This Guide is not a fan of carrying stuff around. So if I add a piece of technology to my three bags, it needs to be useful on a nearly daily basis. The Garmin Vivoactive 4 smartwatch has surprisingly been one such tool. I didn’t understand how useful it would be until I was constantly moving through different environments but still wanted to maintain consistency with fitness, sleep, and nutrition. In this post, we’ll delve into why the Garmin Vivoactive could be your next travel essential. This post does have affiliate links, but they add no extra cost to you and I use the Garmin Vivoactive and would buy another one if anything ever happened to it. Let’s explore why it’s an ideal travel companion for travelers that like exercising…
What makes a Garmin smartwatch useful for remote workers?
A smartwatch can help manage some key areas I hear digital nomads struggling with: fitness, sleep, and nutrition.
Versatility Near Your Fingertips: A watch may help you catch your train on time, but it’s the fitness and calories tracking, quick notifications without needing to check your phone, GPS, and sleep tracking that really pack a lot of value in a smartwatch.
Durability: My Garmin Vivoactive is 4 years old now. The battery life hasn’t changed as far as I can tell. And I’ve never had to fix anything on it, not even the band. It looks new. It’s been around the world a few times, up and down a couple of mountains. These watches cost around $300 US but it’s definitely been a great investment for me.
A Personal Trainer: For me, somebody who often struggled with pacing myself during workouts, something that hit home the value of the Garmin Vivoactive is its ability to act as a digital personal trainer. You can download personalized workout plans that give you a target heart rate for the exercises. It can then beat at you if you’re going too slow or too fast. It transformed how I run and how I do Crossfit workouts.
If you want to maintain fitness while traveling, it’s worth checking out. Take a look through the reviews on Amazon for the Vivoactive here: Garmin Vivoactive 4
It does also collect useful data for sharing with other travelers, like the distance from the train station up to Eiheiji–3.8 miles (6 km)–a path Zen monks have been walking for centuries (although the train station was a more recent addition).
Does the Garmin track meditation?
I’ll do a separate post just on that because it is actually the most accurate meditation tracker I’ve tested (and leverages an unexpected metric).
The Garmin's body battery is useful for tracking jetlag
I do not understand how the “body battery” works but I do believe it is a generally a more accurate reading on what’s happening in my body than I get from my own brain (although my own brain is famously unreliable).
One area where it’s been especially useful has been with handling jet-lag and long flights. In the attached photo, you can see the body battery data (from the Garmin Connect app) leading up to the flight and then it bottoms out when I did a long-haul, late night departure flight. I had a 13 hr layover before my connecting flight and slept in a transit hotel at Doha’s airport. The body battery did not go up. It bottomed-out and flat-lined for two days. This type of data has helped me change how I travel and now I can recover much more quickly from jetlag because I plan out layovers and sleep times better.
If you’ve used the Garmin Vivoactive or one of their other watches to track sleep around jet-lag, let me know what you’ve found.
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