Garmin Instinct 3 – You Rucked, They Answered

Garmin Instinct 3Garmin Instinct 3 – You Rucked, They Answered

That’s right, folks, in the most salacious and exciting firmware news since you discovered accelerometer-based hacks related to ‘sleep’ monitoring, Garmin now lets all you ruckers ruck to your heart’s content on the most recent beta update to Instinct 3 AMOLED.

Garmin lets you improve your fitness assessments and the impact of hiking, accounting for carried weight. Rucking fantastic!

Q: What is rucking

A: Something that childish elements of the media have to spell-check very carefully. More precisely, it’s a Garmin sports profile, very similar to hiking, that allows pack weight to be logged before or after the activity. This excludes the rucking workout from some of Garmin’s calculations and stops training load errors, but it won’t affect elements of training readiness based on HRV and sleep.

Garmin should further refine rucking in the future to give Load-adjusted pace – factoring in the extra resistance and calorie burn calculations – making energy expenditure more accurate (testing by Desfit shows that this change was not implemented, at least for the low weight/distance combo he used); Endurance and strength impact tracking; and heart rate analysis – avoiding misleading spikes due to the extra load. But these don’t seem to have been implemented yet.

For those who bought the Instinct E version, now might be the time to realise that Garmin has already forgotten you.

Garmin Rucking Feature on Tactix 8

In Detail – New Instinct 3 Series Feature Updates

All products:

  • Added support for Garmin Connect+ – Garmin knows you want to pay more, now you can.
  • Added support for Breathing Variations.
  • Added Passcode support.
  • Added support for additional locations in Weather glance.

Solar/E Only:

Solar/AMOLED Only:

  • Added Rucking activity.
  • Added Support for Pack Weight.
  • Various Gaming activity fixes and improvements.

AMOLED Only:

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10 thoughts on “Garmin Instinct 3 – You Rucked, They Answered

  1. Rucking is my main event activity, I’m patiently hanging on for it to be released to Fenix 7pro….any idea if or when?

    1. no sy
      however you should already be able to add the pack weight info retrospectively to Connect.

      what I wrote above and in the linked article includes intel about what WILL be included. It’s a pretty rubbish feature atm. but once all the bits are added it might be useful

      1. Yeah I’ve seen the retrospective pack weight, doesn’t alter any of the stats. Think I’ll hang on with the 7 and see if it’s added in the next 6months.

  2. I’m sure this activity will not be dropped on the 7-lineup anytime soon, if ever! They still want us to upgrade. But I am just waiting for the day when Garmin is selling these new activities on Connect IQ for 5,99, which I think is the next move once their customer base is getting used to get ripped off by their new subscription. I mean it’s quite ridiculous that Garmin watch face are amongst the most expensive in their own store!

    1. take the price of Garmin staps/bands too.

      I’m not sure i’m opposed to the idea of a $5.99 rucking app per se. just perhaps not as an option on a $1000 watch. dcr discussed this years ago

      so long as there is an open standard and competition then i dont mind garmin charging a premium for accessories. watch straps follow a standard and CIQ is a de facto standard.

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