Hello everybody. I hope that you are well. My name is Christian and welcome to my channel, Backpacking Bananas. Last year I made the big change from an Apple Watch to a Gin and that was a big deal for me at the time and I actually made a video about why I made the switch. But now I've had my Gin Fenix 8 for almost a year. So, I wanted to make an updated video on how I'm using my Gum Infinix 8 on a daily basis, what my favorite things about it are, what I have discovered, some things that I think could perhaps be improved upon. I can tell you now the general consensus is I am absolutely still obsessed with this thing. So, I'm very excited to share with you in this video exactly why

this is one of my favorite gadgets that I own and why it was worth every single penny that I spent on it. Now, I use this thing everywhere in my home country abroad, when I'm in the house sleeping, when I'm out and about on the mountains doing activities. And although you don't actually need any internet to operate the Garmin device usually, as I am using my Garmin most of the time for running and walking, I really like to plan my routes before I go or even during when I'm on the course. And for that, I use something like All Trails or Google Maps. And for that, I do need data when I'm at home, but especially when I am abroad and I don't know where I am. And I use Syim when I'm abroad for this

data. And thank you to Sy for being the kind sponsors of today's video. And of course, with it being an eim, I don't need to fuff around at the airport or in a town trying to find a phone shop to buy a physical SIM. I also don't have to fuff around with swapping out the physical SIMs in my phone. But the coolest thing about s compared to other eim providers is that you only ever need to download the eim once and after that you literally just top up that same eim with data from whatever country that you are traveling in. And there's lots of different data packages and plans as well depending on how long you're going to be in that place how much data you're actually going to need. I find that I

actually do chew through a fair bit of data using Google maps all the time. But that is just absolutely gamechanging in the eastern world. And if you do go ahead and download SY, don't forget to use my discount code because that will get you 15% off all data plans. The discount code is backpacking or you can also head to sy.com/backpacking and I'll put that in the description as well. First, I'm going to talk you through the daily lifestyle features that I use on my Garmin. I will wear this day and night. So, I don't charge it while I'm sleeping. When it needs to be charged, I'll do that normally just when I'm working, sitting at a desk, when I'm not moving anywhere, cuz I don't want to miss any data. Anyway, the

main reason why I do that is because I like to track my sleep, but more importantly, I use my Garmin as my alarm. I have it on silent but vibrate, which in all scenarios is the most game-changing thing. If you are not using your watch vibrating your wrist to wake you up in the morning, I don't even know how you're waking up anymore. It's good if you're in hostile dorm rooms cuz you don't wake anyone else up. Also, there's no risk of if it's going off on your phone and you're trying to find the phone and then the phone falls down the side of the bed. I also just find any alarm noises in the morning really jarring and so there's no noise. He doesn't even wake up my boyfriend who is sleeping next to me most nights and then

I can either turn it straight off or snooze it right from my wrist. With one of the more recent updates, Garmin has introduced smartw. And the way it works is at some point in the 30 minutes before your alarm, it will wake you up at the lightest point of your sleep. Because you know how we sleep in cycles and we kind of go deep and then light, deep and then light. Let's say I've set my alarm for 7:30 a.m. My watch has recognized at 10 7 that I have actually reached the lightest point of my sleep. It will wake me up then as opposed to when my alarm was set at 7:30 because it anticipates that when the alarm's going to go off, you're actually going to be in a deeper sleep and it's going to be harder to

wake up. So, I really like that feature. I find that it has worked really well on the app sleep cycle on Garmin itself. Maybe they have a little bit of work to do because although every day I have the smartw function turned on, I'd say only three times out of 10 does it ever actually wake me up before the alarm goes off. And I don't know if that's just because I'm absolutely fantastic at sticking to my sleep cycle. I know that's not the case, but yeah, I think at the moment it's perhaps not the most accurate at being able to identify when you're in that lightest part of your sleep, but it's trying. The fact that the feature is even there pleases me and I still use it. But I think maybe G can

make some further improvements for this. And when you do wake up and turn off your alarm, you get a morning report. And one of the first things it gives you, which I love to see, is my sleep score. So this is out of 100. I have become quite critical of myself. I always aim for a high sleep score. I find that alcohol affects it massively. Even after one glass of wine, I will have like a 20% sleep score. And that really gets to me. But do you know what? In the best way. Because then it just encourages me to drink less alcohol. And when I tell you that factor alone, I have drunk not even a fraction amount of the alcohol that I have done in previous years since getting my Garmin. And I think that's never a bad thing. I'm so proud of myself and

I'm so pleased with that change in my life. In the morning report, you also just get like a little motivational quote. What I also like is that you can specifically record naps on the watch. And so if you've had a really bad sleep, but then you record that you're having a nap later on in the day, it will adjust your sleep time, like the recommended amount of sleep that you need. And I think that's just really nice and intuitive. I am always monitoring my body battery. I feel very proud of myself when I've woken up with 100% body battery. It doesn't happen all the time. In fact, does it happen often? H I go through phases. But I do genuinely find that knowing what it says my body

battery is helps me to know whether I have room to push with my exercise and what I'm doing that day or if the body battery is really low. I know, okay, I am just running on fumes here and maybe that I shouldn't push it so much. It's never gone lower than five. If you are a Garmin user, let me know if your body battery has ever gone below five. I'm under the impression that's just when you're dying because sometimes I will have no energy whatsoever and it will be on five for like the whole day and I'm like am I like what's happening here and why is it not going down any lower? Something that I absolutely love is I download my Spotify playlist directly to my watch.

So it means that I can go out for a run without my phone. I don't need to bring anything with me. So, it's literally just me, my watch, my AirPods, my dignity, which doesn't last long out there, and away I go. Anyway, let's talk about the flashlight. I literally just double press this button on the top here, and it turns it on and off. I can adjust the brightness. I use this every single day. Anytime you're using your phone's flashlight, for whatever reason, I'm using my watch. And guess what? I'm handsree. I've used it running in the dark, finding my way around a hostel dorm room at night, even just finding my way to the toilet in a house that I am unfamiliar with. Flashlight on this

watch is genuinely genius. And let me tell you about my main watch face because this is what I see when I first look at my watch. So, things that I just like to be able to see the whole time. So, I've got the battery life at the top. I've got my body battery. I've got my recovery time. I have the altitude that I'm at, which actually now I'm in Australia, I might swap out for the weather. I might find that more useful. I've got my floors climbed, the number of steps I've taken this day. We've got my timer, which I always crack out whenever I'm cooking anything or just know I need to do something in a certain period of time. And then of course, I've

got the time of day. We've got the month, the date, the day of the week, and even counting down the seconds to the next minute. So, I've got a lot on my main watch face. And I find this all really useful to have like at just a glance. So, let's talk more about the battery life of the watch. The GMA Fenix 8 claims that it can last up to 30 days. I'm pretty sure. I think that would be kind of entirely on like a low battery saver mode though, which I don't do. So, when I first got the watch, it actually said it had a 10day battery life. Still amazing. Then I switched on a few more auto features cuz I just wanted to have access to everything. I wanted it to be recording all my stats the whole time.

And so now my default of 100% battery life is 7 days, which is still absolutely amazing. And it will give me a low battery warning when there's 18 hours left. Almost a whole day left, it gives me the low battery warning. So to be like, okay, at some point today you need to put this on charge. When I had my Apple Watch, if I had 18 hours of battery left, it was on like 90%. That was almost a full battery. And so the battery life really is just where Garmin is in a complete league of its own. I do find it goes down a little bit faster than 7 days if I'm doing loads of activities or a really long hike, understandably, but that would be the case with any watch, of course. In terms

of watch aesthetic, I do still think that this is a really nice looking watch for me. Especially when I was first doing research of this watch, I barely saw any female people wearing it. It's a unisex watch and I was like, "Huh, I wonder like am I going to be able to pull this off?" But actually, I think especially with the color way that I went for, I feel very good wearing this on a daily basis. I think it looks nice. Understandably with it being a sport watch, it is a bit clunky though. So, my biggest qual with it is because I like to wear this for all occasions. I would still like to explore some different watch bands if Gin have any that are

just slightly more elegant because on the whole this thing is quite chunky which for me on a usual day-to-day basis is absolutely fine. I never need to dress up. However, sometimes I do. So, I tell you what I would absolutely love. Garmin, if you're listening, I would love for you to bring out a Garmin ring. a bit like the Aura Ring, which still tracks all your essential stats, like your steps, your heart rate, so I'm never missing any of that data on any given day. Heck, maybe I could even go for a run with it. But then it would just automatically sync with everything else on my Garmin app seamlessly, so I could take on and off my watch as if that's never happened. What's cool about

the Garmin watch is that you can navigate everything that you want to do using solely buttons. You can also use the touchcreen for it. And as a former Apple Watch girly, I thought I would just entirely use the touchcreen because that's what I'm used to. But what I found is that actually I am using the buttons 90% of the time. What I've come to realize is that it's actually super useful because often I am outside exercising and it might be raining, my hands are wet, my hands are sweaty, and the touchcreen doesn't work. But the buttons, the buttons will always work. And also, I don't even need to be looking at my Garmin because I intuitively know where all these buttons are now. I can stop my workout, resume

my workout, turn on the flashlight, move through my screens without even looking at it because I know what my navigation buttons are. So, that's really, really nice. There's a few health and recovery insights which just don't even exist on the Apple Watch. So, they've been really interesting to get to know over the past year. The first one is one of the things that comes up in your morning report, and that is your training readiness. So again, this is a score out of 100. 100 being that you are at your absolute most peak. You have never been more ready to go out and exercise and one meaning you are dead. You need to lie down. Don't go outside today and just relax. And this number is affected by your sleep,

recovery time, HRV status, acute load, your recent sleep score, which is where I often fail or just sleep in general, and your recent stress. This metric for me is both very good and very bad. It's very good because if it says that my training readiness is high, I'm like, "Hell yeah, let's go out and do something." Even if I don't necessarily feel like it, I'm like, "Well, the government says I'm ready, so I must be ready." But on the other end of the spectrum, if it's low, even if I'm feeling okay, or if I have some exercise in my schedule, which I've been planning to do, it almost gives me an invitation to be more lazy about it. It gives me an invitation to potentially skip that workout, which I really wanted to do all

for the sake of being lazy. So, I think I need to take it with a pinch of salt, but it is very interesting. As well as training readiness, you've also got your training status. It also tells you this at the end of each workout that you do. It will tell you where you are. Whether you're peing, that's the ultimate productive is where you really want to be. Maintaining or recovery or I've seen some people even be like draining or there's some really negative ones. Now, I've never had anything really negative which suggests that my fitness is massively declining. But I have had strained quite a few times. When it sees that I'm not getting very good sleep, I have an unbalanced heart rate variability and yet I am doing a lot of

exercise. That's when it will tell me that I'm strained. Kind of frustrating cuz I'm like, I know, but what do you want me to do about it? But I will say that the training status does motivate me more than the Apple Watch rings ever did. It's like a thing where Garmin can be so harsh and so much harsher than Apple Watch. Apple Watch like always praises you for everything, no matter how small. It's like, well done. You walked for 5 minutes. You are amazing. common. You might do the best workout of your life. If you've not slept well and your heart rate variability is unbalanced, it will just be like maintaining. And you're like, are you joking me? Are you telling me that this has not improved my fitness at all

and that I am just maintaining? Oh, it makes me work harder though. Not at the moment though. It says I'm in recovery. Basically, I'm just not working out enough. And I'll tell you why I think that is for me at the moment. For me, as well as having the gar for encouragement, in order for me to be working out really well and consistently, I need to have a goal which I'm working towards. So last year, I was working towards my sub 2-hour half marathon at the end of the year. Since running that half marathon, I've not given myself any other physical goals that I'm working towards. There's not a particular trip with a physical endeavor that I need to complete. I don't have a race lined up. And so for me on any

given day, if I'm supposed to do a run, but it's raining. I'm like, ah, I'm not going to go because there's not an extra factor for me going, "Oh, but you need to go because you're working towards this thing." Does that make sense? Something I also like to monitor that I didn't used to monitor is my V2 max. Mine's currently on 45. Excellent, which is great. And it kind of goes up and down between 44 and 46. I definitely think at the moment I can be doing more to increase my V2 max, but I'm pretty happy with that at the moment. I like to keep an eye on it. I think if I was consistently going down with my V2 max, that would definitely be a factor which would make me ramp up whatever training

that I'm trying to do. Now, if you are quite performance-minded and you're considering getting a Garmin, you may be interested in the Garmin Coat. Now, I used this for my sub 2hour half marathon plan. I didn't actually get sub 2, by the way. I don't know if I told you that. I got 205, which I was still very proud of. But what the gin coach does is you tell it your goal. So I said, you know, half marathon. If you have a time goal which you are working towards, obviously you tell it that and you tell it the date that you're going to be doing it. And it will put you together a full program over the amount of time that you have to reach your goal that you can follow on a daily basis. And

what I really like set it apart from other coaching plans online is that it will adapt based on daily factors that it has. Let's say it had you scheduled in for a long run on Sunday, but on Saturday night you went out and you had sleep. Uh maybe you didn't sleep at all. You wake up on Sunday morning and you'll see that what it's given you that day has actually changed. It won't be a long run anymore. It will be maybe a rest day or maybe it will be just an easy 30 minute run and it will have moved that big workout to another day where it thinks that you're going to be more ready for it. And it also takes things like your stress and your heart rate variability into account. And I

love that. I think that's so intuitive and that really sets it apart from the other online coaching plans that are out there. What I also really liked about it is that it showed me if I was on track for my goal, it would show me a graph to be like right now if you keep going the way you're going, you are projected to get this time at this pace in your half marathon. And that was really motivating for me even though I actually didn't end up reaching my goal. And I know why I didn't reach my goal. because closer to the event, I wasn't doing all of the training that I was supposed to be doing. I just didn't take it as seriously as I could. But seeing the metrics beforehand were pretty swish.

Now, I know that not every G user likes the Gin coach plans, though. In fact, I have a few friends who still use programs like Runner if they need a coaching plan for their race. Uh the reason being, they just don't always like the structure of the Garmin coach plans. And I do agree with that. It almost always uh if you've got like an interval training session or a sprint session, it always starts with a 10-minute warm-up jog and a 10-minute cool down jog. But that's actually quite a lot of warm up and cool down. And I don't think that is always necessary for the session. And I found that they would put a particular pace for that warm up and cool down, which sometimes would tire me out for the

actual session. Now, most of the time I had my coach plan set up as a preference to go by my heart rate, not by my pace. And I much preferred that. And I would recommend that to anyone who is going to be doing any online coaching plan for that matter because some days are going to be better than others. And if normally your easy run pace is 6 minutes 30 per kilometer, but you wake up one morning and you're not having a good day and it tells you to do an easy run at 6 minutes 30 per kilometer, but you're finding it really bloody difficult for whatever reason and therefore your outcome is not actually an easy run.

Whereas if you go with heart rate, if your easy run is at 145 beats per minute, even on the days where you feel really 145 beats per minute is just going to slow down your pace and actually keep it an easy run. I hope this is making sense, but the point I'm trying to make is that training by heart rate is so much better than training by pace for the most part, in particular for the easy runs. The saying goes is that an Apple Watch is a sporty smartwatch and a Garmin is a smart sport watch. And I think that's so true. Things are really focused on the sport and activity with Garmin, which I'm really pleased with because that is the main reason that I use my watch. So, I'll talk you through the activities

that I track the most on this thing. So, running and walking, this is something that I do on a daily basis. When I first got the watch, I didn't love the interface of how it showed the stats, but I've now realized that it just took some getting used to. Now I know where everything is. I actually really like it and I like the fact that it shows you so much. Everything that you could possibly want to see, you can see. To my knowledge, you can also adjust the stats that you are looking at as you are working out. However, I've now just gotten used to what I see on the default screen. I can see my active heart rate.

I can see my current pace. I can see how many kilometers I've done. I can see how long I've been training for. The only thing that I'm not a fan of here is the map feature purely because it's just too slow to load. I do like that if I get lost on a run and I don't have my phone with me, I can go onto the map, but I have to wait for it to load before it actually starts working, which is not always great when I'm trying to run. And so if I do have my phone on me, if I do get lost, I find it just much easier to whip that out and look at Google Maps or all trails or wherever I want to go. And that's a lot faster. Scuba diving. I actually haven't scuba dived since last year, which really upsets me. But when I

was scuba diving, I would have the auto dive feature on, which meant that whenever I entered the water and went below like 1 m, it would automatically start the dive on the dive computer. But when I tell you how obsessed I am with the diving capabilities on this watch, it is one of the biggest reasons that I went for the Fenix 8. With the previous Fenix series on the Garmin, they didn't have dive watch capabilities, but now it has recreational dive watch capabilities, which is exactly what I need. I'm not a tech diver, and so I don't need all of the super advanced features that some of the specific dive watches can give you. But this is just perfect for telling me everything that I personally need to know as a

recreational rescue diver. So I can see my dive time. I can see my current depth. I can see my NDL time. It auto counts me down on my 3 minute safety stop. If you're not a diver, you won't understand what any of this means, but if you are a diver, you will know. Something that I wasn't expecting to see on here whilst diving is if I start ascending too fast, it actually buzzes me. So I'm like, "Oh shit." Cuz like sometimes you might not realize that you are rising up. And so that is so cool. And I of course also absolutely love the fact that it just auto logs all of the details onto the Garmin dive app. So I don't have to chase anyone after I do a dive to find out what the

statistics were. I also don't even need to write anything down. It just auto logs it into my phone which is amazing because fun fact about me before I had this dive computer I wouldn't log any of my dives because of pure laziness if I'm completely honest with you my Garmin came on its first hiking expedition in Pakistan last summer and let me tell you it was a gamecher we go on quite long hikes like up to 12hour days when we're out there and when I had my Apple Watch in previous years I would literally have to take my charging cable and my power bank and I would have to charge it along the hike. Even if I set out with 100% or like whenever we stopped for food or anything, I would take it off and charge

it, which is just massively inconvenient. With this, I can hike for like several 12hour days without having to recharge it. I don't even have to think about it running out of battery, and that is really invaluable on a hike. with the walking, the running, and the hiking. I have tried marking out my own route before on the watch before going to then follow. And let's just say that was a hitand- miss experience. Sometimes it was very good and really helped me go in the right direction. Other times, like I mentioned previously, the map was very slow to load. Just found it a bit of a clunky experience, especially if I was running.

I wanted it to be fast. I wanted to know immediately which way I was turning. I wanted to be able to see ah okay this way, this way. And it just wasn't quite fast enough for that. So that's my little review on that. I recorded both skiing and snowboarding for the first time this year on my Garmin. And h I loved doing that so much. It was awesome seeing how much ground we were covering, seeing what run that I was on. It would like auto go ding when I would switch to a new run. Lab 4 6148. Interestingly, I was simultaneously using the Slopes app on my phone. We mainly use that so that we can see in real time where everyone else in our group is on the slopes. Um, but slopes app also gives you information like what

your max speed of the day was. But I actually found that information was a little bit more accurate on the Garmin. So, that was really nice to have both. And also the fact that unlike slopes, my Garmin workout for the ski or the snowboard would auto upload to Straa. And that's great cuz when you're in Strava, you see a map of everywhere that you've skied or snowboarded that day with a few of your key statistics and obviously you can add photos and all of this. I'm just an absolute Strava I love it. So, let's move on to that. Actually, the fact that Garmin syncs so seamlessly with Strava is really lovely for someone like me. All of my activities just auto upload to Strava. And I can, of course, go in and change the title, the description, I can

add my photos. I much prefer viewing all of my activities in one feed in one place on my Straa rather than on the Garmin app. I can also get the kudos on the Strava as well which I can't get on Gin. And then there's some features on the Garmin which I use somewhat regularly but not all the time but I'm still really glad that I have them here. So the first is the jet lag adviser. I was really excited when I saw that Gin had added this to their repertoire of applications. You basically input when you have flights to another country or another region with another time zone which you are going to have to adjust to. And as someone who lives in Sydney but quite often travels back to the UK

several times a year, I'm often dealing with jet lag. And so getting advice on when to try and stay awake and when to try and go to sleep is really useful. What I will say is that I think that they have a lot of improvement to go and to do with this application. It's not the most easy to follow. I'm comparing it to an app which I'm very fond of called time shifter which is like a jet lag advisory app which I think is very good and I think gins in comparison is not as good but it is a new feature of theirs. The reason I don't like it as much is because it doesn't really allow you to plan in advance, which you kind

of need to do for your jet lag. It just tells you what to do at the time. It's like, okay, avoid light. Okay, get sunlight. And if you've already made plans for your day, you can't just immediately follow the instructions it's giving you. Do you know what I mean? I loved when I was in Pakistan seeing my altitude acclamation. I have never been able to see this before, but it literally told you what height your body had acclimatized to based on how long you had spent at that altitude and like you know you're going up and down. It just helped to understand your body a lot better when you're at those altitudes. It can feel very confusing when you're up high and you don't quite

understand why your brain's not working right, why you feel like you've got a headache, why your appetite has lost. and understanding a bit more about where your body's at and where it needs to catch up to is just really useful. I have the sunrise and sunset here. I can also see dawn and dusk, which is actually very useful, especially as a content creator and living in Sydney, which is somewhere famous for having the most fabulous sunrises and sunsets. I like to see them when I can, and it's useful to know when they're happening, and also making any plans for going on a run. Like, is it going to be dark or is it going to be light? I like being able to see the moon here. I can see when

that's rising and setting and also where it's at in its cycle. I've got the weather app here. I don't think this one is entirely accurate, but you know, still good to have something on my wrist to get an idea of what temperature it might be that day. You've got the primary race there, so if you have a race day, you can input what it is and what date it is, and it will just count you down, which is quite nice. Like I said, it's primarily a sport watch. And then a feature that I've added onto my main list quite recently is the tides. It is useful when you're living in Sydney, you're close to the beaches, you're close to the harbor, knowing when high and low tide is, uh, just because

it can affect some of your plans. If you're planning on walking along a particular beach that you can only walk at low tide, or maybe you want to go swimming at rock pools that you can only swim in at high tide, it's just useful to know this. So, those are the features on my Garmin Fenix 8 that I actually use on a very regular basis. Some of which I did not know that I was going to want to use before I even purchased this watch. But in summary, I'm still really happy with my watch. Some may say obsessed. Listen, I just like stats. I'm a stats gal and having my Garmin pleases me greatly. I genuinely believe it increases my quality of life. It brings me that much joy. Let me know if you

have any other questions about having a Garmin or a Gin Fenix 8. I know that there are so many different Gins that you can get. Some are similar to this, some are very, very different. But I really hope you guys enjoy this video. Perhaps learned something new. Maybe I've inspired you to get a garment. If that's the case, I will be thrilled. It's going to change your life. And I will see you guys in the next video. Bye-bye.