Garmin Forerunner 165 review: a must-buy fitness watch

The Forerunner 165 runs on Garmin’s proprietary operating system, and it’s much improved here. I wasn’t a huge fan of it in the Vivoactive 5, but I’ve found it much more palatable this time around. I much prefer the design offered on the Forerunner series, and this is paired with a much faster and snappier performance. Before this, I hadn’t realized how slow the Vivoactive 5 could be and how much it had soured me on Garmin’s software. This time around, I’m finding it much better to use, and the swift performance is a big part of that.

The real meat of any Garmin device is its fitness capabilities, and while the Forerunner 165 has had some cutbacks to hit a lower price, everything you need is here — making this a solid, if limited, fitness smartwatch.

We’ll start with how it performs during various exercises. Running is the focus, so it makes sense that it excels here. Right out of the box, the Forerunner 165 will start throwing training recommendations at you, with its selection based on your history, your underlying stats, and how well-rested you are.

Had a hard night? It’ll go easy on you. Coming out of a long period of rest? Then it’ll shoot for the horizon and really push you. When you’re running, all the usual favorites are here: pace, heart rate, and time. But there are also some unexpected additions, like wrist-based running power, which calculates how hard you’re running on any given surface or incline. This is a vital tool for pacing in races, and keeping an eye on your running power can help make sure you make it to the end and don’t wind up out of gas partway through.

The tools aren’t perfect, and they wildly overestimated my abilities at the start. The watch can calculate your VO2 max (how much oxygen your blood carries), and it judged mine far too high, proudly proclaiming I could run a 5K race in 21 minutes. Thankfully, it updated after a few practice runs and has slowly become more accurate — i.e., much slower. Happily, the run recommendations tend to center around a target heart rate, so it’s not going to accidentally push you too hard, even if the stats end up as misjudged as they were for me.

There’s support for a lot of other exercises here, including swimming, cycling, pickleball, and strength training, among others. The presets on the watch can stretch to fit just about any activity, though there’s a notable lack of a stretching activity. Yoga and Pilates aren’t really the same, and having the ability to track stretches would have been nice.

Strength workouts are a particular focus for me at the moment, and the Forerunner 165 works well enough here. Start a Strength workout, and it’ll count reps as you go while also monitoring your heart rate. You can press the Back key to swap between sets and rest periods, and it’ll also give you a chance to correct the rep count and set a weight during these intervals. There’s no way to specify what exercise you’re doing during a strength-training session, though, which meant having to constantly change and correct the weight I was using as I moved between different weights, machines, and even sets.

Left to its own devices, the Forerunner 165 is good enough. While you can’t specify your strength workouts, it will try to guess the particular exercise you’re doing. It’s rarely correct, though, misidentifying standing shoulder presses as chin-ups on more than one occasion. But the exercises it guesses are usually close enough that it will at least know which muscle groups you’re using most. Avid weightlifters may feel let down by this, though. You can edit these records in the Garmin Connect app if you want to, but if you want to accurately track your strength workouts, you’re better off creating a specific plan of exercises in Garmin Connect’s Workouts function and following that.

I also took the Forerunner 165 for a short swim, and it held up well. It counts lengths better than the Vivoactive 5, and the button controls make it much easier to use when you’re in the pool; water and a touchscreen are rarely good friends.

There are personal wellness features here, too, but they’re not at the forefront like they are with the Vivoactive 5. Stress tracking is there, and the tracking functions are just as good as on other Garmin watches, but outside of a casual reminder that you can do breath work to reduce stress, there’s little to keep mental wellness at the forefront. The exception to this is the sleep tracking, as the daily Morning Report contains a detailed description of your overnight sleep. There’s also automatic nap tracking if you’re a napper.

As you might expect, some features are missing, which will be a disappointment to some people. There’s no triathlon or multi-discipline support, so it won’t automatically switch between workouts like more advanced models can. There’s also no built-in map support, making its abilities as a hiking or trail running watch a bit limited. However, these are all features most casual fitness users can live without, and most of the major fitness bases are covered well enough for the price.

I’ve come to expect lengthy battery lives from fitness smartwatches, and the Forerunner 165 is no exception to this rule. It doesn’t match Garmin’s claims of up to 11 days of battery life, but I managed a solid week between charges, running from Monday to Monday and recharging in the morning when it hit around 15%.

Granted, this was with minimal exercise tracking, after only having done a half an hour of swimming that week. The second week of more intense gym work and tracking meant it lasted a day less, hitting 10% on Sunday evening. In both of these cases, the battery could have gone a little longer on the remaining capacity, but it’s still far from Garmin’s claims, even if a week is more than acceptable.

Recharging was fast enough, as it charged back up to full in about an hour. If needed, you could easily pop this on the charger for 10 minutes in the morning to get enough juice for the day, but it does need a proprietary charger from Garmin.

The Garmin Forerunner 165 is available in two different models: The Forerunner 165 and the Forerunner 165 Music. The two are identical, except for the ability to save and play music through Spotify on the Forerunner 165 Music, plus the different colors on offer. The standard Forerunner 165 is available in black/slate gray and mist gray/whitestone, while the Forerunner 165 Music comes in a wider variety, including turquoise/aqua and berry/lilac, as well as the other two colors.

Both are currently available and can be found in a number of retailers. The Forerunner 165 costs $250, and the Forerunner 165 Music costs $300.

I wasn’t expecting to have too much to say about the Garmin Forerunner 165, having just come off reviewing the similarly priced Vivoactive 5. But hoo-boy, was I wrong. The Forerunner 165 (and, by extension, the 165 Music) is a phenomenal fitness watch for the price.

“For the price” is the important part there, of course. The battery life didn’t come close to the “up to 11 days” Garmin claimed, and the lack of deeper weightlifting features or triathlon support will disappoint the more hardcore members of those particular crowds.