Garmin Forerunner 630 review: The fitness watch for serious runners

Garmin has kept us waiting patiently since it was first announced, but the Forerunner 630 has finally arrived. As Garmin’s top-flight running-specific watch, it’s designed to push keen runners to new heights, personal bests and provide a wealth of ultra-detailed performance data that other mere fitness trackers can only dream of. Oh, and it’ll ping your Facebook updates to your wrist, too. The only downside? It costs as much as three pairs of (very nice) running shoes.

The Forerunner 630 looks like it means business. Where the jack-of-all-trades Garmin Vivoactive opts for a simple, low-profile design, the Forerunner 630 is every bit the burly sports watch. It feels much tougher and sturdier than most fitness trackers I’ve encountered, and the thick rubber strap also feels built to last. It’s much thicker and stronger than the plain silicone band on the Vivoactive I wear every day. It isn’t heavy, though, weighing only 44g and, as it’s also waterproof down to 50 metres, you don’t have to worry about getting soaked.

One of the big upgrades over Garmin’s more affordable Forerunner 230 and 235 running watches is that the 630 adds a bright touchscreen to the mix. This isn’t as responsive as the touchscreens you’ll find on most smartwatches, or many other fitness trackers, but even that has its benefits. It takes a little more pressure to react to each touch, but it works with gloves and even when the screen is wet, which is incredibly handy when you have to drag yourself out to train in the depths of British winter.  

The Forerunner 630’s circular display is just a tad larger than that of the Vivoactive’s, and it uses the same reflective, low-power colour display technology, meaning it’s incredibly clear in daylight. The flip side is that at night, or dark conditions, you need to activate the front light with a button to make it legible, but this isn’t much of a problem.  

And it pays huge dividends for battery life, with Garmin claiming up to 16 hours of GPS-enabled training and as much as four weeks in “Watch” mode. If 16 hours isn’t enough, however, the addition of UltraTrac GPS tracking promises to push battery life even further. This periodically turns off the GPS and uses the watch’s accelerometer to calculate running speed and distance covered. Nifty.

When the Forerunner 630 does finally run out of battery, there are no clever wireless charging features to get excited about. Instead, Garmin has dreamt up yet another proprietary charging cable, something it seems to do with unerring regularity, which clips to the side of the device.

Garmin sent us the Forerunner 630 bundle which includes the new HRM-RUN v2 heart-rate chest strap in the box. This adds a few handy features (more on which shortly) to that of the original strap, but bear in mind that you don’t need to splash out if you already have a v1 Garmin strap. It’s possible to update the firmware on the v1 by connecting it to one of the newer devices, such as the Forerunner 630, and save yourself around £40 in the process.

Garmin Forerunner 630: Run, Forrest, run (or go for a ride)

The big, big news here, however, is the breadth of running statistics the Forerunner 630 is able to analyse on the fly. Go for a run, and the sheer wealth of data pulled out by Garmin’s Running Dynamics feature is wildly impressive, perhaps even a touch daunting for the uninitiated. Bear in mind, though, that these features are only available with Garmin’s own HRM-Run chest straps – third-party straps are not supported.

Thanks to sensors within the HRM-Run chest strap, the Forerunner 630 detects – deep breath – running cadence, ground contact time, vertical oscillation (how much you bounce with each step), left-right balance (how long each foot touches the ground for), stride length, and vertical ratio (the ratio of vertical bounce to stride length, lower being better).

What this means, in layman’s terms, is that the Forerunner 630 is able to learn more about your running style, and any potential issues with your technique, than most other fitness trackers could ever hope to.  

All this comes in addition to a variety of other running-focussed features. Like the Microsoft Band 2, the Forerunner 630 estimates VO2 Max, although as this figure is the amount of oxygen you can consume, per kilogram of body weight, it is only an estimate. It uses your heart rate and performance to give you an estimated recovery time after each workout; and if you follow a guided test, it even claims it can calculate your lactate threshold to give an idea of how hard you can go before risking blowing up completely.

The reality is impressive. Taking a run around the block on a cold day with a dodgy knee resulted in the Garmin telling me that I was very slightly favouring my good leg. You can monitor your form in real-time by scrolling to the Running Dynamics screens: here, colour-coded graphs indicate when your form or balance is shifting, so even if you do have to read the manual before you understand it all, you don’t have to interpret pages of numbers to get a feeling for when your technique is going awry.

Factor in its running-specific abilities that let you race against virtual training partners, against your previous workouts, set pace targets or create your own bespoke interval training sessions, and it’s clear that this isn’t a device for the average runner.

With its running focus, the Forerunner 630 doesn’t provide a huge variety of extra activity modes and, unlike the Vivoactive, there’s no option for golf or swimming.

However, where the 630’s predecessor originally shipped with no other sport tracking modes at all, now there is a little more flexibility: a Bike mode lets you pair ANT+ sensors for speed and cadence, and swaps running pace for average speed and so forth; a Run Indoor mode uses the accelerometer, rather than GPS, to measure pace and distance; and there’s a Race profile, which you can customise to prioritise different data screens.

It’s also possible to create custom profiles if you want to customise the data screens and device settings for a specific activity.

Garmin Forerunner 630: Connectivity, Notifications and Connect IQ

Getting data off the Forerunner and up into the cloud is easy. Fire up the Garmin Connect app on your iOS or Android device and, once you’ve paired the Forerunner, all your data syncs automatically via Bluetooth. If that sounds like too much hassle, you can hook it up to your PC or laptop and, using the Garmin Express application, have it synchronise over Wi-Fi every time you’re in range of your home network.

It’s not all about exercise, either. Once connected to your phone, the Forerunner 630 doesn’t just do a good impression of a bog-standard watch – it also pings notifications to your wrist, letting you know when one arrives with a helpful buzz. There isn’t a great deal of granularity to the process.

You either get all the notifications appearing on your phone or none at all, but you can, at least, decide to block notifications during a workout.  Here you can choose to have only phone calls ping you, or absolutely nothing at all.

The notifications themselves are basic, too, but while you don’t get to scroll through the full messages, it’s normally enough to save you from having to pick up your phone and check.

Elsewhere, the Forerunner 630 also carries over all the Connect IQ features from Garmin’s other recent watches. This makes it possible to install all manner of watch faces and basic apps from the Connect IQ store, where third-party developers are allowed to add all the features that you could ask for.

For example, install the third-party ActiFace watch face, and the Forerunner 630’s basic, rather uninformative default screen is replaced with one that details your daily and weekly distance covered, the time, date, number of new notifications, steps taken and even the local sunset time. As developers get to grips with Connect IQ, you can expect a whole host of new apps to appear.

Garmin Forerunner 630: Fitness and sleep tracking

The Forerunner 630 also shares all of the basic fitness tracking features of Garmin’s lower ranking devices. Plod around day-to-day and the Forerunner will happily record all your step data, tell you how far you’ve travelled in total – including your runs and rides – and automatically adjusts your step targets to make sure you’re pushing yourself a little further every day.

If you’re the type of person who forgets to get up from your desk and walk around once in a while, the Move Alert function will be a great help (or the bane of your life). Over time, your inactivity levels mount slowly, and after a while, the Garmin will prod you on the wrist with an insistent buzz. I find it’s the perfect reminder to take the stairs down to the vending machine to buy sugary snacks. You can turn this off, though, and I suspect that the target market for the Forerunner 630 won’t need any encouragement to get up and move around.

Automatic sleep tracking is on the cards, too, and this needs no manual input whatsoever. Just fire up the Garmin Connect app on your iOS or Android device, or access it via the web portal, and you can see your shuteye split into light and deep sleep, with brief interruptions marked with a pink dash. It’s genuinely helpful at times, and if your training is suffering, or you’re feeling under the weather, it can be reassuring to know you can put it down to a bad night’s sleep.

Garmin Forerunner 630: Verdict

In truth, I don’t need a high-end running watch to tell me I’m a poor runner, but even I can see the potential in reaching beyond straightforward pace and heart rate measurements during training for big events.

Is your form suffering after a certain distance? Then, maybe, you need to work harder on your core strength. Are you favouring one leg over the other? Then perhaps you need to work harder on stretching, or freeing up that creaky-feeling hip.

Even the straightforward ability to see that you’re maintaining the same pace, albeit with better balance and form, is an insight that you’d never be able to glean from Garmin’s lower-rung devices or everyday fitness trackers.

It’s fair to say that the Forerunner 630 is all about giving keen, everyday runners the tools they need to improve. If the mere mention of lactate threshold and VO2 Max makes you yearn for a biscuit and a sit-down, you’re probably better off with the likes of Garmin’s simpler, cheaper Vivoactive. But, if you want a device that challenges you to go further and faster than ever, then there’s no question: the Garmin Forerunner 630 is the next best thing to a real, human running coach.

See also: The best smartwatches of 2016 – Alphr’s favourite wearables