Garmin Forerunner 970 review — A top-tier running and triathlon watch

The Garmin Forerunner 970 is a real contender for the best running watch of them all, as long as you are willing to spend the requisite money.

It has numerous higher-end fitness and running features, and as of June 2025, it is the brightest Garmin watch we’ve ever used. The Forerunner 970 flourishes in the summer, even if you do have to pay for that clarity in battery life. Under heavy use, the Forerunner 970 won’t last nearly as long as some older Forerunners.

The Forerunner 970 is also perhaps a little pricey for UK buyers, at $749.99/£629.99. That is $150/£30 more than the predecessor Forerunner 965’s $599.99/£599.99, which was one of the best high-end fitness watch deals of its generation.

There’s a bit of a sting for US buyers, but a much less pronounced one for those in the UK.

Garmin Forerunner 970 review

Garmin Forerunner 970: Design

The Forerunner series is home to some of Garmin’s most practical and easy-to-recommend watches. Its Garmin Forerunner 970 tests that premise, being the most expensive of the lot. But this is still an easy-to-like design.

It doesn’t have the bulky, intimidating appearance of Garmin’s adventure-bound Instinct watches, and the mostly-plastic build keeps the weight to a light 56g.

Think it’s crazy to spend this much on a plastic casing watch? That’s just part of the bargain when you buy a Garmin.

This is an ultra-tough polymer, though, and there are metal touches throughout. The Forerunner 970 has a titanium bezel with a matt finish on its front-facing edge. All the buttons are metal, too, as is the little lime green Forerunner panel on the side.

A truly ultra-rugged design is what the Forerunner 970 lacks. The bezel does not sit significantly proud of the screen, a design used in some Garmin models to help deflect surfaces and objects away from the screen glass.

Now, several weeks into using the Forerunner 970, we would also advise against thinking titanium means the bezel won’t get damaged. We’ve already put a few scrapes into its matt surface. Oddly enough, we tend to find it’s Garmin’s “polymer” plastic watches that often age the best.

The main body of the Forerunner 970 is made of this plastic polymer and appears to be a single piece of it. This watch also only has 5ATM water resistance, not the 10ATM of the Fenix 8. It’s a reminder that Forerunner is a runner-first series, even if Garmin does also recommend this series for triathletes.

It’s easily tough enough and rugged enough for most, myself included, but doesn’t have a laser focus on being abuse-ready compared to more adventure-ready families like Garmin Instinct. That said, the jump to Sapphire crystal display protection is a big boost over the Gorilla Glass of the previous Forerunner 965.

There’s also no size option beyond 47mm in diameter. We are perfectly happy with this size, but if you prefer a more petite watch, you may well prefer something in the 40-42mm bracket. There’s the pricier Fenix 8 (43mm) or the lower-end Forerunner 570 (42mm), for example.

Garmin Forerunner 970: Features

The Garmin Forerunner 970 has just about every feature you could ask for, bar the dive-ready water resistance Garmin added in the Fenix 8.

On-watch maps are one of the key things you’re paying for, above the step-down Forerunner 570. You can download whole continents’ worth to the 32 GB internal storage.

With a cheaper Forerunner, you can still transfer planned routes to the watch for navigation but here you can see full colour maps as you go. We’ve done this a few times during testing, and it. It might be the best such experience we’ve ever had with a Garmin watch.

Why? The Forerunner 970 has a great mapping display screen that provides the map plus some essential stats — all you need. And this thing’s 1.4-inch AMOLED screen is exceptionally bright. In more than a decade of reviewing wearables, we’re not sure display brightness has ever stood out to me as much as this.

The Forerunner 970 really goes for it too, making the screen look ultra-clear on bright and sunny days throughout multi-hour workouts rather than playing safe to conserve power. It feels positively indulgent, even if it does predictably have an effect on battery life. More on that later.

Garmin has also done its best to blend the sense that the Forerunner 970 is a hardcore runner’s watch and also a lifestyle device. It bookends your days with Evening and Morning reports, which show the upcoming weather, your calendar and — the really important bit — your suggested workout for the next day.

Morning Report has been around for yonks but the Evening one is newer. And we find it can be useful when Garmin suggests a tougher workout. Who doesn’t need some mental preparation time for a sprint session?

What’s specifically new for the Forerunner series is the Forerunner 970’s combo of a speaker and mic. This enables two flavours of voice-prompted assistant.

Voice Command lets you control parts of the watch. That might be starting a run session, increasing screen brightness, or using the Find My Phone feature. But the part that’s actually useful? Setting timers. The best bit: the Forerunner 970 can do this all without being connected to your phone, which is neat.

The Forerunner 970 can also be used as a conduit to your phone’s own assistant. This is less exciting, though, as the watch itself isn’t really doing any of the work. And neither of these voice assistant modes feels immediate. There’s a short wait while you hope it’ll work.

Additionally, the Forerunner 970 has a flashlight, which used to be the preserve of Garmin’s bulkiest watches. Up on the top sidewall of the watch, easy to miss, there are two white LEDs and a red one, used when you don’t want to cast too much light and just need to see your near-field surroundings.

The Forerunner 970 has an adventurer’s edge after all.

It also introduces a few new stats, alongside the long-running (and super-useful) Training Readiness and Training Load. The Forerunner 970 adds Running Tolerance, which is a stat — expressed in km. But it’s not just the amount you’ve run. Harder running has a greater km value.

Right now, the Forerunner 970 says we have a running tolerance of 91km a week, and that we are currently at 81.8km for the last seven days. But we’ve only actually run 73km.

Is messing with a concrete stat like weekly distance questionable? Sure, but we have found it a useful way to, fingers crossed, avoid injury through overdoing exercise.

On the health side, the Forerunner 970 also provides ECG readings to look for signs of arrhythmia. This is only available in a few high-end Garmin devices so far, and does require activity participation, a 30-second session where you place your thumb and forefinger on the metal bezel.

Garmin Forerunner 970: Performance

The Garmin Forerunner 970 is a lot like the Fenix 8 in use, which is no surprise when they share the same level of internal tech.

GPS lock-on takes a few seconds — not instant but fast enough not to become annoying — and the route maps it produces are highly accurate. You may get even better results if you use the more battery-sapping dual-band GPS mode, present here.

We’ve used the Auto mode during testing, which claims to be able to tell when the powerful dual-band mode is needed, then switch to it.

Heart rate accuracy is very good for running, too, but as with every other high-end Garmin, it’s not perfect for weight-based gym sessions where your heart rate rises and falls within the space of a minute. The Forerunner 970 still massively outclassed the Sunnto Run we’ve tested alongside the Garmin, but results were far better with a Garmin HRM 600 chest strap worn at the same time.

As with most Garmins, you can connect a chest strap to the Forerunner 970 wirelessly if you like.

We’re basically looking at a quality level the best Garmin has to offer in terms of GPS and HR accuracy, which is also among the best found in any wearable at present. It gets an A-grade for running, maybe a C+ for gym work.

Sleep tracking is good too. The Forerunner 970 can always tell when we’ve had a few glasses of something the night before, and notices the loss of sleep quality, although it does tend to miss wakeful moments at times — even if they include walking to the toilet.

Earlier, we suggested that the very high screen brightness has an effect on battery life, and it means we personally haven’t come close to Garmin’s claim of 15 days of battery life. With the always-on mode switched on, it’s closer to 4-5 days. And we’ve found tracked outdoors exercise can eat up to 7% an hour — the variance depends on how your interactions with the wash push it to its highest brightness mode.

Is Garmin’s 15-day claim a fake, then? No, but there are more factors to bring it down than before. And even if you lower the display brightness setting, it will still put out a good amount of power when in direct sunlight.

Garmin Forerunner 970: User reviews

The Garmin Forerunner 970 has received almost universally positive user reviews so far online.

One complaint is that the “always-on display” mode is not very visible when outdoors. This is where the watch displays the time even when the watch is sitting idle on your wrist.

The Forerunner 970’s brighter screen actually highlights this effect by increasing the disparity between the brightness level when the watch is used and left hanging around on your wrist.

Should you buy the Garmin Forerunner 970?

The Garmin Forerunner 970 is a terrific running and fitness watch we’re comfortable recommending to many, with a few caveats.

It doesn’t feel quite as high-value a package as the older Forerunner 965 for US buyers. That older model was probably the easiest-to-recommend high-end Garmin watch of the last generation.

We get more smart features, even greater teasing out of stats. But the core proposition is pretty similar. And its neatest trick, supernova brightness, does make real-world stamina worse than last time around.

Does that matter when it genuinely enhances the experience? Maybe not, but it does reinforce that the Forerunner 970 is better suited to those who exercise around a regular routine rather than spending weekends (or weeks) away in the wilderness, where charging opportunities may be less forgiving.

If the Garmin Forerunner 970 is not for you

Put off by the price? It’s worth seeing if you can hunt down a deal on the Garmin Forerunner 965. It’s an older watch without this one’s screen brightness and older software. But it does have most of the core features we care about most, for less.

You may also want to consider dropping down to the Forerunner 570, although we actually find the value issue more glaring in that watch. The two were released at the same time, and that one lacks features like maps and ECG readings, and uses cheaper glass and metal for the bezel and screen.

How we tested

The Garmin Forerunner 970 was worn consistently for more than two weeks during testing. Most days it was used to track a run, and around three times a week it was used to track gym sessions. It took a rainy London day festival like a champ, and was worn most nights to assess sleep tracking. Testing also included switching between the Forerunner 970’s “always on” screen mode and the default “raise to wake” to get the best idea of battery life.