Garmin 970 and HRM600 review: Is this the best running watch and heart-rate monitor combo?

Evening Standard

26-06-2025

Under a smooth, ink-black surface of Sapphire glass, the Garmin Forerunner 970 quietly ticks away. I glance down, the screen comes to life. With a flick of my index finger, I can find out almost anything I want about myself, in what must be one of the most personalised sports watch experiences to date.
This is the top of Garmin's Forerunner range. The screen and its titanium bezel are elegant and eye-catching. At a recent running event, others crowded around me, cooing at the 970. It has Garmin's brightest AMOLED screen yet, which pops and fizzes with colour.
Pair the 970 with Garmin's new, highly advanced HRM 600 chest strap, and you get a staggering amount of running and sports data. From your vertical oscillation to your running economy (a brand new feature, which covers perhaps the most important metric for marathon-running), to umpteen other data points down to the hyper-granular, it is a dream come true for the data-obsessive runner. All this information is helpfully packaged up to give you things to work with, rather than just numbers to boggle at.
That said, is there a limit to how much data you can usefully absorb? For example, the watch and HRM strap can tell you about your Step-Speed Loss (a feature new to Garmin with this pair). If your score is not great, it gives you advice. In this case, that's run 'lightly and smoothly'. That's good advice, but did I need to know my Step-Speed Loss to find that out? Or is there a risk that your watch floods you with data that obscures the basic principles of running training (the link between mileage and speed, doing different kinds of sessions, and so on)? The counter-argument is that the watch need not obscure those lessons; it just gives you more information. And there's something undeniably fun and gamified about this data and the way it's presented.
If you're paying well over £600 for a sports watch, though, you want all the bells and whistles. That's what the 970 delivers. It can take and make calls thanks to its microphone and speaker, it can pay for things through Garmin Pay, and it has an incredibly handy flashlight (genuinely much more useful — and frequently used — than you would guess at first). It tracks and scores your sleep, it measures your training readiness, and it computes your running tolerance (a very useful feature: this tells you how far you can run over a total of seven days without pushing yourself beyond your limits). It can even run an ECG on you, though this is presented with a forest of disclaimers, pointing out you should go to your doctor if you're concerned. The battery life drew some concern when announced — up to 15 days in smartwatch mode, down from up to 23 days in the Forerunner 965 — but in my testing, I didn't find it a problem. That might be because my previous experience was with a sports watch that needed charging every other day, but bluntly, it just wasn't an issue.
What this watch — and Garmin — really is aiming at is to give you the most personalised experience possible. All those features and data points make that more feasible than ever. It's packaged up elegantly, too. Each morning and night, you receive reports about the day ahead or the day you've had (not a new feature of the 970, but as ever with this watch, beautifully presented).
Every tracking metric is used to inform suggestions for the watch about what's possible for you personally in terms of running or exercising. On top of this, the 970's key differentiating factor with other Forerunner watches is its maps (this is true for all Forerunners in the 9xx range). These are accurate and come in full colour. They make hitting the trails or navigating a new city as easy as can be.