Best Sports Smart Watches to Buy in 2022

Despite being diminutive in size, sports smartwatches can really pack a punch by bringing the power of a feature-packed GPS device onto your wrist. 

Whether you are a backcountry explorer or hitting the gym for hours, tracking activities, sticking to a preloaded sports regimen, or even navigating a complex terrain has become effortless and hands-free now! But which sports smartwatch is the best?

With so many options available, it can be hard to know which one is right for you. So, we’ve researched and found the best smartwatches on the market. We’ve also included buying guides on how to find the right one for you.

So, if you’re looking for the best sports smart watches, read on.

What is a Sports Smartwatch?

A sports smartwatch is a highly functional, easily legible, and water-resistant smartwatch that helps you stay connected and keep up with your active life daily and seamlessly. 

No more juggling your super-busy life with the everyday workout – with a quality sports smartwatch, tracking activities becomes effortless, even if your smartphone is not nearby. 

The thing here to remember is that a sports watch can never supersede your training coach; instead, it’s an additional layer of assistance when your coach is not available. 

The Difference Between a Sports Watch and a Smartwatch

With the skyrocketing advancements in modern science and technology, sports watches are on a constant upsurge. But many users equate sports watches with smartwatches. However, they are not identical. 

Simply put, a smartwatch is an extension of the smartphone you use. 

A sports watch operates based on its own OS, a smartwatch works on Android Wear or WatchOS, and via Bluetooth or ANT+ connectivity. It interacts with your smartphone when the distance between these two devices is proximal. Thus you can receive incoming calls, send texts, download apps, and connect to the internet using your smartwatch. 

On the flip side, a sports watch is specially devised to help you keep an expert eye on your training progress. 

Most avant-garde sports watches come with customised sports profiles to pick from. Plus you can tailor these profiles based on your preferred game. 

Via interactive graphs, charts, and tables, these game-focused devices allow you to visualise your essential sports-specific metric – pace, cadence, distance covered, VO2 max, THR zone, steps taken, heart rate, SpO2, and more. 

Benefits of Sports Smart Watches

With more people being health-conscious now and leading a more active lifestyle, putting on a sports watch is no longer a luxury or extravagance. 

While some use it to follow up on their running metrics, some simply wear one to stay motivated to exert them a bit more to be on track! 

Of course, you don’t have to break the bank and purchase a premium watch with a hefty price tag – all you need is to identify your health requirements and cash in on the most suitable one that can help hit your fitness target. 

Let’s dig deeper into the benefits of wearing a sports watch and see how a sports smartwatch comes with some incredible pay-offs:

• It’s Your Electronic Training Log: How about having a cool-looking device conveniently wrapping around your wrist and logging your activity details automatically? If you need to track your workout progress on the go or even offline, a sports smartwatch should be your go-to choice. From the speed you have reached to the calorie burned, now everything is electronically stored in your device. 
• Smart sports watches are like your personal training instructor telling you when you should slow down or speed up your training intensity based on your current fitness level so you can efficiently hit your fitness target. Plus, the built-in GPS constantly pings locations and ensures you hit your target mark within your set time frame. So you can get motivated to stick to your goal and stay the course. 
• Cross the Finish Line Faster: Thanks to top-tier smart sports watches that constantly ping as you lead up to a race competition – it notifies how fast you have gotten and the distance you have covered. So you can put the fire back into the activity if you’ve slowed down and feel motivated to push yourself harder, get more strength, and boost your pace during a training run.
• Helps You to Focus on Distance: With a GPS-enabled sports watch, you can get constructive feedback whether you are in intensity-variant interval training or distance-focused bursts. So you can, doing no involved estimation on mileage, hit trail, road, track, or anything – whether you prefer pace or stride running! 
• You Can Join a Community: Some avant-garde sports watches allow syncing your activity data over to a compatible mobile application that lets you share your workout data with fellow sportspersons. So you’re more likely to feel motivated and stay on the right track. 

What to Look for in a Sports Smartwatch?

The ultimate journey to optimising your fitness level begins with figuring out your current physical condition before you jump into your workout routine. 

And the significance of getting in-depth insights into your body stats in gauging your fitness condition and setting a long-term fitness target is beyond words. 

Thanks to sports watches that help beginners and even expert endurance athletes measure sports performance efficiently.

Whether you have just started practicing or are a pro athlete, you will find the market bustling with tons of sports watches that come in various price tiers, including different packages of various functionalities and features. 

So, what features make a quality sports watch package worth your investment? Let’s dig deeper:

Built-in GPS

If you are in outdoor sports and need to constantly track your pace, elevation, distance covered, etc., a sports watch with built-in GPS can be your go-to device. 

A GPS-enabled watch measures your covered distance accurately by continuously pinging locations and receiving satellite data. Whether you are riding, mountaineering, trekking, or hiking, get accurate sports insights at your fingertips with a GPS watch. 

However, with the GPS mode turned on, your watch will juice up the charge faster. 

Longer Battery Life

You would never want your daily wear watch to run short of juice frequently, right? Make sure you spend on a device that works fine for at least a few days before you recharge the battery.

Heart Rate Monitoring

Most wrist-based smartwatches run on PPG technology that uses optical sensors to glean your heart rate. The sensor sits on your wrist, and the LEDs in the sensor shine lights of various wavelengths onto your wrist skin to measure the volumetric variation in your blood flow and translate it into pulse value. 

This way, you can keep an eye on your RPM during training and evaluate when you are doing fat-burning work, rather than aerobic, anaerobic, etc. In other words, the smartwatch is a real wrist heart rate monitor!

App-Syncing

Investing in a sports watch with no company-specific mobile app is a big fat NO. With a sports watch with app-syncing functionality, your activity data gets stored and auto-synced over to a fully-fledged application that offers interactive visualisation of your performance. 

Plus, with a compatible app, monitoring and tracking health metrics become effortless – with a few clicks, you get your data on your heart rate, pace, distance, etc., popping up in the app dashboard. So you can, without doing complex calculations, measure your progress. 

Non-Sports Activity Monitoring 

While the sole purpose of a smart sports watch is to help keep a close look at your sports-specific metrics, it can also show up some non-activity metrics – sleep duration, blood oxygen saturation level, HRV, R-R intervals, calorie burned, RHR and more. So having a top-end sports watch means you don’t have to spend on a separate fitness tracker to track these metrics accurately.

Multiple Sport Tracking

For a triathlete, a sports watch with multisport tracking functionality can offer the best bang for the buck. For instance, your device may be great at tracking your running distance or speed, but does it also detect and count your swimming strokes, laps, or splits? 

With a top-tier multi-functional model, you can customise your training routine and tailor it based on the workout you prefer and access different data points to store and monitor your endurance performance efficiently. 

Design

Unless you intend to put it on only during training, a quality fitness tracker should rock the dapper design. It should look cool while sitting on your wrist. So you can leverage its technology and sensors onboard throughout the day rather than wrapping a boring watch to keep tabs on your HR while hitting the gym.

Plus, go for a fully water-resistant watch – the higher the water resistance rating, the better the device is. 

Heart Rate Monitoring

All high-end fitness watches come with HR monitoring optical sensors. 

However, chest strap HRMs, by working on ECG technology, can monitor heart rate more accurately than wrist-based wearable operating on PPG technology. 

By coupling the pulse data detected by the built-in photodetector with the motion data measured by the accelerometer, these PPG-based watches display an almost accurate motion-variant heart rate value. Thus, you can better track your RPM while working out, ensure optimal caloric expenditure, avoid lactic acid buildup, and more.

Connectivity

Though few low-budget fitness devices come with ANT+ connection only, most chart-topping devices support ANT+ and Bluetooth connectivity simultaneously. So with few clicks and far less time, you can connect with other company-specific and compatible external sports apps and stay on top of your game. 

Choosing a watch that can sync with a spectrum of external services is a big plus. 

Best Sports Smart Watches to Buy

Let’s look through our hand-picked list of the best sports smart watches:

Coros Apex

Tec Specs

Weight: 2.0 oz.

Diameters: 42, 46mm

Battery: Lithium-ion coin cell (35 hrs in GPS mode)

Display Type: Always-On Memory LCD

Display Size: 1.2 Inch

Coros Apex has become a chart-topping multisports smartwatch over the last few years, constantly pulling the street ahead of the competition.

Packing loads of essential features in its well-constructed, sleek, and super-light frame, Apex helps triathletes keep an expert eye on their performance and track improvements even on the go. 

Incorporating ABC functionality, and 200+ preloaded workouts with Coros’s sport-specific mobile app, Apex, the minimalist watch, is the best package in its price bracket for those who love adventure, trek fast, and require the best with no limitations. 

Whether you hit trails for hours or work in the office, Apex’s sophisticated dapper configuration and high-level build can fit into any aesthetics seamlessly. With a Titanium alloy bezel, sapphire crystal watch lens, and sturdy silicone band for top-notch protection, this smartwatch can offer the best bang for the buck. 

Garmin Fenix

Tech Specs

Weight: 2.8 oz.

Battery: Lithium-ion coin cell (40 hrs in all satellite on mode)

Diameters: 42, 47, 51mm

Display Type: Transflective MIP (memory-in-pixel) and sunlight-visible

Display Size: 1.3″

Garmin’s flagship product, the Garmin Fenix 7 multisport fitness watch that builds off of the already-successful Garmin 6 Pro, is constantly pumping out the competitions.

By pairing stupendous functionality with an intelligent and improved build, this rugged watch can surely outrun your expectation when considering premium backcountry-ready devices. 

With offline mapping and loads of preloaded sports-specific activity  – from skiing and surfing to HIIT – plus a spectrum of essential activity metrics fed by its high-end sensor arsenal, the Garmin Fenix 7 truly transforms exertion into exhilaration. 

Enabling smart notifications, music compatibility, contactless payment, respiration tracking, optical HR measurement, sleep scoring, sophisticated sleep pattern monitoring, ABC technology, SpO2 measurement, and much more, Fenix 7 ensures you can track your health 24/7 effortlessly.

If you can stretch your budget, Fenix 7, the ultimate combination of sporting endurance and high-level activity tracking, can be your choice.

Coros Pace 2

Tech Specs

Display: 1.2″

Weight: 1.02 ounces

Battery Life: 20 days for regular use and 60 hours with UltraMax mode on

Water-resistance Rating: 5 ATM

Connectivity: ANT+, Bluetooth, and GPS

If you are searching for a feature-loaded power-packed triathlon sports watch without breaking the bank, Coros Pace 2 can be your ultimate companion for the long haul. 

Whether you’re just getting into sports, preparing for your next big marathon, or need heart rate monitoring, fitness level evaluation, or sleep tracking, this dapper design in a lightweight structure has all you can expect from premium sports watches of hefty price tags. 

With more storage, RAM, and processing speed than the predecessor Pace, Coros Pace 2 is a power that brings endurance to your wrist. 

Whether you are swimming or running, Pace 2 multisports watch can guide you through its well-programmed training sessions. 

Polar Vantage V2

Tech Specs

Weight: 52g

Battery: 346mAh Lithium polymer battery (40 hours in Training mode)

Display: always-on color touch display

Display Size: 1.2″

Being a flagship Polar product, Vantage V2 bridges the gap between a traditional and smart sports watch, offering loads of power-packed functionalities and plenty of data to pore over. 

Carefully engineered and devised to allow exercisers to be on top of their game, V2 is a blend of innovation and minimalist layout that fine-tunes your workout efficiency.

From logging your activities to walking you through the most successful recovery process with a comprehensive Polar Training Test, Vantage V2 is a high-end training device that packs a punch. 

While it’s lightweight at a little over 1 ounce, the super-refined curves belie a rugged construction: fronted by laminated Gorilla Glass, the aluminum casing meets military-level durability standards and is fall-proof and water-resistant down to 100m. 

Though the display may not seem crispest, it’s translucent and large enough to help get a quick glimpse of your training metrics and hit the target. 

Garmin Forerunner 245 Music

Tech specs

Display Size: 1.2″ 

Water Resistance Rating: 5 ATM

Battery: Lasts up to 6 hours (With GPS+music on)

If you need a quality running watch, you would be hard-pressed to find a better one than Forerunner 245 Music – a sleek design with an intelligent build that constantly cuts back on bulk, offering running dynamics tracking, a longer-lasting battery, and Spotify music even on the go!

With a sweatproof, highly durable silicone band and long-lasting Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3, Forerunner 245 Music ensures you can be super-efficient anytime, anywhere!

With GLONASS, GPS, and Galileo global navigation satellites, Forerunner 245 Music ensures you can slay the training day with the most pleasing positioning experience, no matter where you are.

Suunto 9 Peak

With over 80 tracking models and enduring battery life of up to 25 hours of sports tracking with GPS turned on, Suunto 9 peak, the company’s flagship device, is best for endurance athletes who need advanced tracking. 

From offering activity and sleep tracking to stress and recovery status reports, Suunto 9 Peak ensures you are training efficiently and not overexerting yourself. 

It’s a slim fully-featured multisports GPS watch that comes with a sapphire watch lens and grade 5 titanium and ticks almost all boxes you need. 

With Peak’s intelligent Snap to Route functionality, mapping out tracks in advance has become effortless like never before.