Garmin Instinct 2

I treated myself to a new fitness tracker last Tuesday, one so feature-rich that many more weeks may pass before I discover everything it can do for me. After a fair amount of research, I bought it with some expectations, of course, but I have barely made a beginning with its 66-page owner’s manual.

Anyway, the Garmin Instinct 2 is now my primary wearable, replacing my Garmin Forerunner 35. Although the Forerunner is still functioning perfectly, it is nearly five years old. Health and fitness statistics have become so important to me that I cannot bear the thought of breaking my tracking streaks for any reason, including a technical glitch. So, now I have two devices that can track the metrics I value the most.

Incidentally, both the Instinct and the Forerunner could be used as cycling computers, but I will continue to use my Garmin Edge 830 for those statistics and for navigation, which is much better viewed on the handlebar than on the wrist. If the Edge 830 ever dies, then I can revert to my Edge 500 … until I upgrade again. Yes, I have a little money tied up in Garmin devices. (Can’t forget about the smart bathroom scale or the blood pressure monitor.) I’m living in a Garmin Connect world where each device motivates me to be healthier.

The Forerunner turned me into an avid fitness walker. The Instinct will encourage a wider variety of cross-training activities by measuring things I couldn’t measure before. I’m counting on it to motivate me to spend more time on strength training, which has been very sporadic this year. I fell out of the habit when I was recovering from my hip replacement surgery last winter. And the Instinct’s built-in barometric altimeter will track elevation gain when I do a climbing workout on stairs or hills.

A better fitness tracker will give me not only more features, but also greater accuracy. However, it still won’t give me perfect accuracy. During a short stair climbing workout last Thursday, my new device counted only 18 of the 20 floors I actually climbed. That’s 90 percent, an A- on the report card. And it was way off during a couple of tests on my treadmill. Fortunately, that one is fixable: Garmin has a calibration feature that allows the user to override its measurements with the treadmill’s measurements. The treadmill knows how long its belt is, and it knows how many times that belt went around, so you can trust it for distance and speed. Garmin is really just making a guess based on your self-reported stride length and the number of steps captured by its accelerometer. Using my Forerunner on the treadmill, sometimes I would grab the handrail for several seconds to arrest the accelerometer when I knew my device was getting ahead of the treadmill’s calculations. The Instinct, now calibrated for my treadmill, should be accurate as long as I am using the “Treadmill” function. But for some insane reason, Garmin treats “Treadmill” workouts as running activities only; there is no walking option. After I complete a walk, I will need to change the activity type from running to walking on Garmin Connect. That’s not great. Garmin fares much better outdoors, where walks can be tracked via GPS.

The Instinct and I are still getting to know each other. Its sleep tracking and heart rate monitoring are getting better the more I wear it. So far, so good, I guess. It’s going to be a great tool once I get past a couple of growing pains.