may be considerably less forgiving than me.

an improved Interface

The watch interface has been improved. The biggest improvement is how you start your sports and sort sport profiles using favourites or a folder of favourites, easily accessed at the top of the screen.

It takes me 3 or 4 button presses to start a run or ride, depending on how my last activity changes the default favourite. That’s good and the same or better as most other watches, although the Apple Watch is 2 or 3 taps to start a workout in the way I have it set up. That one tap or button press makes no difference to me either way; both are fine. Similarly, to zoom in or out on the map screen during a workout is also a similar number of presses – three, or so.

However, you encounter Garmin’s complexities once you dip beneath the veneer. These complexities then translate into wearing out your fingers and contorting your wrists as you struggle to remember where that specific setting is squirrelled away.

• Example 1: It takes 14 button presses to start an existing, custom Hyrox-sim workout. The number of button presses will vary, and it could quite easily be more, depending on how you set up or accessed the workout. I think 14 is the minimum number of presses!
• Example 2: Calibrate Compass takes 10 button presses if you remember to scroll through the various options the wrong way, but considerably more if you scroll through the options in the regular order.
• Example 3: Disable/enable auto multisport change at the start of a triathlon race takes about 13 button presses – perhaps you realised you need to change that training setting on race day near the start line.
• Example 3: Creating a custom brick training profile took well over 25 button presses. That number will vary and could easily take significantly more if you have a complex setup in mind.

Garmin’s plethora of options now seems better organised than ever. But there are just so many of them. If you are really into your gadgets, then it can be a toy-like joy to learn and discover new tricks. If you want a simple-to-use watch and a core set of features, then maybe Garmin is not for you.

Using shortcuts or touchscreen swipes might make things easier for your commonly used tasks.

Watchfaces

Garmin’s stock watch faces for the Forerunner 970 are awful. There are one or two that are just about wearable, but the rest were designed by Garmin’s Chief Designer’s 12yo child while s/he was out on a quick 10k run.

Thankfully for Garmin, there is a vibrant 3rd-party marketplace for watchfaces, and you can find some very good ones there; even free ones can be good.

 

 

Some of Garmin’s watchfaces on other models look great, but you can copy them to your Forerunner. In fact, you can’t always buy them – an odd omission by Garmin. 3rd party developers used to copy some of Garmin’s better faces and sell or give those away; however, Garmin has recently stopped that from happening.

Garmin’s watchface ecosystem is perhaps the most powerful on the market for sportspeople. Like many competitors, Garmin allows you to choose a colour and stylistic theme for the watchface and add various screen components/metrics (complications). Garmin’s complications include some of your sports-related abilities – for example, VO2max could be a complication. The downside here is that there is no guarantee that your favourite-looking watch face will support the inclusion of your desired complications. So the well-intentioned, powerful watchface ecosystem is somewhat let down by commercial, aesthetic and practical hurdles.

All you want is a good-looking, useful watch face, right? It shouldn’t be that hard. But it is.

Update Aug 2025: Installing a new firmware version resets the watchface, at least it does for me. Specifically, I use a non-Garmin watchface, and after a firmware update, it changes to another non-Garmin watchface shown on a quarter of the screen.

Garmin Forerunner 970 Review: Accuracy Tests & Results

There are posts about GPS errors with the Forerunner 970 on some forums. I don’t see any GPS errors worth talking about. All is good in my testing, with the usual caveats around tree cover and tall buildings.

Historically, Garmin has had years of relatively poor GPS accuracy overhyped by multiple reviewers. Garmin’s recent crop of dual-frequency GNSS chipsets has ended that. The dual-frequency, multi-band chips from Airoha and Synaptics deliver a positive step change in accuracy. They are as good as they will get in most circumstances, and the competition isn’t meaningfully better. We are at Peak Accuracy!

Suburban Running Test

Excellent GPS results when running

Open Water Swimming

Providing you get a good GPS signal at the start and don’t keep your Garmin submerged for too long, you should get great results like this.

Cycling

Tracks are great when cycling too.

I must have easily cycled over 1,000 miles with the 970. 2,000 miles? IDK. Lots.

 

Heart Rate Test Results with the FR970

One reason I held off publishing a review of the Forerunner 970 was that I wanted to capture some poor optical heart rate results from its Elevate Gen 5 sensor. Aside from the usual minor quirks you’d expect from any brand’s optical tech, I haven’t had much luck—performance has generally been good.

Swimming is the weakest area of HR performance, as expected. I also tend to see accuracy drop during cold-weather runs, but with the UK being unusually warm this year, that factor has not yet come into play.

Something else I’ve done differently in my testing this time round is to include far more time in the gym. I’ve kept repeating various HYROX simulations in my gym, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how accurate the 970’s Heart rate accuracy has been. Perhaps it wouldn’t be quite so good for Crossfit where there are more significant wrist movements.

 

Elevation Accuracy

 

The elevation accuracy looks pretty solid. Here is an example chart.

 

Sleep Accuracy

Sleep stages are a bit of fun…that’s all

It’s impossible for wearables to accurately determine sleep stages.

The following chart shows @thequantifiedscientist’s sleep stage comparison. He compares the performance of watches’ sleep stages from HRV and motion against a brain wave sensor. But even the brain wave sensor is NOT as accurate as a lab-grade polysomnography (PSG), and even lab-grade PSG’s use cost-saving methods that further limit accuracy.

The bottom line is that sleep stages are a bit of fun.

The other best sleep devices on the market are the awesome Eight Sleep 5 Pod, Oura Ring and Apple Watch. Comparing the Forerunner 970 stats visually to those devices each morning on a daily basis, I find the time in bed from all to be broadly similar.

The Deep sleep stage is easier for wearables to more accurately assess (but still inaccurate). The deep sleep durations I see differ between the devices; however, they all feel to me like they trend in a broadly similar direction. I wouldn’t like to say how accurate Garmin Deep Sleep and Sleep times are from a scientific perspective, but you can perhaps look at that data to look for trends or exceptions. Most people simply know when they have had a good or bad night’s sleep.

Garmin VO2max Accuracy

Garmin-Firstbeat claims 95% accuracy for VO2max. Other studies show a 5% variation to lab results; other studies like this one show very significant underestimation by Garmin.

@ChaseTheSummit found his lab VO2max was 2 points higher than Garmin suggested.

I have noticed that switching between Garmin devices (previous generation to current generation) introduces a permanent step change to VO2max. As I use a chest strap, I can only assume that new and old versions of the algorithms exist.

Garmin VO2max – how to make it higher

You can use Garmin’s VO2max to track your improvement, but I wouldn’t compare its values to those from other people, other than for a bit of fun.

Even ignoring the method used to determine oxygen consumption, the other component of the calculation, weight, also plays a bit part. A relatively light person will easily get a 1 or 2 point VO2max variation, simply due to weight variation or weight taken at a certain time of day. Garmin’s algorithms will probably smooth that out.

 

Notifications and other Smart Features

Some Redditors point out that notifications are not always displaying correctly.  I’m happy with what I see on my end.

In fact, Garmin is oddly good at quickly showing notifications in my experience. Whenever a website has to send me a PINCODE via SMS, the notification and number appear on my Garmin before showing on my Apple Watch.

That said, Garmin can never be as good as Apple with many other smart features. This article explains the key smart features that only an Apple Watch can leverage, like the ability to react to iOS notifications.

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Hardware and Design Differences: 970 vs 965

The upgrades here represent a significant hardware upgrade over the FR965 – the best lens material is used, there’s a flashlight, and new speaker and microphone capabilities, similar to those found in the Fenix 8. Even better, the latest Gen 5 optical HR sensor includes an on-demand ECG feature! I’m happy.

• New User Interface – it’s similar to the Fenix 8, not hugely different, but you’ll appreciate the improvements.
• Optical Sensor
  • Garmin ECG App: The Forerunner 970 has the Garmin ECG App for on-demand ECG readings.
  • More accurate in exercise
  • Adds a skin temperature sensor
• LED Flashlight: The Forerunner 970 features a new LED flashlight with three shades of white and one shade of red.
• Lens Material: The Forerunner 970 features Sapphire Crystal lens material, while the Forerunner 965 uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3 DX.
• Physical Size: The Forerunner 970 has a physical size of 47 x 47 x 12.9 mm, making it slightly thinner than the Forerunner 965, which measures 47.2 x 47.2 x 13.2 mm.
• Weight: The Forerunner 970 weighs 56 g, slightly heavier than the Forerunner 965 at 53 g.
• Built-in Speaker/Microphone: The Forerunner 970 features a built-in speaker and microphone. This hardware supports features like phone calls and voice assistant support, and is a major upgrade for smart feature support in the future (and now)
• Display Size: While both are listed as 1.4″ diameter, the measurements are slightly different: 35.3 mm for the Forerunner 970 and 35.4 mm for the Forerunner 965.

Battery Life Differences: 970 vs 965

There’s a mixed bag here. For me, the numerous negatives are outweighed by the modest boost in battery life, particularly in the SatIQ mode and when playing music. Meh!

• Smartwatch mode: Up to 15 days for the Forerunner 970 vs. Up to 23 days for the Forerunner 965. The 965 has a longer estimated battery life in standard smartwatch mode.
• GPS-Only GNSS mode: Up to 26 hours for the Forerunner 970 vs. Up to 31 hours for the Forerunner 965. The 965 has a longer estimated battery life in GPS-only mode without music.
• Satiq (AutoSelect) GNSS mode: Up to 23 hours for the Forerunner 970 vs. Up to 22 hours for the Forerunner 965. The 970 has a slightly longer estimated battery life in SatIQ mode without music.
• All-Systems GNSS mode + Multi-Band: Up to 21 hours for the Forerunner 970 vs. Up to 19 hours for the Forerunner 965. The 970 has a longer estimated battery life in Multi-Band mode, excluding music playback.
• GPS-Only GNSS mode with music: Up to 14 hours for the Forerunner 970 vs. Up to 10.5 hours for the Forerunner 965. The 970 has a longer estimated battery life in GPS-only mode with music.
• SatIQ (AutoSelect) GNSS mode with music: Up to 13 hours for the Forerunner 970 vs. Up to 9.5 hours for the Forerunner 965. The 970 has a longer estimated battery life in SatIQ mode with music.
• All-Systems GNSS mode + Multi-Band with music: Up to 12 hours for the Forerunner 970 vs. Up to 8.5 hours for the Forerunner 965. The 970 has a longer estimated battery life in Multi-Band mode, especially when playing music.

Battery profiles (power modes) are introduced to enable you to tweak power management.

I expect there are several factors contributing to the odd changes to battery life – new GNSS sensor (Synaptics), new Elevate Gen 5, possibly new screen (higher brightness claims), possibly a new Bluetooth version (>5.2 – more energy efficient and some more energy efficient when playing music)

Smart Features Differences: 970 vs 965

These smart features are all new for the Forerunner 970, and the 970 is well-positioned to benefit from these new features, unless they require 4G LTE (which is reserved for the FR975).

• Make calls and send texts via voice: The Forerunner 970 supports this feature when paired with a compatible smartphone.  A significant step towards becoming a smartwatch – now we need 4G LTE.
• VIRB Remote: The Forerunner 970 adds a VIRB Remote feature.
• BLUETOOTH phone calling and voice assistant support: The Forerunner 970 supports BLUETOOTH phone calling and voice assistant functionality using its built-in speaker and microphone.
• Voice command: The Forerunner 970 supports voice command functionality.

Health & Wellness Differences: 970 vs 965

Improved support for women’s features and improved sleep support

• Skin temperature: The Forerunner 970 now features skin temperature tracking, which helps with more accurate period predictions and past ovulation estimates for women’s health. A new sensor capability provides this.
• Ovulation Estimate: additions
• Evening report: The Forerunner 970 includes an Evening Report (reminders of sleep need, tomorrow’s workout, weather, and events). An older version of this feature was first on other Garmin watches; elements resemble Whoop‘s sleep coach, and nicely complement the 965’s Morning Report.

Workout and Training Plans Differences:

These are new to the 970 and fill some glaring gaps in the coaching and workout support that previously existed for multisports.

• Garmin Triathlon Coach: The Forerunner 970 explicitly lists support for Garmin Triathlon Coach. This fills the gaps in Coach: the ability to set triathlon race dates in the calendar, hopefully creating better-specified bike/run workouts.
• Multisport Structured Workouts: The Forerunner 970 supports Multisport workouts that you can now create in Connect

Activity Profile Differences (Exclusive to 970): 970 vs 965

Over 10 activity profiles for the Forerunner 970 are new:

• Multisport: Brick workouts, Duathlon and Pool triathlon are added (I think they are new, I created them manually before)
• Wellness: Mobility
• Outdoor running: Obstacle Racing (I’m slightly disappointed this doesn’t include sports like Hyrox, though maybe this can be customised?)
• Outdoor recreation: Hunting, Horseback Riding
• On the Water: Fishing, Boating, Sailing, Sail Racing, Snorkelling, Sailing Expedition

Running Features Differences: 970 vs 965

There are some interesting features here that might be useful. Two require a very expensive chest strap to function properly.

• Step speed loss: New Step speed loss metrics (compatible with the HRM 600).
• Running Economy: new Running Economy metrics (compatible with the HRM 600).
• Running Tolerance:
  • Mileage – how far can you run this week in total? (Useful!)
  • Impact Load: how surfaces and gradients affect the load as you run, great for managing injury risks

Golfing Features Differences:

• Auto CourseView updates:
• Tournament legal
• CT10 Compatible

Outdoor Recreation Features Differences:

• Expedition GPS Activity.
• ‘Improved’ maps, including radius arc.

Other New Features: 970 vs 965

• Dynamic Round-Trip Routing: whilst this feature was on the FR965, what’s new is the dynamic nature of the feature now. Meaning you can re-plan after starting.
• Auto Lap by Timing Gates: This is a flavour of autolap triggered at gates marked on any preloaded course. This is useful for trail, ultra, or city marathons to align recorded laps with the correct race line distances.
• Suggested Finish Line: The Forerunner 970 overview mentions a feature that, if you have a course loaded for your race, allows the watch to suggest trimming your data to the finish line if you forget to stop your timer. Neat!

4G LTE / 5G RedCap Features

There is no real autonomy with the FR970. Whilst you can upload workouts over Wifi and also download maps, music and firmware updates over Wifi, true connectivity to web services is only via a connected smartphone.

Thus, the phone, text features and live tracking features only work if your phone is present.

The FR970 can make and take connected calls in this way and is certainly OK to use. I find the audio quality on calls to be satisfactory, but not as good as an Apple Watch.

Triathlon Features and other multi-sport like Hyrox and Crossfit

The triathlon features in the Garmin ecosystem are significantly superior to those of any competitor. Competitors might appear to offer the same broad competencies, but the sheer breadth and depth of Garmin’s capabilities are unmatched. Here are several examples

• You can connect to every sensor or training platform that counts
• Swimming modes are comprehensive. Open Water Swim tracks accurately and pool swim counts strokes, sets and lengths properly in my experience. The drill log and REST interval timer are excellent.
• Heart rate signals from chest straps do not travel through water, and optical HR is unreliable. As an alternative, Garmin will cache and retrieve HR data from a chest strap after any swim.
• Long course cyclists can follow power guides, which suggest optimal power profiles to match the undulations of the course.
• Runners can consider any metric they like, including the latest Running Economy – an important metric that’s conceptually similar to vVO2max, explaining how your physiology translates to speed on the ground. It works best at slower effort levels, which is perhaps where your body best learns to become a more efficient runner, one of the benefits of easy miles.
• Garmin sells a handlebar adapter so you can more easily use your watch on the bike leg (get a dedicated bike computer!).
• Triathlon training can handle virtually anything you can throw at the FR970, including the ability to handle BRICK workouts or create custom multisport profiles – Duathlon, pool triathlon, and XC triathlon are a breeze to properly track.

There is an omission for HYROX multisport athletes that probably applies to all other arena multisport events like Crossfit. You can’t put together the proper multi-activity profile that combines running with individual gym station activities. The partial workaround is to use a manually created structured workout, but that can’t include all the correct Hyrox activities as Garmin hasn’t yet created them; the only sensible option on race day is simply to use the Cardio profile. None of the fancy triathlon features like auto-multiport detect will work – that needs GPS for starters, but there are other reasons too.

So FR970 might be a multisport watch, but it’s only really a multisport watch in the triathlon sense. At least for now.

setup Hyrox on your Garmin Watch – everything you need to know about HYROX Sports Tech (WOD, AMRAP, CrossFit, Spartan)

A few years ago, Garmin introduced an outdoor auto-multisport mode to switch between disciplines. This works well at a casual level, but obviously can’t know when you pass through the out gate of T2 – you already started running when you left your bike, right? The timing gate could be 3 or 103 seconds later, depending on the transition setup. So if you want your personal stats to match your race timing stats, you’ll still need to press the LAP button to progress into and out of transition.

With the recent introduction of Timing Gates to other sports, I reckon Garmin will soon add (2026) the ability to set the position of transition gates by GPS point in 2026.

There’s more. Garmin also recently filled a gap with its Coach setup. Garmin Coach now offers adaptive training plans for triathletes that cover all three disciplines, adapting to your progress and fatigue on a regular basis. This is a market-leading feature, but could be improved further by incorporating the strength trainer, which itself would be further improved by a better interface to modify activities and more accurate rep counting.

Finally, another new feature lets you determine the correct end time for a race by trimming the workout. This is great for your A race when you were so tired you forgot to press stop and got halfway down the I-90/M4 before realising.

Garmin Forerunner 970 Review – Take Out

By some measure, this must be Garmin’s best-ever endurance watch. It is fantastically impressive in how it serves the needs of competitive multi-sport athletes. I definitely recommend it, but also definitely recommend that you consider whether such a complex, ‘pro’ watch is suitable for your needs.

You will never, ever use all of the FR970’s features, but that’s not really the point. Whatever idiosyncracy or niche interest you have in triathlon training, performance or physiology, Garmin will almost certainly serve your interest out of the box. There will be relatively rare occasions where Garmin can’t, but then it’s almost certain that you will find something on the Connect IQ app store – be that deep a running power ecosystem (Stryd), heat training (Core Gen 2), or muscle oxygen for Hyrox (Train Red).

But there are lots of annoyances, and these will taint your time with the watch to some degree. If you have relatively basic triathlon needs, then a) you don’t need this watch, but b) you might never encounter any of the bugs that still exist months after launch.

I know this review was headlined to give you a negative viewpoint to balance every other review, which are invariably blindly positive. Despite that, the Forerunner 970 is my favourite-ever Garmin watch because it serves my needs as a triathlete, and certainly its tech capabilities serve the needs of this blog. However, in order of annoyance, here are the issues I have that probably will affect other people.

• Usability – non-routine tasks require way too many clicks. ie it is a poor user interface despite improvements
• Aesthetics –  poor stock watch faces and an oddly designed yellow sensor guard

You have to live with aesthetics and usability every day. They are pervasive characteristics. You may or may not encounter or care about my other pet peeves

• Physiological metrics – I’m not convinced of the accuracy or science behind several of them, eg REM sleep, VO2max and Readiness
• Underpowered hardware – often mildly annoying at small tasks like saving workouts and rendering maps, made more annoying when I consider the premium purchase price
• Inability to correctly build a multisport Hyrox workout, either as a custom sport profile or structured workout.

Sources & Resources

• Buy Garmin Forerunner 970
• Sleep Accuracy from Rob @ThequantifiedScientist
• VO2max accuracy from @ChaseTheSummit
• Garmin Forerunner 970 – Official Product Page
• Garmin Forerunner 970 – Official Manual
• Garmin VO2max validation and here and here (FR265)  and here