2022 Garmin Fitness Insights

Towards the end of every year, some of the larger sports platforms publish trends based on your usage data. This can sometimes be highly insightful or contrived and spurious, like Strava’s data from earlier in the week (I didn’t publish it).

Garmin has kept it simple with simple year-on-year percentage increases for the major sports it logs. The data might show increased sports activity by us all but, much more likely reflects increases to its customer base.

In a nutshell: Many sports categories show increases! Especially the newer ones that Garmin recently targetted 😉 Less so old stomping grounds like triathlon.

In the Gym

Most sports watches now properly support and record gym-based activities. For example, 2022 saw the first full year of use for Garmin’s HIIT activity profile. Perhaps that explains a good part of the 20% increase in gym activities or perhaps we all log them when previously we didn’t?

 

 

On 2 Wheels

Growth in cycling continues. Or at least growth in the logging of cycling activities continues.

Increases here perhaps reflect the fact that newbies to cycling during the Covid period just kept going or maybe Garmin is eating into Wahoo’s market share? (nah 😉 )

Perhaps more interestingly there is an obvious shift toward gravel cycling. Certainly, gravel bikes have become a key feature of bike shop sales floors so it looks like we are putting them to good use. I still haven’t got one myself but did manage several off-road adventures this year on my extremely heavy aluminium MTB. The King Alfred’s Way was apparently completed by Simon@GCN in a day…#Impressive, although I doubt he would have done it on my bike 😉 his sponsors gave him a carbon beauty.

 

 

Perhaps instead, the 40% increase in gravel cycling reflects cyclists who have moved to e-bikes but prefer to log their activities as gravel.

 

Pounding the pavements

It seems like we are, in fact, pounding the belts more than we are pounding the pavements. Hopefully, Zwift will have seen some of the increases here.

Is Zwift running still free?

Treadmill runners don’t forget NPE Runn which can turn even your oldest, most threadbare dumb trainer into a smart trainer that links accurate speed and cadence info to your watch or iPad/TV.

 

Swim+Bike+Run

I’m not sure this number reflects anything. In the UK there are definitely fewer people renewing their annual British Triathlon memberships and several events have not re-opened. Maybe the situation is better elsewhere in the world?

 

Other Indoor

Make a new sports profile…they will come. If you create a sports profile people will use it. Pilates seems ever-popular and breathwork seems newly faddy. We might as well log both.

 

Getting wet

I’m surprised that swimmers are logging more indoor swimming. The pools seem much emptier to me. I would have been much less surprised to see big increases in open-water swimming.

 

The next few sports are undoubtedly the result of the availability of sport-specific outdoor watches & sports profiles (Instinct Surf, Fenix, Descent, Quatix)