Accessing the Activity Dashboard

When you go to the website (not the app, but the Garmin Connect website…see the overview post if you don’t know what that is, or how to get there), there will be a sidebar and the Dashboard section is right at the top:

When you choose the Activity Dashboard, you will see all sorts of “widgets”. We are going to dive into the “Device” widget today.

Getting into the Widgets

Device

Click on the name of your device at the top of the Device widget to see the whole page on whatever device you are using. You can also see the same thing if you select “Device Settings” as well.

There will be a section at the top that will alert you if you have a software update available. You can select that to send it to your watch, which you can update using Garmin Express. Note that you need to use a computer to do this.

You can see when the last time your watch was synced.

Below that, there is a link to FAQ’s/Manuals about your specific version of watch. This link will take you to video tutorials about your device.

Tabs-

Sounds and Alerts

Under that, the first tab is “Sounds and Alerts”. You can add an alarm, either to wake you up (useful if you wear your watch to bed) or to alert you to whatever you need throughout the day.

You can see that you can add as many alarms as you need.

Pick the time, the day and whether you want tone and vibration or just one or the other.

For “Sounds”, you can tell your watch to make noise when buttons are pushed. You can also have it vibrate. Alert tones can be set to “always on” (like if you get a text), only during a run or “off”. You can also have it vibrate.

As your Garmin gets to know you, it will be able to sense if you have an abnormal heart rate. Obviously, this is not a fail safe thing. If you want to have your watch alert you when something is “off” (either too high or too low), you can tell it to do that. The watch will only trigger if you have been inactive for more than 10 minutes.

If you have a low heart rate as an athlete, the device does not recommend you be alerted to a low heart rate because it may go off a lot.

Always remember to hit the “Save Settings” button when changing something.

Activity Tracking

Pulse Ox tracking can be enabled to measure the oxygen level in your blood. Depending on your device, you can either enable this to measure it on demand/ set it to measure periodically while you sleep or record during the day at intervals. My Forerunner 245 Music only gives me the sleep option.

Keep in mind that certain studies have shown that this way of measuring pulse ox is not considered especially accurate.

Under Activity Tracking, you can tell your watch to measure your activity (including calories burned, etc.). You can turn it off so that you are basically using the watch as a watch. This will extend the battery life.

Your watch can also alert you to “move” if you have been inactive for a period of time.

The “Move IQ” can sense when you are doing things that are a pattern for you, and will show running or walking in your timeline. It doesn’t ask you if you are working out to prompt you to track it like an Apple Watch does, but will show it in your timeline.

You can set up your goals (steps/physical intensity minutes) manually, or Garmin will get to know you and set it up for you based on your previous activity.

Your Garmin will calculate your stride based on your running movement, but you customize this further by talking a walk test. To do this, you will walk a certain distance and divide by the number of steps and Garmin will calculate your stride length.

User Settings

Your user settings will ask you for age, weight, height, etc. You can also set an Activity Class.

Read through what each class means and set your class accordingly.

If you know your max heart rate, this area will allow you to set your own zones. Those of you who have been running for awhile and do speed and hill work, you can look at your recent data and see what your max heart rate was. It may not be the truest way to get your max, but it will be better than nothing.

The training zones will then be more personalized to you.

General Settings

In this tab you can ask the watch to not track your heart rate, to save the life of the battery. Since I only need to charge my Garmin once a week, I keep mine on at all times.

Finally, tell your watch how you want to see your time expressed (either 12 or 24 hour), the day you want as your “First Day of the Week”), and the language.

The last setting is called Physio TrueUp. When you have this activated, any other device that you use as an activity tracker will be sent to the Garmin and then used to figure out things like how many steps you took/calories burned or exercise intensity minutes.

You can go here if you would like to read more about that.

Next time I’ll dive into the Timeline, which will cover several of the widgets on the home page.