What Is The Body Battery Garmin Feature? | Is It Accurate?


what is garmin body battery

One of the most interesting and useful metrics that you can get on many newer Garmin compatible devices is the Garmin body battery. This innovative feature is essentially a way to measure body battery energy almost as if to gauge the overall operating procedures of your actual body. But what exactly is the Garmin body battery?

The Garmin body battery is a system that measures the sympathetic nervous system. It gathers a large variety of overall internal health statistics and then presents it to the user as one concise piece of information relating to their daily activities and how this affects their health.

Are you curious as to what the Garmin body battery is and how it works? Perhaps you have compatible devices with body battery and are curious how to use it or read it correctly?

Whatever the reason, this article will tell you everything you need to know. The Garmin body battery monitor is a wonderful new tool, providing you know exactly how to use it.

Quick Overview: Our Top Picks for Garmin Smartwatches with Body Battery
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Garmin Forerunner 45
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Garmin Vivoactive 4
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Garmin Approach S62
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Garmin Instinct 2
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Garmin Fenix 7
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An overview of Garmin body battery

Throughout the day we all undergo strenuous activities, and these activities can be physical, mental, and sometimes both.

Other factors such as getting enough sleep, whether or not you are a heavy coffee drinker, your energy levels and how this counterbalances your stress levels and much more, form the composite of what our activity levels reflect in a single day.

Throughout each day, your watch is tracking your steps, your heart rate, stress levels, energy, and even your sleep to see if you are rejuvenated, and will in turn have a very restful or a very stressful day.

The Garmin body battery is essentially a compilation of all that data that is presented to you in a way that most people would readily understand: as a body battery score.

The accurate information contained in this number allows you to see what you need to do to reach optimal health levels and what you need to work on to attain better overall energy levels.

What does it monitor?

The main things that the Garmin body battery monitors is heart rate, stress, sleep, and how these primary systems all affect your daily energy reserves.

All of this information is broken down by category in Garmin Connect, as well as the main reading number that is displayed on your device as well.

How does the body battery feature work?

The information that Garmin is using for the body battery is your heart rate variability, which is the time between heartbeats and how variable that number is.

This is a great way to measure the overall health of your autonomic nervous system, in addition to the sympathetic nervous system as well.

Your heart rate is then measured against how much you sleep during the night, and whether you achieved rest or had disrupted sleep, in addition to your daily stress rating over several hours throughout the day.

All of this is then scored in a number between 1-100, with a good score falling within the higher range of the 80s and above.

What affects the body battery?

As mentioned, not getting enough sleep, stress, your energy level, exercise, rest periods during exercise, and how all of this relates together is what affects the body battery score.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

Stress levels

The Garmin body battery measures your stress through a scoring page in Garmin Connect known as ‘stress details.” The stressful barometer can be measured in both mental anxiety, as well as the stressful impact that working out or over-performing can do to drain the body battery energy level.

Suffer from stress? Find out more about Garmin stress measure here, How Does Garmin Measure Stress?.

Working out

Training should be measured insofar as much as your body can take, depending on how rested and what your energy data reflects each morning.

The Garmin body battery looks at this number to then recommend a training plan that can help you stay within a positive score.

Sleep data

An important aspect of Garmin body battery energy rankings is sleep. The Garmin body battery measures your sleep each night to determine if you slept enough hours or just a few hours, and this is then reflected in data the next day.

Read more about Garmin sleep here, Guide to the Garmin Sleep Tracking Widget.

Should my body battery be high or low?

You will always want to ensure that your Garmin body battery is a high score as this reflects that you are in optimal health each day. Garmin will provide recommendations in the data on your watch that you can go by to ensure you stay in the higher scores.

What if my Garmin watch doesn’t have this feature?

You will need to purchase a watch that has the applicable body battery if you currently have a model that does not support it.

FAQs

How do you recharge a body battery?

The best thing to do to restore your energy levels, is to make sure you wear your device to bed and get a full night’s sleep.

This is the single most important thing you can do to restore your energy and have the data reflect that your levels are now in the positive zone.

It is important to note that diet and caffeine and other things that cannot be adequately measured by the battery are not going to do anything to change the data. So make sure you get 8 restful hours of shut eye each night.

Why does my body battery drain so fast?

There are many different things that can drain the battery down. As mentioned above, anything that causes undue anxiety on your body, be it physical or mental, and enough to accelerate your heart rate is going to drain your battery the quickest.

Once again, your sleeping patterns will also play a major part in what brings down or raises your overall battery score. It is important to prioritize these two functions since these seem to be the two major factors in the draining of your battery.

Why is my Garmin stress level so high?

As mentioned, the heart monitoring feature is what is tracking the stressful rankings in terms of the scoring. The body battery does not measure outright psychological anxiety, but rather the effect this can and almost always does have on the increase in your overall heart statistics going up.

If this is the case, you will want to ensure that you are avoiding situations that can cause this to happen. Another thing that causes this number to go up is how intense you train as relative to this ranking, and how long it takes for your body to recover after a strenuous workout.

Your levels will be naturally high in this situation because your body is now having to go back to normal after a short burst of intense activity. This is naturally stressful on the body, and should balance out after an applicable recovery time has been successfully met.

Should I wear my Garmin all the time?

It is really up to you if you decide to wear your device all the time or not. Many people do not like to wear the device 24/7, because the device can eventually cause some discomfort as time goes on.

That said, there may be some instances where wearing the device at all times could be beneficial, such as the body battery readings that are based solely on your night’s sleeping habits and how this reflects and relates to the rest of your readings from the pervious day.

It can be beneficial in this regard, but you may want to go at least a day or two each week where you give your wrists a break.

Conclusion

In summary, the Garmin body battery is a very useful device to measure a variety of health statistics all collated into one number that is ranked from 0-100.

Using the application can help you gain insight into your overall health and also help you to understand ways to improve your habits that may be leading to a diminished quality of life each day based on anxiety or not getting adequate sleep.

Like the sound of this Garmin feature? Find out more about devices with features:

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