Apple Watch vs Garmin (Don't Make This Mistake)

after one year of wearing both the Apple watch and the Garin as I train for the London and New York City marathons this year I want to make sure that you don't make the same expensive mistake that I did I train almost 3 to 4 hours per day with the goal of running a sub three-hour Marathon one day because I want to see what my body is capable of Garmin and apple are two of the biggest watch players in the game there's a ton of marketing on all these fancy features but the most important things

in my opinion is it easy to start your workout can you view the data that you need while you're working out and then can you easily review all the data after you're done with your workout and we're not talking about specific watches I'm going to be talking about the general experience about Garmin watches in general versus Apple watches overall cuz for the most part they're pretty close thank you Shopify for sponsoring this video first can I easily start a workout without frustration how does it work on Garmin I'll pull up my watch I hit the

start stop button I don't even have to be looking at the screen until this view I see the type of workout I want to do I select it and now I just wait for GPS once I'm ready I can keep my eyes closed and all I do is tap this start stop again and the workout has started boom when I'm done I press it again and it stops a workout I never really have to look at the screen there's audio there's haptic feedback to notify that the workout has started and stopped so it makes it

super easy and effortless I don't have to use the touchcreen at all unless I absolutely want to I can actually scroll with these side buttons here now for the Apple watch if you have the ultra you can press the action button or you go ahead and and just open up the workout app by scrolling and using the touchcreen I find the type of workout I'm doing I have to select it with the touchcreen there's no way to use physical buttons to do so once that's started I can now wait for GPS on the ultas whereas

the series and SC watches I don't have this feature once I'm ready on the ultas I can press the action button to start the workout and on the series watches it's going to do a 321 countdown once that workout is started if I want to pause I just press two buttons it doesn't matter which two as long as one of them is the action button or on a series 9 or SE watch you press these two side buttons and that can start and stop your workout you might also have screenshots tied to it too so

from a starting a workout standpoint I love that all of the Garmin are going to wait until you've achieved a good GPS signal whereas the Apple watches only the ultas if you've activated Precision start here are you going to be able to wait and start your workout with the action button or else it's going to have a 321 countdown as soon as you tap the workout type so from a hardware standpoint I really prefer having buttons that I can press and not have to look at the screen get physical and audio feedback so I know

that I started stop my workout whereas the ultra the action button to start the two press buttons to stop the action button to create a segment or a lap it gets a bit confusing in terms of which buttons I have to press because the start stop is not the same on most workout types I've only found on swimming and certain custom workouts where the action button itself will act as a stop button so that gets confusing as a user because I'm not really sure which button I need to press so there is a slight frustration

on the Apple watch side there is one issue that I've had with both watches when it comes to starting my workouts effortlessly on the Garmin there has been a couple times where it's like restarted right at the beginning of me trying to start a workout not sure what that was about I haven't had that issue in a while the Apple watch has this like orange screen of death where I can press it and it just shows an orange screen and it doesn't start the work out but it vibrates like it does that's been a bit

frustrating cuz I've lost faith in that the action button actually starts my workout so I always now check visually or I will go ahead and swipe to manually started from the touch screen these are both like very random occurrences but they can happen from time to time these are computers and they are not perfect battery life now this is the world's number one argument everyone who's Team Garmin is going to be like we have battery life Apple watch will not survive a single workout you are right and you are wrong at the same time the

newest Apple Watch series 9 and 8 if you bought it in the past year or two more than likely it's going to last a half marathon at least maybe a full Marathon depending on which power modes you're using the series 9 I think will last the full Marathon 4 or 5 hours the Apple watch Ultra will definitely last a full marathon and if you're doing Ultra marathons you do need to activate low power mode but for every single workout that I've done I've not even been at 100% before the workout like sometimes I'll start the

work at a 50% run for 2 to 3 hours and the Apple watch will still survive so trust me the whole battery conversation these both these devices are great and will do what you need it's the charging situation where it becomes an issue the Garmin it has the worst charging experience I've ever seen it's kind of like the mouse on the Apple devices where you have to plug it into the bottom but what's nice is right now I'm at 21 days battery with this specific features that I have activated here um if I want to

run it's actually going to tell me I'm going to have 44 hours of battery just for GPS so I can run with this watch for 44 hours before it runs out so you want to mix that 21 days plus the 44 hours and you're probably getting you know maybe 2 weeks of battery life in current settings I'm going for maximum accuracy on this thing but this can last to 30 days if you're not doing any GPS tracking whereas the ultra lasts me about a day and a half I typically take it off in the morning

and at night while I'm showering or using the bathroom let it charge for 30 to 45 minutes and that gets me enough juice to get to the next charging point one thing that's interesting though is the charging experience in the appw watch is so much nicer I take the watch off and with a magnet I just plop it on and now it's charging the Garment I have to take the watch off I got to find the port to find the cable make sure the port fits in the cable and then it's charging obviously with the

magnets if for some reason you slam it on there and the magnets aren't on properly your watch might not be charging whereas with the cable as long as you really shoved it in there it will be charging if you don't have an Apple Watch and you don't have the daily habit of charging your watch that's a new thing you will have to adopt whereas the Garmin I can travel a weekend sometimes even a week somewhere and I won't bring the charger the other side of that is I feel so confident that this battery kind of

lasts forever is I don't check the battery before I leave for a trip and I've had it die in the middle of a trip and I didn't bring the charger so it's going to be unique to your personality and you're charging habits and style as you probably know when I make videos about watches or any other products on my channel I tend to say click the link in the description because they help power the channel those are all usually affiliate links where at no cost to you I'm able to make some commission so I can

keep making videos like this and some of these links are powered by Shopify who's the sponsor of this video Shopify is a Commerce platform used by millions of people in over 170 countries selling online in person and across borders as a Creator I actually use Shopify collab for some of my products cuz I'm able to apply to and work with some of my favorite brands for example you probably saw the video where we measured our body fat using an Apple Watch strap called Aura and in the description I put a Shopify collabs link to measure

any clicks conversion and commissions that I made from the sales of that product but that's not it there are other brands that I want to work with like you probably know I love saas so I can actually go to the Shopify collabs discover section search the top SAA Brands and I know cus SAA looks amazing I want to work with them so I can send my application and start partnering with them directly through Shopify and as a business owner you'll be able to find amazing creators who can help start getting the message out there about

your product as a Creator I'm able to effortlessly track my current revenue streams and increase the ways that I make money Shopify collabs makes it that easy this is just one of the many tools that Shopify offers in terms of supporting to start grow and manage your entire business to learn more about Shopify and Shopify collabs go to shopify.com sherven collabs creators with with at least 1,000 followers on a single platform are eligible to join thank you Shopify for sponsoring this video so a lot of the workouts that I do and that most people will

do will be based on distance the pacing and sometimes heart rate and for these three main variables I like to have different pieces of Hardware that help make the watches a bit more accurate and you have to put these on before you work out and you need to make sure that they're connected to your watch so if you are a data freak like me you want to make sure that it actually connects easily to your device like the Garmin heart rate strap will work with my Apple watch the Polar heart rate strap will work with

the Garment and the Apple watch um The Stride foot pod to get better distance and pacing accuracy when I'm doing a treadmill uh my core body temperature sensor just to see heat strain all these devices I like to connect before I go on my run on the Garin you can see that there's a flashing heart a flashing shoe and a flashing M2 those are my three external devices so as soon as I start the workout I can see is that device connected or not I'm missing two of those devices it's very easy to know that

things are connected and if they're not I can go ahead and tap into my settings and go ahead and make sure that my sensors and accessories like why they're not connecting I can go try to find them or search for them whereas on the Apple watch as soon as I start the workout I have no idea so every time I run and I want to make sure that my heart rate monitor uh connected I have to go to the home screen I have to use the touch button I have to then go to settings and

then go to Bluetooth scroll all the way to the bottom because that's where Health devices are find my heart rate monitors and if it says not connected I have to tap that so so it shows connected because I have no idea if it's actually connected right before my run and it doesn't show it on the workout screen so that's one of the downsides with the Apple watch when you're trying to use external devices the second piece is foot pods the Apple watch does natively support D stried footpod inside of their workout app so I have

to load up the stride workout app on my Apple watch instead of the Native workout app so I don't use the action button I scroll down find stride and then I can select run I could do an open run and it could be indoors and now I just need to make sure so i' go to treadmill run if I'm doing an indoor run open workout and then I just need to connect my stride to the watch to get it going and I'm just going to get different data screens different information is going to get documented

and recorded for indoor workouts it uses the stride as the distance and pacing for outdoor workouts it uses GPS so I found from a usability standpoint of using external pieces of Hardware the Garmin just shows them easier before I start the workout and it just integrates with more Hardware pieces even for cycling and bike computers they both connect but it's just easier to know that the Garment is connected before I start the workout whereas the in the Apple watch I got to go to settings Bluetooth blah blah blah and double check that it's actually connected

doing an open run isn't the only way that I work out another one is custom workouts I personally have a coach and he writes my workouts inside this app called training Peaks it will have everything that I need to do um as well as a description on what I need to do and this information automatically gets sent to both my Garmin and my Apple watch so I'm happy that they both support this integration so here you can see it's sent to Apple watch or an auto sent to my Garmin and the workout distance the pasting

and the time durations are sent and my watches will both Buzz as I'm going through the workout and this makes it effortless because I know I need to do this workout today how does it look and feel on my watch Apple watch is I go ahead and press the action button to open up the workouts under training Peaks if I have a workout that day it's going to show up with whatever that workout is I can see the distance the pacing and all that information and if I want to start that workout I just tap

start I select if it's an indoor or outdoor run typically I'm running outdoors and then it's actually going to guide me through the workout as I do it on the Apple watch it's very focused on the actual distance so the information that I get to see here is purely the distance the one downside of the Apple watch is that I only really get to see the distance left for that segment of the workout whereas the Garmin I think does it a little bit better so on the Garmin I would do the same thing I'd go

ahead to my run if I have a workout that day it's going to say hey you have a workout today would you like to do it but since I don't I'm actually going to go training C calendar you can find a workout that has some information in it like 5 miles with strides I would say do workout and now the workout is loaded onto my watch when I start the workout on Garmin the one advantage that I think it has is I have a specific Pace I need to follow for this and it's actually going

to show my pacing right here it's saying hey you need to be within that 757 to 10 minute pace and it's kind of like a dial it's very visually easy to see that information while I'm running it'll also send me notifications if I'm within that pace or what that pace for that segment needs to be the buttons aren't perfect I guess Garmin is a bit slow to react which can be a bit frustrating if you're moving very fast whereas the Apple watch tends to be a bit faster so on the Apple watch if I start

the workout it's going to show me the paces that I need to see only at the beginning so that's a bit frustrating cuz now that I'm running I don't really know what the pace I need to be at for this segment is um and if I tap the next interval I can see 3 Mi at 605 to 640 Pace but I honestly don't know if I'm within that pace I have to kind of memorize that piece of information for all three miles whereas on the Garment I can kind of see a red in yellow zone

um and I will get notifications if I fall outside of that on both watches but on the Apple watch there's no glance ability during the workout to know if I'm within that pace or not when it comes into diving into more detail while working out or running and looking at this information I can see my heart rate zones on both watches they have kind of color coding for those heart rate zones I can see my live pacing in terms of how quickly and well they're able to update to my newest Pace with any kind of

watch there is going to be a bit of a delay so keep that in mind and it looks for the most part right there's pretty spoton uh there's going to be more smoothing as you can see the blue is the Apple watch and the purple is the Garmin so the the Apple watch just has more smoothing like these Corners are rounded more the lines are straighter whereas the the Garmin is going to have like a little bit more jaggedness to it and that can impact your distance yeah so this seems like there's nothing else on

the pier but it definitely is uh I walked up and around this Boardwalk it looks like both watches put me in the water for a second but then I got back on the boardwalk it's still pretty close so both of those conditions once again yep right here the Apple watch decided to cut corners and put me through the water so if you add that up over multiple miles and multiple peers oh cut Corner around this pier too see this is where the 20 mile run where I lost almost half a mile of distance on the

appat and I didn't actually finish a full 20 mil but for the most part I've noticed that they're very on par to each other while I'm running it's only on the treadmill that they can be drastically different and overall distances for the most part they're good in a good GPS area and if my software is up to date and time watches are best at tracking time you're are going to have very consistent seconds hours minutes on both watches and a plus addition is the Garmin does do rep counting so if you're doing any kind of

weightlifting you can count your reps in the gym it does require a bit more of a setup process so I just never use that feature there are some apps on the App Store in the Apple watch we'll do automatic rep counting as well same thing setup process friction points I don't use either now that we finished the workout what is the user experience like both watches will display your distance your average pace of the entire run elevation the temperature of that day sometimes power and some other Advanced metrics as well the Apple watch I can

go ahead and just Scroll once I finish my workout to see that information and then the Garmin is going to kind of scroll on its own automatically through that stuff as well as show a visual map of where I've ran so it's cool to sometimes take Instagram photos of that visual map on the Garmin and post that whereas the Apple watch it's just showing text now if you're doing any kind of heart rate Based training I prefer using a chest heart rate strap the Garin and polar are pretty pretty good they're actually very good some

of the best they're going to use electrical signals from your heart to tell your heart rate they will update the fastest in terms of giving your your current heart rate at that time whereas watches will be using light and algorithms to guess your heart rate and they're pretty good at getting close if youve watched videos from the Quantified scientist desfit DC rain maker especially Rob the Quantified scientist he shows that the Apple watches when it comes to heart rate accuracy are some of the best just know that they're going to lag behind and be a

little bit slower especially when doing any kind of workout where your is fluctuating a lot but steady state workouts with a little movement you'll get some of the best information like cycling but when I am running and I'm trying to do very specific heart rate zone workouts I will wear these you just need to make sure to get them wet on both sides and then connect via Bluetooth or ant but I found for the most part the heart rates are pretty close to one another it does depend on your skin color the tightness skin profusion

based on the weather that day if you have tattoos they will most likely not work so this is your next best alternative wear this and you'll just override the heart rate data and get very accurate information what's the experience like when I'm actually working out and can I view the data that I need while I'm running swimming cycling I would say I would argue that running is probably the hardest workout to actually look at things like your watch or your phone because you're just moving up and down whereas biking you're more stable and swimming you

kind of have to stop on the wall to look at your watch and weightlifting it's much much easier than everything else so running it's the hardest I want to be able to quickly absorb information while I'm running and I've noticed when I have custom workouts on the Garmin and I have that barometer of like the Reds on the sides and the Green in the middle it's much easier to know am I hitting my Pace am I within my heart rate zone from that just visual color perspective where I don't have to kind of like really

read the information I can glance and know what's going on the Apple watch doesn't have that good of a feature it has like a pacing feature but it's specific to the pace of your entire workout not to that segment of your custom workout and the heart rate zones on the Apple watch are pretty nice because I can know the color shade that I'm in but sometimes those square blocks are a little too small so when you're running you might not be able to tell which heart rate zone you're in so from a glance ability the

Garmin wins but when I want to get more detailed information they both offer the ability to customize your data screens customize the number of data screens on the Garmin I can press buttons without looking at the screen and go through my different data screens on the Apple watch I would use the digital Crown to scroll it can be a little frustrating to scroll a digital Crown when you're running whereas pressing buttons can be a bit easier especially when you don't have to look at the screen on the Apple watch the screen just needs to be

active so that way you can scroll through and scrolling takes a couple more milliseconds than pressing a button does so it makes a bit harder but for the most part I'm not changing screens cuz I'm tired I'm exhausted I'm sweaty and I'm focusing on doing the workout at Peak effort rather than trying to look at information and when I'm trying to do that glance ability how well and bright are the screens both are bright and colorful I think the epics is much better than the Phoenix but the Apple watch is definitely very bright with the

new 3000 nits arguably there's not a drastic difference between the two in terms of can I see the screens when I'm running outside as long as you get some of the newer models even the new Garmin 965 like all those screens are now very bright very colorful the older Garmin might struggle with display brightness but the newest Garmin and almost all the Apple watches will have great displays the touch screens the touchcreen on the Apple watch is much more responsive it feels like an iPhone whereas in the Garmin there is just a slight lag it

feels kind of like an Android but when you start a workout on the Garmin it will automatically lock the screen this is native to how it arrives when you first purchase it on the Apple watch it does not lock the screen automatically nor is there a feature for you to activate to do that me as a sweaty male man who sometimes wears long sleeves in the winter that long sleeve as well as my sweat can stop the workout pause the workout end the workout change my data screens so I've learned anytime that I'm working out

a big thing to do is turn on the water lock I press the control center I turn on water lock and now the screen I can't touch it I can't do anything with it but all my buttons on the Apple Watch Works so I can still scroll right I can't use the touchcreen but I can use the digital crown and I can use the action button so I can start stop pause workouts and I'm not actually using the screen so that's just one thing where I have to kind of remember to turn on the water

lock I did a half marathon Race once where I forgot to turn on the water lock I was sweating I had long sleeves on and it stopped my workout and I was looking at my watch to see my pace and there was no workout running and I was like no my straa is not going to show a full 13 miles I'm going to have a 6 Mile and then like a 4 Mile I was a bit disappointed ever since then I always wear two watches now to have some redundancy and then because I have worked

out right I have to think about the straps and the sweats always take your watches off dry them like look at all that like look at that sweat that's just from sitting here in this hot room right now you want to make sure that not only you check out your watch hands but also that you you're allowing your skin to breathe it can be pretty bad if you're always wearing your watch and you're not allowing it to be breathe and moist is building up you can get different things on your skin so take these watches

off wear bands that are breathable like this Ocean band has some bumps so there's just more air that can go through and water can evaporate the Garmin one also has some holes I love the Nike bands cuz those have a lot of holes and they can breathe the flexible straps can actually retain water sometimes they can dry quicker but they just retain water on your skin so you really want to let those ones dry after you've worked out just make sure you get the good straps for both and for the most part they do have

an easy onoff system like here here I can kind of take the strap off and swap it out for a different band Apple watch same thing you just press a button and slide it off so they do have an easy system to switch them on and off uh definitely on the newer Garmin and all Apple watches some of the older Garmin might have a different system now that we finished the workout what's the user experience around sleep tracking and overall training insights I wear a lot of wearables I'm always tracking my recovery Readiness whatever you

want to call it Garmin has a ton of that stuff stuff now they've got like body battery they give you this like training readiness thing where it says oh you're unproductive you're productive you're overtraining you're detraining the apple watch doesn't have anything natively other than showing my sleep stages and overall sleep time I think most of this information can be an interesting data point but it should not decide how you feel and I try to dial into how I actually feel and not let wearables decide how I feel that day but one thing I do

love about the Garment is it has a morning report so every time I wake up in the morning it's going to say hey good morning you have a morning report this is how you slept last night this is your training readiness today this is your HRV and this is the weather it's kind of cool it's neat but I would never let these things Define how you feel and how you actually train it's just a data point um sometimes when I am overtraining it might be good to know all right you're you're running too fast too

hard but the one value I love is the V2 Max metric I do look at that a lot cuz I'm trying to increase my V2 Max and we all know that's a very important Health metric and on the Apple watch it's all o saying 52 so it's definitely increasing I'm trending up and both devices definitely say that oh am I above average I'm not exceptional yet am I both these watches are going to give you all this other information it's like it's not necessary you need the basics you need to able to track your workout

you need to be able to do your workout and you need to review it and see how you did that's really all that's important all this other stuff is like fancy it's like the cherry on top of the cherry on top of the other Cherry but I do like looking at the race predictor here like I'm almost at a sub 25k supposedly these are all nice nice to have it thinks I can do a 329 Marathon let's see if that's true when I do it in London in just 10 days subscribe to see that video

turn on your notifications down below straa integration I think this one's huge um I think it's important to publish your workouts online I don't know I think it's cool to be able to see what other people are doing as well as like show what you're doing it's inspiring can be a bit competitive but it's fun both of these watches will take their native data from the Garmin app and from the Apple workout app and you'll be able to publish it to straa do they work exactly as they say sort of and sort of not really

there are two things I've noticed that I don't like about both of them one the Garmin sends its data from your watch to your phone to the Garmin servers and then the Garmin servers will send that to Strava I found that to be very good because if the app is not working the best as long as the Garmin server got it boom it's on straa but there are cases where the Garmin servers do go down so sometimes you have to wait a day maybe two days before that work gets published to Strava or you can

manually do it yo Strava you want to verify me I love that so much but you can follow me at shervin shares on Strava and the way to publish your Apple workouts is actually through Apple health so it's going to send it from your watch to your iPhone and store it in apple health and then you can automatically or manually upload that to the Strava cloud from the Strava app on your iPhone so right now I have both Apple health and Garmin connected as you can see my Garmin will automatically send that data to straa

I do have it as public so you can see most of my runs if I do want to rename it change the shoes that I wore on that workout I do have to open the app and like update those for Apple Health when I had it manually set I would manually go ahead and import only my runs so those are the ones with the shoes leaning upwards you can have automatic uploads on but I kind of prefer doing manual stuff so I don't have to send everything and on my garment I only track runs anyways

the only issue that I've had is sometimes Apple Health can be a little funky when it when it's working with other apps I've had this on straa as well as training Peaks but the solution that I found is as long as you delete the app and reinstall the app and reive permissions to appoh health then it can work and the automatic uploads isn't perfect so that's why I just pick the manual uploads cuz that seems to just work every single time so that's where I kind of prefer the Garin I know as long as I

open the Garment app I sync it to my Garin app it's going to send directly to Strava I don't have to think about the specific settings on my iPhone final thoughts I'm 10 days away from the London Marathon which watch am I going to be wearing on my wrist both because I want to make sure I have a of redundancy but if you do follow me on straa you notice that I've actually switched using my Garmin as my main device and there are just a few reasons for that I've had too many occurrences where I've

accidentally ended the workout I've had the issues where even though the GPS is locked the pacing and distance data was a little bit off on my ultra 2 and add on top of that the hardware Integrations piece where I can see my heart rate strap my foot pod are connected as soon as I'm starting to run whereas on the Apple watch I have to go on into settings and it just creates this extra effort to starting my workout and because of that experience over the last year I've decided to make the G my main running

device now I think these things only matter when you're really getting into training and there's specific numbers you need to hit where if you're really busy and you don't have the time to deal with technology issues I will always be wearing both I will continually test them use the device that you have the Apple watch is still amazing they're both great devices I would recommend either one if you're someone who's starting to train but there are specific needs that I have that the Garment just does better so I've made that my main running device since

you enjoyed this video make sure to turn on notifications subscribe down below follow me on all the socials at shervin shares and go watch my video where I compared all of the best SmartWatches linked right here