I absolutely love it! I went from having an Apple Watch that the battery didn’t last past 8hrs to this. I am a very active person and never took it off not even to sleep and the battery lasts 6 days! If you’re thinking about it do it! If you have an Apple Watch it’s definitely a learning curve to learn how to track workouts and sleep but it’s worth every penny.

This item is very thorough at collecting overall statistics about a persons health. It is a hreat little tracker if you dont need all the bells and whistles. If you are apprehensive about having all your health stats in the hands of Google like the fitbit and Google tracker, this is the one for you.

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.

Hello I just received a Garmin vivoactive 5 on Christmas and was very excited. One of the features that I was really excited about was the battery life, but so far very disappointed. my battery doesn't last more than 24 hours! I've tried all of the things to do, drained the battery entirely and cleaned the ports and no success!

The watch is comfortable to wear. It has enough free faces to pick from that I can read with out my glasses. After a full change over seven days ago I still have 47 percent battery left. The colors are bright and clear. It is responsive to touch and when you turn your wrist to veiw. The band is easy to put on and the extra flap stays down. It seems to count steps and sleep pretty accurately. It can do way more than I will use. I like the watch better than both my fitbits. The app is okay maybe I haven't figured out all it can do yet because I USED to like the fitbit app better until Google took it over. Definitely a great watch for people who want to use the basics plus. I can't say if it's great for you serious health nuts or not.

I have had 2 Garmins. Venu 2 & Vivoactive 5. Both say they are water resistant. They had the swimming meter on them. Both quit working after about a year & a half. I swam in 3 ft of water 3 or 4 times a month (Jun-Sept). It is a shame, I really liked both watches. The water is the only thing I can think of that made them stop working.

The battery is going down at a rate that suggests it won’t last 2 days let alone 11. Also it didn’t come with a charger. Nothing in the box even though it states there should be one. Waiting to hear from customer service. I will update if it’s a positive experience.

# 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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I've been wearing for a month & have been learning something new everyday. Battery life is the best feature as it replaced my much loved Viactve 3 which could no longer hold a charge long enough to complete 4 hour activity. Sleep score/coach & reminders to get active are most useful in addition to body battery score.

User interface is not intuitive. Many steps to set up- like two hours to get things dialed in including four different resets. I bought two - one for my wife and one for me. After the amount of time I put into mine I returned my wife's unopened to the store. Figured I would struggle through for a few days, but now the watch face is static, even though there are multiple faces available. Found out in forums this is a known problem to Garmin. They old UI was pretty good from what I've read, but they moved a lot of functionality out of the app and onto the watch face (workout routine set up, tracking, watch faces, etc.) and this has been a disaster. I've got a third email into Garmin now, but will likely return this last one today and just be done with it. I hope others have better luck.