I got my Venu 4 on Friday. It was intended to replace my Apple Watch Ultra 1. My main reason for switching from the AWU to Garmin was the broader range of metrics and KPIs Garmin provides compared to Apple Health. I also expected better accuracy.
I’m not an athlete by any means, but I’m really into health and fitness — and also into tech and science. So I was genuinely excited about the Venu and all the insights it would give me.
But today I did my first workout — and I was honestly shocked.
It started with the watch completely freezing just 10 seconds into the workout. The only way to recover was to hold the power button for about 30 seconds to force a reboot.
Then things got even worse during the run. It was a very easy recovery run, not a hard training session. However, the Venu kept showing a heart rate above 150 bpm for most of the workout. I can’t prove my exact heart rate, but I’ve done plenty of runs like this, and this definitely felt like my regular Zone 2 pace. At one point, the heart rate suddenly dropped to around 80 bpm, stayed there for a few minutes, and then jumped back up to 150 bpm again. My guess is that the watch was tracking my cadence instead of my heart rate.
On top of that, the step counter also seemed completely off. I started the run with roughly 2,500 steps, and afterward it only showed around 3,900 — far too low for the distance covered.
Considering all this, I’m really worried now that key metrics like training load, training effect, recovery time, body battery, and so on become meaningless if the underlying data from the Venu is this inaccurate.
So now I’m wondering what’s going on here. Is this a known issue with the Venu 4? Did I just get a defective unit? Or are there settings I should tweak before judging the watch too harshly?
I would really appreciate any help, advice, or shared experiences. I want to love this watch - I’m just trying to figure out whether something went wrong on my side… or on Garmin’s side.