In August of last year, I purchased the Garmin Fenix 8 AMOLED Smart Watch to replace my now ancient Apple Watch. It’s largely everything I had hoped it would be: large display, incredible battery life, and tracks what I wanted to track on the watch face. However, I recently started having an issue where the watch would stop tracking my heart rate and my sleep, two things I largely rely on, after every update.
This Issue
After the watch completes an update, the Garmin Fenix 8 stopped tracking my heart rate will no longer show or track my heart rate. Sleep tracking and other metrics are the same – if I open my Garmin App on the phone it will show blocks of data missing. Efforts to get the watch the start tracking this data again were frustratingly hit and miss. Manually resyncing the watch didn’t work. Even a full restart of both the watch and phone failed to resolve it consistently.
The Fix
I have found that following a specific, but easy, set of steps will kick start the data tracking again.
- After the watch updates, open the Garmin App and tap the sync button on the upper right (see screenshot).
- Restart the Garmin Watch by pressing and holding the upper left button on the watch and then pressing the power button (upper right or tap the screen).
- After the watch reboots, open the Garmin App and tap the sync button on the upper right again.
Following the steps in this order have worked flawlessly the past several updates the watch has undergone.
If you have done this and the watch still does not track your heart rate or sleep data, leave a comment as I will be curious. If you have also suffered through this issue and have found a different or better way to fix, please drop a comment as well.