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The recently unveiled “lifestyle logging” feature with Garmin’s Venu 4 watch extends beyond just that device—it appears to be accessible to all Garmin users. This indicates that the application has made significant progress in competing with brands like Whoop.
What is lifestyle logging?
This innovative feature allows you to monitor various habits or actions that may influence your health metrics. For example, you can make notes when consuming caffeine or alcohol in the evening and assess how these affect your sleep quality. (Garmin often labels these as “behaviors,” even though some resemble environmental factors or states of being—such as illness—but I digress.)
The Whoop, a screenless tracker offering a premium (yet arguably justifiable) subscription, has offered this type of feature for quite some time, providing detailed insights on how daily habits influence your recovery. Similarly, the Bevel app for Apple Watch offers comparable functionalities, while the Oura ring features “tags” in its application, which are more for categorizing than analyzing.
Garmin’s iteration utilizes your logged activities to create reports illustrating how those factors affect:
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Your sleep score
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Your overnight HRV
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Your overnight stress
These appear to be the primary outcomes tracked, so you won’t be able to assess whether these behaviors influence aspects like running performance. Additionally, as with any feature of this nature, the app is unable to determine if your behaviors are causing the positive or negative outcomes you observe.
For instance, Whoop indicated that I experience poorer sleep on nights when I take melatonin, but this is merely a correlation: The melatonin isn’t likely to be detrimental to my sleep; rather, it’s probable that I take melatonin on nights when I’m already staying up late or anticipate having trouble sleeping.
Which Garmin devices can utilize lifestyle logging?
You don’t require a specific device to log your behaviors; I was able to access it on an account without any wearable devices linked. However, Garmin advises that for meaningful reports, you will need a device capable of measuring HRV (which also plays a role in your sleep score and overnight stress). Most of Garmin’s popular wearables possess HRV functionalities, including the Venu, Vivoactive, and Forerunner series, as well as the new Index sleep monitor.
How to use Garmin’s lifestyle logging
This feature is somewhat hidden, so it’s understandable if you weren’t aware of its existence. First, ensure your Garmin Connect app is updated, then click the three-dot menu icon in the lower right corner. Navigate to training and planning, then to health stats, followed by lifestyle logging.
The first time you engage with this feature, you will receive several informational screens explaining its purpose and asking for acknowledgment that it is not intended as medical advice.
You will then choose which items to log. Garmin suggests selecting “only a few” items at a time to gain insights into those specific behaviors rather than sifting through copious amounts of data. The app’s information screen wisely highlights that logging too many different factors might lead to conflicting data, complicating your ability to identify what truly affects your health metrics.
A non-exhaustive list of what you can log
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The lifestyle category covers alcohol and caffeine (either morning or night), exercise intensity (light, moderate, or vigorous), late meals, and intermittent fasting.
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The self-care category includes cold showers, journaling, and obtaining sunlight.
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The treatments category comprises acupuncture and massage.
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The sleep-related category encompasses the use of a CPAP machine, eye masks, reading before bed, and sleeping with pets in your bedroom.
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The life status category features allergy symptoms, caregiving activities, illness, and vacations.
You also have the option to create custom logging items. You can assign them a quantity if you desire, or simply set them up as yes/no responses. Additionally, you can specify if an item is related to daytime or nighttime. Lastly, after selecting the behaviors you wish to track, the app will prompt you for morning and/or evening reminders related to those items.
To view results from any behaviors you’ve logged, you’ll need to accumulate five affirmative and five negative entries for each one. (Similar to Whoop’s variant of this feature, tracking behaviors that you always do or never do isn’t useful, as there isn’t enough data to analyze.)
Your results can be accessed through the Training and Planning menu as detailed earlier, and you can also add a quick view card to the “at a glance” section of your Garmin Connect app home screen. This card will display whether you logged your behaviors for the day, and tapping it will reveal what you logged both today and in the past. The Venu 4 watch also includes a widget dedicated to lifestyle logging on the device itself.