New Garmin Forerunner 745 – the watch that thinks it’s a Coach!
Garmin has launched a new smartwatch, the Forerunner 745, that will tell you – just like your coach – when to work out. This watch will keep you within reasonable limits of your ability, balance out your training activities, and keep you on track of your goals by measuring and evaluating your progress. From there, you can make adjustments to help you determine what training methods work best.
It does this by gathering data as your out training and uses this information to recommend whether and how intensely you should exercise. In addition, the watch brings a host of other features, including a blood oxygen monitor. The blood oxygen sensor, which Garmin calls Pulse Ox, is intended to allow people to see how well they are sleeping, and whether they have adjusted to changes in altitude. The watch is intended to be worn all the time to collect such information, as well as to power other features such as the “Body Battery” tool which can help track your energy levels and provide an estimate of how run down you are and whether fatigue is setting in. There’s also a menstrual cycle tracking feature to help women adjust their training when needed.
As you would expect with a Garmin multisport GPS watch, the Forerunner 745 has lots of built-in activity profiles, including triathlon, swimming (pool and open water), cycling (indoor and outdoor) and running. The Forerunner 745 can recognise track workouts specifically to gather better location data, as well as being able to suggest how intensely you should work out or if you should take a rest day. Monitoring speed and distance is just a tiny part of what the 745 can do, though. VO2 max, training load, training status and aerobic and anaerobic training effects are all measured, and the watch can even make workout suggestions based on that data.
Once a workout is completed the watch easily syncs through Garmin Connect, which can upload your workouts to training programs such as TrainingPeaks, or social apps like Strava. You can also use Garmin Connect to plan and download routes using the course.
The safey and tracking feature is a must for those training solo if an incident occurs and/or feel unsafe. The incident detection features send your location to emergency contacts.
The Forerunner 745 also offers Garmin Pay integration as well, so you can leave your wallet at home on runs and rides and music playback with storage for up to 500 songs, plus the ability to sync playlists from streaming services.
You can expect up to a week of battery life when using the Forerunner 745 in smartwatch mode, up to 16 hours in GPS mode, and up to six hours in GPS mode with music.
Price: as to be expected the price reflects the more advanced features – the new Forerunner 745 is priced at $499.99 / £449.99 / AU$849. It’s available in four colours: Neo Tropic, Magma Red, Whitestone and Black.
The new Forerunner 745 can be purchased direct from the Wiggle
