The fatal flaw of my Garmin is that it refuses to accept my blink

Ask any coach, athlete, personal trainer or doctor: Sleep is an important, if not the most important, part of recovery. You can’t get these benefits without regular, quality sleep. But life happens, and sometimes regular, high-quality sleep just isn’t possible. In those instances, studies have shown that blinking can an effective way of boost your recovery and athletic performance, So, knowing this, someone please explain why none of the Garmin smartwatches in my review closet will accept my nap.

Miraculously, my occasional bouts of insomnia and Garmin training didn’t make much difference. It makes sense. I never sleep better or more regularly than when I’m training for something. This trend came to an end in the last few weeks when my insomnia came back in full force while training with the Epix Pro and Fenix ​​7S Pro. No big deal, I thought. Insomnia and I go back a long way, and I find that strategically timed naps help me keep functioning until the insomnia goes away. Plus, these days, most smartwatches and sleep trackers cover naps to some degree. Naturally, I assumed that Garmin — which is one of the most popular smartwatch brands among athletes — did the same.

Surely, I was forgetting something. Garmin has more settings buried in labyrinthine menus than I know. Blink Was He was supposed to be buried there somewhere, and I was so sleep deprived that I couldn’t find him. But a quick Google search later, Garmin’s support page told me that, “Our activity trackers are designed to track your specific sleep duration only, and will not display any nap/rest time outside of the primary sleep time for each day.” Some older Garmins used to have some nap tracking via sleep mode, but this is no longer possible on current Garmins.

Instead, when you set up the Garmin, you’re asked to set up a sleep window. (It’s a similar approach to Apple’s sleep schedule for the Apple Watch and iPhone.) Basically, Garmin’s intensive sleep tracking will only kick in during those hours. You can do Edit your sleep hours manually, but again, Garmins will only track one sleep session per day. Let’s say you slept from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., but Garmin’s autodetect messed up and said you went to bed at 2 a.m. You can fix this in the app. But if you’ve pooped and you took a nap between 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Then Went to bed at 11:30 p.m., naps don’t count. The best you can do in that scenario is to set your bedtime starting at 6:30 p.m. The problem is that as part of your overall sleep you have a four-hour period of wakefulness, which can lower your sleep score, even though naps are beneficial.

Maybe my sleep-deprived brain needs some more caffeine, but it doesn’t account for it.

Garmin, like other fitness-focused wearables, takes into account your sleep and other biometric data to calculate how well-rested and ready you are to train. Garmin also summarizes this into a handy training readiness metric that looks at your sleep, sleep history, recovery time, HRV status, training load, and stress history. I’m not surprised that my sleep and sleep history bars are bad, but not including naps—which can have a noticeable effect on your recovery time—seems silly.

The Aura Ring automatically detects naps and will adjust your readiness and sleep scores to reflect the extra rest. The Whoop 4.0 – a tracker geared towards serious athletes – does the same and allows for manual snooze. Fitbit and Samsung also automatically detect blinking on their wearable devices. Is auto-detection correct? No, but you can usually also manually log naps as separate sleep sessions. The point is that it matters. The Apple Watch also doesn’t have a good nap-tracking solution, but at least, you have access to a number of third-party sleep-tracking apps that can integrate with HealthKit.

However, this explains why my recovery and readiness data on the Aura Ring and the Garmin Fenix ​​7S Pro don’t match up as much as they normally would. I know it is temporary. Eventually, my insomnia will leave me so that I can snooze off in peace, but there Is This is going to be a transition period where I will have to actively work to reduce my sleep debt. Nap will also play a role here. I’m lucky in that, as a wearables reviewer, I have access to multiple platforms, so I can still gather enough data for this inspection. This is not true for everyone.

And it’s not just athletes and insomniacs who will benefit from it. There are tired parents, jet-lagged travelers, and exhausted shift workers who can all use nap tracking to help improve their overall sleep. Then again, it’s a shame that Garmin is taking a nap.