This product has changed my overall health and pushes me to be better everyday!! I've already recommended to so many people and have already had two people get one!!!! I love this watch! I use it for stress tracking, running (training for a half marathon), hydration, steps and so much more!! I love how it is also waterproof and the battery life is amazing. I used to have an Apple Watch and it always died on me but not this watch!

# Garmin vívoactive 5: Great Fitness Watch, Terrible Sleep Tracker ## Rating: 2/5 for Sleep Tracking I've been using the Garmin vívoactive 5 for sleep tracking over several weeks, and while it's a solid fitness watch, the sleep tracking is fundamentally unreliable. If accurate sleep data matters to you, look elsewhere. ## Major Sleep Tracking Failures ### 1. **Completely Misses Sleep Periods When You Change Locations** The watch frequently fails to track entire sleep sessions if you move to a different bed or room mid-night. Multiple times, I woke up in the middle of the night, moved to a different bedroom, went back to sleep for 2-3 hours, and the Garmin simply stopped tracking—pretending I was awake the entire time. This isn't a minor glitch; it's a fundamental flaw that makes the data useless for anyone dealing with fragmented sleep. ### 2. **Cannot Distinguish Between Sleep and Watching TV** The watch regularly mistakes lying still on the couch watching TV for sleep. On multiple occasions, it logged 1-2 hours of “sleep” that was actually me lying down watching Stranger Things or other shows. If the device can't tell the difference between unconscious sleep and conscious TV watching, what's the point? ### 3. **Fails When You Remove the Watch** If you take the watch off during the night (for a shower, for example), it ends the sleep session entirely. No recovery, no second tracking period—just missing data. This happened multiple times and makes the watch unusable for anyone who might need to remove it briefly during the night. ### 4. **Co-Sleeping Interference** When my toddler slept in bed with me, the watch's tracking became even less reliable. Movement from another person seems to confuse it, leading to either missed sleep periods or wildly inaccurate wake time calculations. ### 5. **Inconsistent Data Accuracy** Comparing the Garmin's data to my actual sleep experience revealed huge discrepancies: - **Dec 14**: Watch showed 3h 45m of sleep ending at 3:26 AM. Reality: I was awake 2:30-6:00 AM (3.5 hours), then slept until 8:30 AM. The watch missed an entire sleep period. - **Dec 15**: Watch claimed I went to bed at 10:51 PM. Reality: I was watching TV until midnight. - **Dec 17**: Watch showed no data at all despite wearing it all night. When your sleep tracker can't even get the basic start/end times right, the detailed sleep stage data (deep/light/REM) is meaningless. ## What Actually Works To be fair, the watch does work reasonably well when: - You sleep in the same bed all night - You don't remove the watch at any point of the night and reapply it - You're sleeping alone - You go straight from awake to bed (no TV time) In these ideal conditions, the sleep stage breakdown seems plausible, and the efficiency calculations are probably in the ballpark. But who has perfect sleep conditions every single night? ## The Bigger Problem The fundamental issue is that the Garmin treats sleep tracking as a simple motion + heart rate algorithm. It has no way to verify whether you're actually asleep or just lying still. It can't handle anything outside its narrow assumptions about how sleep “should” look. For someone trying to address chronic sleep issues—the exact use case where accurate tracking matters most—these failures make the watch actively unhelpful. You can't identify patterns or measure progress when the data itself is fiction. ## Bottom Line **Buy this watch if:** You want a fitness tracker with decent battery life and you only care about general sleep trends (e.g., “I usually sleep 7 hours”). **Don't buy this watch if:** You need accurate sleep data for medical reasons, sleep therapy, or tracking actual sleep patterns. The tracking is too unreliable to be useful for serious sleep ----- **Tested with:** Garmin vívoactive 5 **Testing period:** December 2024 (2+ weeks of nightly use and external journaling) **Use case:** Sleep restriction therapy for chronic middle-of-night insomnia​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The watch is intuitive, easy to customize and simple to integrate into daily life and planning. Great fit for walking, running, lifting and cycling. I refer to it often and it's helped a great deal in working towards my health goals. It's easy enough for a beginner to use, but has enough info that a seasoned athlete would benefit from it. Battery life is great, especially if you aren't using the gps feature.

It's not as user friendly like a fitbit, but keeps a good charge on it. Still trying to get to know more about it. The watch faces are clear and good. When I change the watch face it should automatically change but there is another step to do. Easier steps to change watch face. Watch bands are very hard to change, and my watch has a purple cover around it. Would love to change that and easier watch bands to change out.

I bought the VivoActive5 a few weeks ago. I was looking for a vast improvement from my previous FitBit devices, most especially when it comes to being water resistant. I paddle board, kayak and go to water parks. My previous FitBits over the past decade could just not hold up at the water parks. After some searching I found the Vivoactive 5. I've loved the additional features and that I can log my paddle board trips as I do it mainly for the workout. However, this week I went to a water park and have mixed opinions on its performance. Several times it got hung up and wouldn't clear a screen. At one point it just kept bouncing back and forth between screens without returning to the “Home Screen”. I finally had to Google how to hard reset the watch to get it to start working again. In the hours it took to get my watch working again I missed countless steps and also had a pretty bad panic attack as I had flashbacks to my past FitBits. Luckily I bought an extended warranty because if it happens again I'll likely return it. Otherwise I've really enjoyed the upgrade to Garmin.

This watch is a step up over the Garmin Vivoactive 4. I own both the Vivoactive 4 and the Vivoactive 5. The Vivoactive 5 has a clearer display and the battery stays charged much longer than my vivoactive 4. I only get about two days of charge with the vivoactive 4. The Vivoactive 5 gives me eight days before I need to charge again. I like the Vivoactive 5 very much.

The watch looks nice and it's not bulky. It's very similar to the Apple watch just that you can't answer text on the watch. The battery goes low if you are getting all ur notifications. If you're getting it for the training feature it only goes up to a half marathon, so if you're doing a marathon it won't give you suggestions.

I love the Vivoactive 5. There are great upgrades from the 4 version. I love the blue option. The Garmin Connect app is easy to use and gives me all the information I need. I love how all the Garmin products work together and the app keeps all the stats. I recommend Garmin to everyone!

I like my watch and would recommend it to others. It tracks a lot of metrics that were confusing at first, but have grown on me and now I appreciate. Overall high marks, very nice products Issues: It is not great at monitoring heart rate. Some time it reads low values and I move my watch a bit and then reading recovers. Maybe it a problem common to all wrist type measurement, so I understand why some people also buy the chest monitor. I plan to, but they currently have a long lead time. It also seems to have some delays in syncing Active Activity with my iOs health app. Might be an iOS issue. Finally, a second charging cable would be helpfuil. I ended up buying a set on-line, and did buy the older stayle USB A since most of my home chargers are this type. But great product overall, Santa might be bringing my wife one.

I am coming from a fitbit - I like this it has more on watch features but I do wish it had a microphone so I could ask alexa to do things around the house and respond to texts. I love how the watch looks and feels I did get a new band for it though. Overall it takes some getting used to after using fitbit but I like it!