Frustrated with the inaccuracies of my new Garmin watch

After a lot of research and comparing different smartwatch brands and models, I decided to go with a Garmin Forerunner 165. Was pretty confident in my decision, but now I’m just disappointed. It feels like nothing is accurate.

The sleep tracking is horrendous. Sometimes my watch can’t even tell if I’m sleeping, and it records sleep if I’m just relaxing. Or it’ll stop recording sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night, and therefore record 5-7 hours of sleep instead of the actual 8-9, which results in a bad sleep score. And since most of the other metrics (body battery, recovery, stress, etc.) are based on sleep, those end up being useless.

On to the actual fitness metrics. I only started running a few months ago, yet Garmin has my VO2 max as 51, the top 5% of my age and gender. And my predicted 5k time is 22:37 which is just… lol. I can’t even break 30 minutes yet!

As for calories burned, I know they aren’t gonna be 100% accurate, but this is just ridiculous. Today I ran 8.41 miles (average pace 10:51/mile), but apparently only burned 360 active calories. There is just no way I burned that little. And my steps outside of runs seem to burn little to no calories, it’s like my watch doesn’t seem to register me being active unless I actually start an activity.

I doubt the steps themselves are accurate either. They’re always at least 10% off (in either direction) from the steps recorded by my phone, which seems quite random and makes me not trust the step counts at all.

Outside of the inaccuracies, I don’t find the watch very useful. I wanted to use the run coach to train for a half-marathon this fall, but it has me running less than 30 minutes per session, which is a huge downgrade from my previous 30-40 mile weeks. Yesterday it wanted me to run an 8 minute easy run lmao what is the point of that?

Overall, I’m quite disappointed. I expected more from a watch I spent $380 on. Can I get some insight as to why everything is so inaccurate and what the use of this watch is supposed to be if I can’t trust any of the stats it gives me? I guess the HR sensor is accurate, that’s pretty much it lol.