The latest Garmin watches include new technologies intended to give you a holistic view of your health and fitness. And the Body Battery is one of the features the watches use to determine the impact of different activities on your energy levels.
In this guide, I share everything I know about Garmin Body Battery. That includes what it is, how it works, and whether or not it’s accurate in the first place.
Let’s get started.
What is Garmin Body Battery?
Garmin Body Battery is a metric that gives you the value of your energy levels based on the combination of your activities, stress, and heart rate variability.
With this data, you’re able to tell whether your body is in good shape to take on a mental and physical activity or focus on rest and recovery.
Your Garmin watch will record a value from 1 to 100. And then it will display a number to indicate your body’s energy reserve based on the three factors that I’ve already mentioned.
Usually, the higher the value displayed on your Garmin smartwatch, the more energy you have. And that implies you can take on an even more challenging workout if you want to.
You can watch the following video to understand this even more:
How Does Garmin Measure Body Battery?
A Garmin watch monitors your heart rate and activity data in real time as you go about your daily workouts.
It uses the results to determine your activity levels, the time interval between your heartbeats, sleep, and stress levels. Then, it combines this information to come up with an estimate of your body battery.
Because the watch doesn’t tell of a single moment in time, I strongly recommend that you take the reading you get as cumulative.
And to get a better estimate of your energy reserve, you should monitor your heart rate variability, stress, sleep, and activity levels for multiple days.
Expect your body battery to charge overnight and be high at dawn if your previous night’s sleep was restful. Also, a calm and restful day should maintain your number to a higher value.
If your day was full of activities or so stressful, your body battery will drain throughout the day. Combine this with poor sleep during the night and you will still get up in the morning with a very low energy level.
Expect your energy reserve to be always low when you are indulging in strenuous activities than when you are doing relatively easy workouts. Alcohol will also affect your energy level. Again, eating too much lowers your reserve because stress levels increase as your body tries to digest food.
Which Garmin Watch Has Body Battery?
The following are examples of Garmin watches that have the body battery feature built into them:
- Garmin Venu SQ 2
- Garmin Vivosmart 5.
- Garmin Fenix 7
- Garmin Instinct 2
Keep in mind that the list is by no mean exhaustible. However, you might want to consider these as top examples if you have a Garmin watch just yet.
What is a Good Body Battery on the Garmin Smartwatch?
Garmin divides the reading into four segments:
- Low reserve energy
- Medium reserve energy
- High reserve energy
- Very high reserve energy
Here is a table summarizing all the four reserves and adjacent to each reserve is the battery level.
| Energy Reserve | Possible Score in Percentage | |
| 1. | Low | 0 to 25 |
| 2. | Medium | 26 to 50 |
| 3. | High | 51 to 75 |
| 4. | Very high | 76 to 100 |
As you can see, the reading ranges from 0 to 100 presented in percentage.
A low reserve energy starts from 0 to 25%, the medium reserve energy is valued from 26 to 50, high reserve energy is valued 51 to 75%, and the very high reserve energy is valued from 76 to 100%.
A good energy level on Garmin should range between 26 and 50%. And anything valued above these numbers means you have more energy within you to tackle even the most difficult days.
How Accurate is Garmin Body Battery?
Let me make one thing very clear:
Smartwatches are not by any means medical devices. Garmin watches are not an exception, regardless of how powerful they are.
In this respect, the energy reserve reading you get from these watches are nothing but estimated values meant to help you determine whether you can take on a challenging workout or focus on rest and recovery.
But here’s the thing:
Garmin has worked hard to ensure that it gives you accurate and reliable body battery reading. And that’s so because it relies on the data fed to the watch to give you results you can rely on to make informed workout decisions.
In testing, the Garmin Fenix 6 retuned a reading between 5 and 12 for an ill person, a key indicator that the measure of energy reserve is very accurate.
If you don’t get sufficient rest, or if your rest is not as restful, your energy reserve value will go below 5. However, Garmin’s body battery will never hit the zero mark.
How to Check Your Body Battery Score
You can view your body battery data on the watch or in the companion app.
1. Check Your Body Battery on the Garmin Watch Display
You can use the at-a-glance widget to displays the energy reserve score on the smartwatch’s display.
To do this:
- Swipe the display.
- Find Edit and tap it.
- Scroll down and select +Add.
- Find Body Battery and select it.
You can now see your graph score on the display at any given time.
Alternatively, you can switch to a watch face that allows you to see the same data without having to activate the at-a-glance widget.
- Go to the Settings Menu.
- Choose the Watch Face option.
- Pick a watch face that looks appealing to you.
- Go to Customize and then Data.
- Select a spot where you would like your score to appear.
And that’s it.
2. View Energy Reserve in Garmin Connect
The other option is to use the Garmin Connect app to view the same data.
- Launch the app on your iOS or Android smartphone.
- Select More.
- Tap Health Stats.
- Choose Body Battery.
With the app, you get full access to your data for the day, the previous day, and the past weeks.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is Body Battery Not Working on My Garmin Smartwatch?
It’s not working because you’ve connected your watch to multiple Garmin Connect accounts. There’s a high chance the data is showing in one of the accounts that you aren’t currently using.
Ensure you only have one Connect account, so you can get your data all in one place, even if you have multiple devices connected to the same app.
2. Why is My Body Battery Not Charging?
If your body battery does not increase, stays the same, or reduces the throughout the night, your Garmin watch may be having a bug.
Restarting the watch should help solve this problem. I’ve had to deal with a similar issue on my Garmin Venue SQ about three months ago, and the simple restart fixed it.
3. Why is My Body Battery Stuck at 5?
If you look at the watch’s display and notice that the reading won’t move past 5, it’s because you recently factory reset your Garmin watch.
Give the watch about a week to learn how your body works. That’s usually enough time for algorithm to collect enough data to give you a reasonable estimate of your energy reserve readings.
