New data gives a real-time look at overall health and wellness of Garmin customers in 2024.
It’s that time of year again. The end-of-year reports are rolling in — what did you listen to, what did you read, which of your social media posts earned you the most internet clout? In a 24/7 cycle of endless streams of content, we’re used to the constant notifications, but you have to admit: They do get considerably more interesting when the main subject is, well, you.
At Garmin, we get the opportunity to provide you with some of the most meaningful stats you’ll see all year. When you buy a Garmin smartwatch, you receive access to a wealth of personalised insights available in Garmin Connect. That data isn’t just related to your fitness (although we certainly have insights there, too). It’s about how well you slept, how your body responded to stress, how much energy you had — in short, it’s about how you lived on a daily basis.
Cool, right? So without further ado, let’s see how you lived in 2024.
Body Battery™
The Body Battery feature on your Garmin watch is exactly what it sounds like: a measurement of your personal energy levels (the “battery” that keeps you going) around the clock. It factors in the influences of physical activity, stress, heart rate, rest and sleep¹ to give you a real-time analysis of how your body’s performing throughout the day.
Wondering if your Body Battery numbers are normal? We rounded up some 2024 data to help you see where you fit in with other Garmin users:
- Average Body Battery levels: Your Body Battery is typically going to be the highest in the morning when you first wake up. The average high for Garmin users in the a.m. is 71. Naturally, then, the lowest point is going to be in the evening when you’re ready for bed. The average low for Garmin users ready to hit the hay is 22. This puts the average daily Body Battery drain, or energy expenditure, at 49.
- Body Battery throughout the week: Just like everyone’s physiological buildup is going to be different, everyone’s week is also going to look different. But looking at average metrics throughout the week, the pattern is clear. Garmin users have the most energy on Tuesdays, with an average morning Body Battery score of 74. They hit their lowest daily Body Battery score on Saturdays, with an average of 20 in the evenings before bed. The most energy they expend is typically on Tuesdays, with a drain of 50, and the least they expend is on Sundays, with an average drain of 47.
- Body Battery throughout the year: It’s probably not surprising that the lowest average Body Battery score — as well as the least amount of energy expenditure — occurred on 1 Jan. It’s probably safe to say that you rang in the new year with a bit of celebratory fun, and who can blame you? Some of the other peaks and valleys, though, are less clearly explained. The highest daily Body Battery, for example, was 10 Sep, which was a Tuesday. The highest energy expenditure was on 27 Aug, also a Tuesday. And the most exhausted evening — the worst day of the year for those Body Battery scores — was Saturday, 20 July.
- Country with the highest average Body Battery: Congratulations to the Netherlands! At 74, you all have the most energy around the globe.
- Country with the lowest average Body Battery: Japan came in at the tail end of the charts with an average daily Body Battery score of 66.
Sleep Score
There is no replacement for a good night’s rest — and you’ll notice as you look through this data that it correlates very closely with Body Battery scores. Not a shocker, right? The better you sleep, the more energy you have — and if you haven’t realised it yet, wearing your Garmin smartwatch to track your sleep will make every other body metric that much more accurate and valuable. (You really don’t need to charge it every night. We promise.)
Take a gander to see if your z’s are as good as — or perhaps better than — the rest of the Garmin community:
- Average sleep score: 71. This is categorised as “Fair” in terms of quality, so this is a middle-of-the-road number. As a whole, Garmin users could be sleeping better — but they could also be sleeping a whole lot worse. Looking to improve sleep patterns? Here are some tips that could help.
- Best night of sleep per week: Since the average Body Battery score is highest on Tuesdays, this isn’t surprising — Garmin users are sleeping the best on Monday nights into Tuesday mornings, with an average sleep score on this day of 73.
- Worst night of sleep per week: And since Body Batteries tend to get lowest on Saturday nights, you’re also getting your worst sleep on Saturday nights into Sunday mornings, with an average sleep score of 68.
- Best night of sleep of 2024: Are you noticing a pattern yet? Sleep impacts everything. So if the highest average Body Battery was on 10 Sep, then yep, you guessed it: The best night of sleep was 9 Sep into the morning of 10 Sep, with an average of 74. Remind us to plan something really fun on 10 Sep this year.
- Worst night of sleep of 2024: Like we said, you had fun on New Year’s Eve. The worst night of sleep was the night of 31 Dec to the morning of 1 Jan, with an average sleep score of 58.
- Country with best average sleep score: Our legal team would like us to note that we are not responsible for the influx in tourism or immigration this report may cause, because in addition to having the most energy, people in the Netherlands also get the best sleep with an average of 73 — nearly three points higher than the global average.
- Country with worst average sleep score: Better luck next year, Indonesia. There’s some room for improvement with an average sleep score of only 64 (which falls under the “Poor” category).
Stress Score
Stress is not just a feeling you get when you’re stuck in traffic before a big meeting or when your to-do list gets out of control. It’s an actual physiological response to the challenges of your life and environment, preparing you to react quickly to whatever comes next — and it’s all tracked on compatible Garmin smartwatches.
Stress levels of 0–100 are calculated by our Firstbeat Analytics™ engine, which uses mostly the heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) data that’s recorded by the optical heart rate sensor on the back of your device². Feel like 2024 has been a particularly stressful year? Let’s see how you compare to your peers:
- Average stress score: Globally, Garmin users came in at an average of 30 for the year, which is categorised as low. Perhaps you’ve all been practicing your breathwork?
- Lowest average stress score of the week: Maybe Mondays aren’t so bad after all, because it’s the least stressful day of the week for Garmin users, with an average stress score of 29.
- Highest average stress score of the week: On average, Saturdays saw the highest stress scores of the week at 32. It’s important to note here that positive situations, like the jitters you might feel before a big race, can also increase your stress level — as can excessive exercise, the consumption of caffeine, poor nutrition and getting sick.
- Highest average stress score of the year: The most stressful day for Garmin users this year was Saturday, 21 Sep, with an average stress score of 33. This leads us to believe that you either had very fun Friday nights or you were all crushing your fitness goals that weekend. Either way, we’re here for it.
- Lowest average stress score of the year: The lowest stress score for the year, surprisingly, was 2 Jan, with an average of 28. Either you all took an extra day off from work, or you spent so much time recovering on New Year’s Day that even going back to work couldn’t dampen your mood.
- Highest average stress score: Our friends in Malaysia had the highest stress scores this year with an average of 33.
- Lowest average stress score: South Koreans, on the other hand, were the most relaxed, with an average stress score for the year of 28.
Training Readiness
Garmin users tend to push it pretty hard when it comes to their training. You all are on a quest to beat yesterday, and every time we look into the data, we realise that you really never let up for long. That being said, though, everyone occasionally needs to scale it back to give their body a chance to recover. Enter the Garmin training readiness feature. It’s a multi-layered analysis that takes into account your activity and lifestyle data to determine how ready you are at any given time for a tough workout.
On your compatible smartwatch, you’ll receive a score of 1–24 (Poor), 25–49 (Low), 50–74 (Moderate), 75–94 (High), or 95–100 (Prime) to help you determine when to time your workout and ultimately improve your performance over time.
- Average training readiness: Garmin users had an average training readiness score of 60 for the year, which means you were (on average) moderately ready to have a good workout.
- Highest weekly average training readiness: Likely tied to low stress scores on Monday, the best nights of sleep Monday night into Tuesday morning, and high Body Battery levels on Tuesday, Garmin users were the readiest to maximise training efficiency on Tuesdays, with an average score of 62.
- Lowest weekly average training readiness: Also not a surprise, since we know you were hitting it hard on Saturdays, Sundays saw the lowest training readiness scores with an average of 57.
- Highest average training readiness of the year: We hope you hit some goals on 23 April, because Garmin users had their best average training readiness score at 64.
- Lowest average training readiness of the year: Not surprisingly, few of you were ready to go hard on 1 Jan, with a collective average score of 44.
- Country with highest average training readiness: On average, New Zealand is more prepared for a workout than the rest of us, with an average training readiness score of 64.
- Country with lowest average training readiness: South Koreans, on the other hand, may need some lower-intensity workouts, as their average training readiness score came in at only 51.
Training Status
If training readiness is an indicator of how prepared your body is for a workout, then you can think of training status as an evaluation of how well those workouts are going. It’s a multidimensional analysis that connects the dots between how you train and the results you get.
Rather than a number, your compatible smartwatch will assign you a status category: Peaking, Productive, Maintaining, Strained, Unproductive, Overreaching, Recovery or Detraining. (You may also see “No Status” if your device doesn’t yet have enough information to give you an evaluation, or “Paused” if you’ve decided to pause the training status in your device settings.)
Interestingly, training status for Garmin users in 2024 seems linked to seasonality in the Northern Hemisphere. Detraining statuses were most common in October, November and December; Overtraining statuses were most common in January, and Peaking and Productive statuses were most common in June, July, August and September.
Daily Steps
As simple as it may seem, a great indicator of how active someone is on a regular basis is how many steps they’re getting in each day. Factors like age, weight, current fitness levels and more will impact what the golden number is for you, but more steps generally leads to improved health outcomes.
On average, Garmin users around the world are taking 8,317 steps per day. Hong Kong has the highest daily average with 10,340, while Garmin users in Indonesia are a bit less mobile at 5,375 steps per day.
Fitness Age
Your fitness age on your compatible Garmin smartwatch is an estimate of how fit you are compared to your actual age. This value takes into consideration metrics including body mass index (BMI), average resting heart rate and average vigorous activity and compares them with those of people of similar ages within your same gender.
On average, Garmin users are 2.48 years “younger” than their real ages. For women, that’s 1.94 years younger on average, while men tend to have a slightly higher gap with fitness ages that are 2.75 years younger than their actual ages.
Activity Percentage Increases
Each year, we take a look at how often Garmin users are moving in comparison to the year before. Since we have such a broad range of athletes, this means we have an incredible number of activities — so each year, we closely examine everything from gravel cycling to horse riding to understand just exactly where our users are kicking it up a notch.
Below, we’ve highlighted percentage increases in some of our most commonly completed activities — and to no one’s surprise, you all outdid yourselves in pretty much every arena. As always, it’s an inspiration to see.
Outdoor
Indoor
Not seeing your stats reflected in this report? Or feeling inspired to improve them after learning where you fall amidst your peers? Shop the Garmin lineup of smartwatches to receive personalised health and wellness insights designed to help you beat yesterday.
¹Data presented is intended to be a close estimation of metrics tracked.
²This is not a medical device and not intended for diagnosing or monitoring medical conditions.
