Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Garmin’s Forerunner 735XT ‘Suffer Score’ shows how hard you’re really working out

There’s practically no end the to the number of smartwatches, fitness bands, and health trackers that’ll measure the steps you’ve walked, the calories you’ve burned, the metric distance you’ve covered, and even the maximum heart rate you’ve achieved in a day. But few collate that data into a single, easy-to-understand metric. It’s tough to tell exactly how intensely you’ve been working out from calories burned alone, and that’s where Garmin’s new Forerunner 735XT sports tracker, which replaces the company’s aging 920XT, comes in.

The Garmin Forerunner 735XT is in many ways unremarkable. It’s got all the standard components you’d expect in a modern-day sports tracker, including a GPS and Garmin’s in-house Elevate optical heart rate monitor. It provides fitness feedback on a variety of activities like running, swimming, hiking, cross-country skiing, and cycling; and can track your restful sleep. But the Forerunner stands out from the crowd in one important respect: It’s the first smartwatch to feature fitness platform Strava’s “Suffer Score,” a measure of physical masochism calculated by comparing your elevated heart rate during a workout to your resting baseline. The larger the delta between heart rate zones and the longer you maintain it, the higher your score.

Recommended Videos

“The deeper you dig, the longer you can hold on, the higher the Suffer Score,” Strava explains on its website.

download
Image used with permission by copyright holder

No fitness tracker would be complete without bells and whistles, of course, and the Forerunner’s got those in spades. It’ll show incoming notifications, calls, emails, and text messages from a Bluetooth-connected phone, plus let you control music playback. It pairs with Garmin’s Connect IQ store for a steady supply of new watch faces and apps; syncs your data with Garmin’s online fitness service; and, if you so choose, lets you share your most impressive workouts publicly and compete against friends. And it’s compatible with Garmin’s Vector pedal tracking, Varia radar accessories, and a chest strap that’ll feed granular data like stride length, vertical ratio, and ground contact time balance to your Garmin fitness profile.

Those features command a hefty premium. The Forerunner 735XT starts at $450 — presumably high enough to elevate most people’s Suffer Score. It’s available in soft silicon black/gray or blue/frost blue combinations, and lasts up to 11 days on a charge (or 16 hours if you’re using it to train).

Buy at Amazon  Buy at Garmin

Kyle Wiggers
Kyle Wiggers is a writer, Web designer, and podcaster with an acute interest in all things tech. When not reviewing gadgets…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?
Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?

Read more