The Best Fitness Trackers for Running

How to Choose the Right Fitness Tracker

Run Circles Around Other Trackers

Even some of the best fitness trackers can’t keep up with serious runners. Many trackers count steps, measure sleep, and even vibrate when a push notification appears on your phone, but they can’t calculate pace, time, or anything else a runner needs to know. But there is a special class of fitness trackers just for runners, hybrid devices that are half running watch and half daily step counter. We’ve rounded up the very best.

While running watches can easily cost upwards of $200 (and above), not all of them do. We looked for a few devices at the lower end of the price spectrum, around the $100 mark, but also some of the higher-end models that cost a lot more. As you can see from our picks, there’s a big range so you can find something that meets your needs and budget, matches your style, and helps you get through all those miles.

We’ve also taken into consideration some of the essential features any runner would want from a tracker, and whether it offers heart rate monitoring, smartwatch features like push notifications, good battery life, and more.

Style

Runners’ watches usually have a sporty look, which isn’t ideal for something you want to wear 24/7. They often have a chunky face and a silicone wristband that can withstand sweat. That’s not what you want as eye candy on your arm when you’re out networking over cocktails.

However, a few hybrid fitness tracker-running watches actually do have a more sophisticated look than many others. The Apple Watch Series 5, Coros Apex, and Garmin Vivoactive 3 come to mind. They have sleeker bodies and more attention to detail, such as stainless steel clasps, that elevate the look. With some models, you can swap the bands for something classier when the occasion calls for it.

The Essentials

A few essential features runners look for include the ability to accurately track total running time, distance, pace, and lap time. It certainly helps if the watch comes with GPS, as stats for outdoor runs are much more accurate when GPS is used to calculate them. Having GPS also means you can usually see the route of your run after the fact. GPS can drain battery quickly, but some watches, like the Coros Apex and Garmin Forerunner 735XT, offer battery-saving features that can be helpful during long runs (more on those features below).

Some of the trackers included here offer advanced metrics including ground contact time, stride length, and estimated recovery time needed after a workout. The Apex and Forerunner 735XT even estimate lactate threshold and VO2 max, but the latter requires a compatible chest strap for these metrics.

When you’re not running, you expect a tracker to keep an eye on your steps and sleep. Most of the devices on this list can track your light and deep shut eye. 

Heart Rate

Most trackers have an optical heart rate monitor (HRM) built into the device. This reads heart rate through your wrist. There are different ways HRMs are used and implemented

With an optical HRM, you never have to put on a chest strap if you don’t want to, although many trackers with optical HRM usually still support them. A chest strap HRM wirelessly (via Bluetooth or ANT+) connects with a compatible running watch so that you have real-time heart rate data while you’re in motion. Many athletes still prefer chest straps because they are more accurate.

The other major distinction is whether the optical HRM offers continuous heart rate monitoring or only during activity. Continuous monitoring lets you see your heart rate at any moment, making it easy to look up your resting heart rate every day. Continuous HRMs tend to eat up battery life, however.

More importantly, you need to ask what you’re going to do with your heart rate data. Many people simply don’t need to know their heart rate while they’re driving or cooking dinner. They can’t act on it any meaningful way, and it doesn’t tell them much about their health or state of being. Every so often, people try to use continuous HRM to manage stress. That can be difficult, because it means you have to notice a rise in heart rate, then act on it.

The point of having heart rate information on a runner’s watch is to use it for training. In this case, heart rate data is very valuable. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch Series 5 has an FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) function that generates a PDF of your heart rhythm you can share with your doctor.

For more, see the best heart rate monitors we’ve tested.  

Push Notifications and Apps

Push notification support is surprisingly abundant among hybrid devices. Typically what happens is that the tracker vibrates when a notification appears on your phone, and the first few lines of the message show up on the tracker itself. The Garmin Vivoactive 3 is a favorite for push notifications because you can read more than just the first few lines if you scroll through the alert.

The Vivoactive 3 also has the benefit of tapping into Garmin’s app store, Connect IQ. Compared with the Apple App Store, Garmin’s store is tiny. But having an app store at all means you can add custom widgets and screens to your device. There is a screen, for example, that shows multiple time zones of your choice around the world.

Battery Life

Battery life is a big deal among fitness trackers. You want a device to last more than a day or two, and if you’re preparing for a long race, you need to feel reassured that your tracking won’t poop out at mile 25.

See How We Test Fitness Trackers

The battery life estimates below are for general step-counting mode. Once GPS is enabled, battery life changes dramatically. All the devices here have a long enough battery life to last a long race…maybe not an ultramarathon, though. The Coros Apex and Forerunner 735XT are the exception. The Coros Apex can last up to 24 days with normal use, 24 hours in full GPS mode, and 80 hours in UltraMax GPS mode, in which the GPS switches on for 30 seconds every two minutes (the rest of the time, it uses motion sensors and machine learning algorithms to track you). The Forerunner 735XT has an option to turn off the optical HRM to extend battery life to up to 24 hours while still getting all the benefits of GPS.

Other considerations when buying a running watch and fitness tracker are whether it’s waterproof or simply splash resistant, if it offers remote music controls, and what other activities you can track with it. In the in-depth reviews linked from this article, you’ll find those details, as well as our own hands-on assessment of how well the devices fair in real-world conditions.

Swimming more your thing? See our favorite waterproof fitness trackers. And if you want to keep track of your weight, check out the best smart bathroom scales.

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