This is the third in a series on using the Garmin Connect WEBSITE (not the app). There is a TON of information there if you know how to get to it.

An Overview can be found here.

Accessing the Activity Dashboard

When you go to the website, there will be a sidebar and the Dashboard section is right at the top:

Last time we went into the “Devices” section, and if you would like to see what information you get find in there, check this post out.

Reports

Today we are going to start looking at the reports section.

The wheel in the corner lets you look at several different views. You can look at this week, the last month or the last year.

The Detail or Mini view refers to whether you want to see a snapshot of your steps, or just an icon showing it is the “Reports” widget.

When you click on the word “Reports”, it will take you to this page, which has a lot of info.

Steps

You can see it starts with Steps. Your goal steps is in green. If you meet your goal and exceed it, the stripe will turn to blue. The gray means you didn’t take any steps, AKA…you didn’t wear your watch that day. I tend to not wear mine if I am not running that day.

It also gives you the step total/distance and your average for the time frame you pick. When you scroll down, it will tell you the date and what percentage of your step goal you met that day.

Quick Snapshot of Health and Fitness

I’m not going to go into too much detail of the items found in this section. If you’re on The Wrinkled Runner site, you are most likely interested in running. I’m just going to quickly go through what you can see there.

Body Battery

The Body Battery section of my watch hasn’t really caught my attention too much. I’m aware of what it says if I look at my day in the app, but I must admit what it is telling me has been kind of vague in my mind.

So, I dug in a bit to find out for purposes of this post. Over the years I have learned SO much for the “purposes of a post”.

Straight from Garmin, the Body Battery “uses heart rate variability, stress and activity to estimate a user’s energy reserves throughout the day”. The 1-100 range breaks down as follows:

0-25 = Low Reserve Energy

26-50= Medium Reserve Energy

51-75= High Reserve Energy

76-100= Very High Reserve Energy

The Body Battery takes in the effects of physical activity, stress, relaxation and sleep. These all have an impact on adaptability.

When you “charge” your “battery” with relaxation or sleep, your number goes up. When you exercise (run) or your watch detects stress levels your number goes down. This can (by Garmin theory) effect your pace or how you will do in a race.

The Rest…

You can track your hydration, sleep duration, calories and other general fitness metrics using the Health and Fitness section.

Running

The “Running” section has a whole list of things you can look at.

Activities

The “Activities” part of this report will show you your running and how much you did over the course of 7 days, 4 weeks, 6 months and a year.

When you scroll down, you can see that it lists all the runs that you did in the time frame you are referencing.

When you pick a run, you can see the name of the workout if you have one (see how to build a workout in your watch). It tells you the distance, average pace, time, calories burned and elevation.

You can also see a cute animation of the run.

Scrolling down, you get a closer look at the stats from that run. You can look at it by time or by distance. You can use the slider to show what your pace was at a certain point, and if you had a target pace. Same with heart rate.

You can also zoom on a stat to look even closer.

Further down from that, you can see all your stats, your intervals and your time in zones. If you are running by percentage of max heart rate for, say, a threshold run you can look at that as well.

Add photos or notes, and you can use this as a very detailed running journal!

Next time we are going to look at everything from the “Activity Calories” down to the “Training Effect” report since most of these are pretty straight forward.