The best smartwatch for serious athletes

Garmin’s Venu smartwatch line has always been the company’s most approachable entry point. It’s sleek, balanced, and far less intimidating than its button-laden siblings.

With the Venu 4 ($549.99 at Amazon), Garmin is leaning even harder into that identity, merging lifestyle polish with the serious training tools athletes actually want.

In a market where rivals keep stepping up their own fitness game, the evolution is well-timed, but it comes at the cost of a $100 price increase over the excellent Venu 3. Thankfully, it’s easily the brand’s best smartwatch to date, and one of the most powerful fitness trackers below the “Ultra” tier of watches that push beyond $600.

Garmin has largely stuck to the same blueprint as the Venu 3 for its successor, refining the details rather than redrawing them. The Venu 4 comes in two familiar sizes, 41mm and 45mm, meaning it should be easy for most shoppers to find a good fit. I tested the 41mm build and found the case and display both comfortably sized.

This time, though, both models now feature a full metal chassis. The subtle upgrade makes a big difference in hand (and on wrist). It feels sturdier and more premium, like a watch you notice for style as much as specs. If you aren’t into the futuristic domed display of the Pixel Watch 4, it’s probably the best option for a minimalist, circular build. In short, it finally aligns the Venu line with the elegance of other leading smartwatches.

To that end, the overall design is cleaner too. Garmin dropped one of the 3’s physical buttons, slimming the layout to a two-button setup. The subtext is that this is a watch for shoppers who are comfortable using a touchscreen. I personally didn’t miss the extra tactile cue, and overall input still feels streamlined and intuitive.

The buttons are two different shapes, though which is strange, and the botton one is quite flush, making it a little hard to get to sometimes. The touchscreen handles the bulk of navigation, while the two buttons cover the essentials: start/stop and back. Meanwhile, the AMOLED display remains colorful and perfectly legible in full sunlight, technically with slightly brighter specs.

My favorite addition, though, is the small LED flashlight Garmin integrated into the case. I’ve swooned before about Garmin’s flashlights, and I stand by it. The LED light is a reliably handy feature that I used almost nightly while reviewing the device. It powers up with a long hold of the bottom button and offers adjustable brightness levels as well as a red-light mode. On night runs, the watch also prompted an optional strobe to make me more visible, which I appreciated.

Comfort-wise, the Venu 4 maintains the line’s reputation for long-wear ease. The silicone band is soft, the case sits flush without catching cuffs, and it’s light enough for sleep tracking yet sturdy enough for workouts, which pretty much sums up the watch’s entire philosophy. It was easy to keep on my wrist throughout the review period because it’s genuinely attractive, unobtrusive, and blends in at the gym as well as outside of it.

Below the glass, Garmin also rolled out the Venu 4 on its unified operating platform, bringing it in line with the company’s most recent watches. The updated software feels snappier and more consistent across menus with smart organizational updates and redesigned tiles. It also means smoother (though somewhat trippy) animations, faster syncing, and broader feature parity. The OS also introduces more inclusive features to the Venu line, like spoken watch faces, audible health data, and a color filter mode for color-blind users.

Garmin rates the Venu 4 for up to 12 days in smartwatch mode (or about 4 days with the Always-on display enabled). In real-world use, I averaged closer to 9-10 days with mixed workouts, considerable GPS tracking, and sleep tracking. A night of sleep tracking averaged me around 3% battery loss. If you’re an Always-on loyalist, a 45-minute workout will drain about 5%.

With or without AOD, the watch lasts well past what Apple or Google can manage, which is a clear reminder that battery longevity remains one of Garmin’s biggest advantages. Unfortunately, the Venu 4 still relies on Garmin’s proprietary charger, which drives me absolutely bonkers, but at least it is the same old Garmin cable used by every other Garmin watch in my box.

More importantly, Garmin didn’t just dress up the Venu 3 and call it a new generation. Thanks to the upgraded OS, the Venu 4 borrows heavily from the Forerunner platform, inheriting a wealth of advanced training and health features.  For athletes, these include Training Load, Training Readiness, Heat and Altitude Acclimation, and daily suggested workouts across multiple sports, including triathlon mode.

In practice, this makes the Venu 4 feel far more “athlete-ready.” My first run with it gave me a suggested pace based on previous load and recovery. Later that night, it surfaced a recovery score that actually lined up with how I felt, tired but not destroyed. Garmin’s Body Battery, HRV Status, and Health Status widgets are also present and more accessible on-watch, reducing the need to constantly open the app.

The multi-band GNSS support is another upgrade, though the story there is nuanced. Garmin touts improved accuracy, and in my testing, routes looked impressively tight, even under Honolulu’s thick tree cover. With that said, the Venu 3 was already a reliable route tracker, so the dual-band mode may feel more like fine-tuning than a revelation. As you can see in the map above, both the Venu 3 and Venu 4 align pretty much perfectly with my much pricier Apple Watch Ultra 3.

Oddly, on the run above, the Venu 4 was a little quirkier, but this was one of the first workouts I recorded, so I chalked it up to calibrating. Every other workout was as tightly aligned with my control devices as the first example.

Heart-rate accuracy remains strong thanks to the Elevate v5 sensor. Against a Polar H10 chest strap, my results were typically within a few beats per minute. High-intensity intervals with abrupt peaks and jump roping with high wrist flexion tracked well. In fact, the watch actually performed better than my Polar device on the above jump rope circuit workout, when the strap inexplicably dropped out at random times.

Overnight (and during naps), sleep tracking on the Venu 4 takes a noticeable step forward. The new Sleep Alignment feature evaluates how your circadian rhythm syncs with your actual sleep schedule, a small insight that theoretically makes users more mindful of bedtime. I am a sleep maverick, so mostly I just found myself disappointing the sleep coach, but my data aligned with my Oura Ring (a notably accurate sleep tracker).

Meanwhile, although skin-temperature tracking isn’t new to the Venu line (the Venu 3 received it in a firmware update), it’s now more tightly woven into Garmin’s overall health insights. Nightly readings feed into the Health Status widget alongside HRV, stress, and sleep data, making trends easier to interpret. The same goes for SpO₂, respiration, and stress tracking.

Garmin also introduced Lifestyle Logging, which lets you manually record habits like caffeine, alcohol, and naps to see how they impact rest and readiness. My excessive caffeine consumption isn’t something I’m ready to face, but I appreciate the heads up. The line’s ECG app returns, as does a refreshed Morning Report. None of it feels revolutionary, but together the refinements make the device’s health tracking more accessible and actionable.

The Venu 4 still doesn’t deliver the full-blown smartwatch experience you’ll find from Apple or Google, but honestly, that might be the point. You won’t find an expansive app store, native voice assistant, or the kind of deep integrations you’ll get elsewhere.

Instead, Garmin sticks to the essentials: on-wrist calls, voice-assistant access via your phone, onboard music storage for Spotify or Amazon Music playlists, and Garmin Pay for contactless payments. The interface feels smoother this generation, with snappier scrolling and quicker transitions, but the watch remains purpose-built for athletes first and foremost. This is a smartwatch for people who don’t want an overloaded device.

Garmin has added Focus Modes, allowing you to customize notifications, brightness, and button behavior for various situations, such as workouts, meetings, or sleep. It’s not a revolutionary addition, and we’ve certainly seen it on other devices. However, it does make the watch feel more personalized and adaptable day-to-day. I would have liked to see the brand add an LTE variant, but it seems Garmin still isn’t chasing total independence from your phone on this line.

Yet, at the same time, the Venu 4 is cheaper than Garmin’s hardcore training devices like the Forerunner 970 ($749.99 at Amazon). It’s also the exact same price as the similar but five-buttoned Forerunner 570 ($549.99 at Amazon), though that one isn’t a great deal unless you can find it on a heavy discount.

This all creates a bit of identity tension. The Venu 4 is no longer the attractive, pared-down wellness watch; it’s a legitimate training tool wrapped in lifestyle polish. If you’re a casual smartwatch user, it’s overkill on fitness and underwhelming on smarts. If you’re a competitive runner, you might still prefer a Forerunner’s extra metrics, tactile buttons, and mapping features.

Still, there’s absolutely an audience for this device. It’s ideal for athletes who want Garmin’s training depth without the rugged aesthetic, or for everyday users who prioritize accurate health data, battery life, and durability over apps and gimmicks. Though I’d readily call it Garmin’s best smartwatch, the truth is that it’s a serious fitness watch that looks and feels like a flagship smartwatch, without putting a phone on your wrist.