Must-Have Workout Gear Of 2025: Ultimate Fitness And Sports GPS Watch

In recent years wearable technology has given us a slew of sports, training, fitness and navigation tools, from heart rate monitors and step counters to GPS golf watches and trail maps for hiking in the woods. Now all of these functions and state-of-the-art features have been rolled up into one product, a smartwatch that replaces just about every other device. After a couple of months of testing it, I think the Garmin fenix 8 is the best on the market today, the ultimate fitness and sports GPS watch.

New Year’s and its inevitable fitness resolutions are here, and whether you are starting a new workout routine, seeking better wellness and self-care, or are already an avid athlete, there’s something this watch can offer you—probably many things.

Why Garmin?

Garmin has been the leader in consumer and professional GPS devices (Global Positioning System) for as long as GPS has existed and has been making smartwatches before we had a name for them. Garmin has remained the industry leader and is the gold standard for professional gear used widely in the aviation and maritime industries—if you have ever been in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft, you will have seen the name.

After the market for handheld GPS devices was introduced, that technology morphed to become incorporated in fitness trackers, smart watches and other wearables, and with every twist and turn, Garmin has continued to produce the highest quality recreational devices for cycling, hiking, golf and other sports. When you look at reviews for the best golf watches, best cycling computers or best hiking GPS, it is almost always a Garmin device.

Within its broad lineup of smartwatches, Garmin has several distinct categories such as golf, diving, multi-sport and fitness & health tracking, but all of these specialty features are combined in this one top-of-the-line model, which is simply called an “adventure watch” because it truly does it all—and often does it better.

For example, as an avid golfer, I have long used the industry leading Garmin golf-specific GPS Watch, the Approach S70, and if you were only going to use a watch for golf, I would still recommend it (you can read my thoughts on why the S70 is the Best All-Around Golf Watch here at Forbes). But not only does the fenix 8 include all the features of the S70, it has more and does it better, with noticeably faster satellite acquisition and bigger, interactive full color hole map pictures. It comes preloaded with over 42,000 courses worldwide, and does the same thing for skiing, with trail maps of resorts all over the world on display at your fingertips. This illustrates one of the big advantages of the Fenix 8 over competing high-end smartwatches—it doesn’t require a series of third-party apps to do all these specialized things, the functions are built in.

What Does It Do?

Sports Specific Features

Yes the Fenix 8 is a truly full-featured golf GPS device that replaces any other and outperforms most, but golf is just one of—wait for it—about 90 different sports and fitness activities the fenix 8 has built-in platforms for. These include every major team sport, not just football, hockey, baseball and basketball, but ultimate frisbee, lacrosse and even rugby. There are three different offerings just for indoor running—and five for outside, including obstacle racing and ultra-running. Eleven specific cycling disciplines are offered, including commuting and cyclocross, there are eight Nordic and alpine ski disciplines, along with almost every imaginable individual pursuit, from pickleball to bouldering to mixed martial arts (MMA).

When I go for a hike and track that activity, I end up with not just time, distance, elevation and all the usual physical metrics, but also a GPS map of my route that can be saved for future use—or used to avoid getting lost in real time. A new Garmin feature called dynamic routing automatically creates back-to-your-starting-point directions whenever you go for a run or bike ride to make getting lost virtually impossible and a thing of the past. All of the sports and fitness and navigation functions work in tandem with Garmin’s excellent app, and you can download hike or bike ride maps for turn-by-turn directions and navigation, create your own or sync with Strava.

For skiing or snowboarding, not only can you look at the trail maps and your location on your wrist, but it tracks runs, speed, elevation, all the metrics, plus your physiological stats such as average and max heart rate and recovery. At the end of the day or week you can create maps of where you skied. The functionality across myriad sports is amazing, especially the level of detail. Going surfing? It even tracks tides.

For decades, one subset of outdoor recreation that has always demanded a very special, specific and absolutely necessary watch has been Scuba diving, but Garmin rolled a full function dive computer (it even works with nitrox) into the fenix 8 as well. The one knock on this model is its high price ($999 and up), so the more other devices such as a dive watch, golf GPS and so on that it replaces, the more affordable it becomes. Needless to say, it is waterproof, and also has full built-in functionality for pool training, open water swimming and triathlons.

In addition to the GPS mapping, while you are doing these activities, the watch also offers incident tracking and alert notification—that means if you crash your bike it can call for help.

All of this is immensely impressive, but it’s just one part of the technological iceberg. I’ve been using my fenix 8 forover two months now, love it, pore over the fitness, sleep tracking and metabolism functions every morning, and use it for way more things than I ever expected, but I’ve just scratched the surface. After all, the instruction manual clocks in at 178 pages.

Health And Wellness

Health and wellness monitoring? It would be much easier to list what the fenix 8 does not do, but I can’t think of anything. There is wrist-based continuously updated heart-rate monitoring— an upgraded, more accurate technology than previous Garmin watches. There’s on demand pulse oxygen monitoring, daily sleep tracking (very detailed and graphed with various stages and an overall rating), stress (heart rate variability) and respiration tracking, daily training readiness and recovery scoring, alarms for abnormal heart rates, and an all-encompassing “body battery” statistic which fascinate me every morning.

For serious training the features are unbeatable, as the fenix 8 can detect lactate threshold and even estimate VO2 Max, which usually requires an expensive treadmill test with specialized equipment. A lot of these features are beyond the scope of most recreational athletes, but for those who do care, there are many other watches on the market that measure EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption). There’s an ECG app for watching your heart, hydration tracking, calories burned, and much more. Going to the desert or mountains? The fenix 8 measures heat and altitude acclimatization. Training Readiness gives a daily score based on sleep quality, recovery, previous training load and more, so you can determine whether it’s a good day to push the limits or take it easy.

Garmin Coach is a platform that offers pre-made weeks-long training plans for various sports and events, as well as strength training routines. Running your first 5K, or longer distance race? There are progressive step-by-step plans for each, and expert coaches involved include Olympian and acclaimed bestselling running author Jeff Galloway. Ditto for cyclists training for a century or metric century. Strength training plans let you choose focuses such as increasing strength, building muscle or working specific groups. There are also easy-to-follow animated cardio, strength, yoga and Pilates workouts, perfect for exercising on the road at hotel gyms. There are also programs for meditation, breathwork, sleep coaching, and much more.

If you do a race like a marathon, it also offers on-course assistance with real-time GPS guided pacing strategies, and it measures and displays stamina in real time so you can know whether to push it or not. For multi-sport races like triathlons, it automatically shifts between swimming, running and cycling.

Travel and Adventure

It is an adventure watch after all, designed for outdoor recreation and off the grid use, so it offers a full suite of orienteering feature to navigate even where there are no road maps. It comes preloaded with TopoActive maps to put a wayfinder right on your wrist, making it easier than ever to access and navigate to points of interest. The NextFork feature gives the distance to the next trail intersection as well as the name of the upcoming trail to avoid wrong turns, and maps include elevation profiles and more. As noted previously, it automatically creates back to the start return routes so you can’t get lost. Also as noted earlier it is loaded with ski resort trail maps worldwide.

One notable feature of special interest to frequent travelers—business or leisure—is the Jet Lag Adviser, which uses the wearer’s sleep history and other metrics to recommend and track the ideal amount of light exposure and exercise, suggests a sleep schedule to minimize the effects of jet lag, and helps travelers feel their best mentally and physically. The feature calibrates for single or multi-destination trips.

Smart Features

Current and future weather is displayed on the home screen, and like many of these category functions, you can dive deeper and go hourly, daily and even see the radar and air quality. It can store favorite locations or use GPS to determine your current spot and deliver the local forecast. As soon as I wake up I check the whether before getting to my phone on the charger, and it’s easier to check while on the move (same for emails and texts which it seamlessly displays).

You can even answer phone calls with it (there’s a microphone and speaker), use voice recording for notes, use a voice assistant to give the watch orders, monitor stock prices, and it handles basic smartwatch/smartphone functions such as music storage and Garmin Pay contactless payment.

For fitness use you can sync it to Strava, and while just about every fitness, sport and travel necessity is built-in, you can also add apps like Spotify.

Hardware

We use GPS as a shorthand for satellite-based navigation, but the reality is that GPS is just the U.S. version of a Global Navigation Satellite Systems, or GNSS. There are five GNSS “constellations” which overlap, and most cover nearly the entire world, but in some places the signal from one is stronger and the fenix 8 supports multi-band GNSS, meaning it works with all of them, including GPS, Japan’s QZSS, China’s BEIDOU, the EU’s Galileo and Russia’s GLONASS. Garmin’s Sat IQ technology provides superior positioning accuracy while optimizing battery life at the same time.

It’s waterproof to 10 ATM (about 330 feet), has a vibrant AMOLED touchscreen display, multi-frequency GPS (L1 + L5) and unlike previous fenix generations, has a microphone and speaker for phone calls and voice assistant. Also new is the LED flashlight like the one you use on your smartphone, another useful tool in the woods, and for connectivity it has Bluetooth 5.2, ANT and Wi-Fi.

You can choose from several different pre-loaded watch face displays and styles (I like the look of good old fashion analog watch with “hands” but there are many displaying a lot of different data), plus many additional options via the Garmin app. You can even customize it with your own photos.

Battery life is crazy, it charges fully in less than an hour and is rated for 16 days, or 47 hours of GPS use, and the Fenix 8 also comes in a solar model that adds wireless charging via the sun built into the glass crystal and extends battery life from 16 to 28 days. It’s one of the only rechargeable devices of any kind I’ve tested that does not exaggerate the length of charge, and if anything, it understates this.

Using the normal non-solar version, I’ve taken two-week trips where I have used it heavily, including GPS navigation, and not recharged. My golf watch can usually, but not always, make it through two rounds. I took the fenix 8 to England and played eighteen holes for six straight days, using GPS for each, navigated while driving my rental car, and wore the watch 24/7 with no problem for the entire 10-day trip. You can’t say that for a phone, headphone, tablet, laptop or anything else, especially when using GPS constantly. It holds a charge much longer than my previous Garmin fitness band which did not have color, GPS, heartrate tracking or do much beyond track steps.

Reviews

Reliable analysis for all things technology can be found at website TechRadar, which did an in-depth review titled “Rugged, expensive perfection,” and made the fenix 8 an Editor’s Pick giving it the the highest possible 5-Star rating. “The Garmin fenix 8 was perhaps the most anticipated watch from Garmin in a very long time, and the reveal didn’t disappoint.” As a nice addition they noted that “Garmin Connect, the watch’s companion app, is stellar and as comprehensive as ever…it remains best-in-class.” TechRadar’s conclusion? “There’s no getting around it: this is the ultimate watch for adventure enthusiasts, with a smorgasbord of hardware and software features and battery that last for weeks.”

The review from sports site PlayBetter.com sums it up well: “if Garmin has a tool for it, it’s on this watch. There’s too many running, fitness, and health features on the Garmin fenix 8 to list them all here. In fact, there’s more tracking insights here than most people really need. All the training mission-critical essentials are here including training plans, adaptive coaching and session suggestions, plus training effect, training load, and performance condition readouts. I found the new targeted strength training plans with helpful animations for each drill very useful.” The long and detailed review applauds mapping tools, workout tools, biometric accuracy and just about everything, concluding that “The Garmin fenix 8 AMOLED is the most capable Garmin multisport watch you can buy. You won’t find a watch with better tracking, training, health or navigation tools.”

Options

The primary AMOLED model comes in three sizes (43mm from $999, 47mm from $999, 51mm from $1,099) while the Solar version only comes in the two larger diameters (from $1,099).