Wellness Gadget Review: Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

I picked up the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music a few months ago, partly because I was fed up carrying my phone on long runs. If you play touch rugby and want your Strava data, you either accept the phone-in-the-shorts situation or you don’t track the activity (which as anyone on Strava will tell you, isn’t a thing). So I took the plunge on a fitness tracking watch.

But I want to talk about something beyond the basics, because the basics — GPS tracking, on-board music storage, decent battery life — are well covered elsewhere, and they work as advertised. What I didn't expect was how much I'd value the wellness features.

The Core Functions Are Solid

GPS locks on quickly, runs accurate, and having music on your wrist without needing your phone is genuinely liberating. Whether that matters to you depends entirely on how you exercise, but for longer runs or a game where you want your tracking data without a brick in your pocket or a weird sweaty neoprene arm thing, it's a straightforward win. Although I had to make a point of turning off notifications because… Yikes. I didn’t realise how much I’m doing my mental health a favour by having my phone on Do Not Disturb for the most part.

The Wellness Side Is Where It Gets Interesting

The Forerunner 165 tracks sleep, monitors heart rate variability (HRV), generates a daily stress score, and gives you a Body Battery reading — essentially an estimate of how recovered you are at any given point. It also produces a morning readiness score that pulls all of this together.

Here's my honest take on those features: they're not going to tell you anything you don't already know, if you're paying attention. If you had a bad night's sleep and you feel groggy, the watch will confirm you had a bad night's sleep. It's not magic.

But that's not quite the point.

The value isn't in the data replacing your own awareness. It's in the data prompting awareness you might not have paused for. When you're busy — work busy, school run, evening commitments, repeat — it's surprisingly easy to go days without really checking in with how you're doing. The watch creates a moment to do that. You glance at your Body Battery in the morning and you're suddenly thinking about your sleep quality, your stress levels, how hard you trained yesterday (if you had time to train this week). Without the watch, that thought might not have surfaced until you were already running on empty.

The Things You Kid Yourself About

Step counts are a good example. Most people think they're reasonably active. Most people are less active than they think. It's not laziness — it's that a busy day that felt full and tiring doesn't register as sedentary, even if you were at a desk for most of it. The watch doesn't care what the day felt like. It counted the steps. On more than one occasion mine has been a quietly humbling number.

HRV works the same way, and it's arguably the more useful one. Heart rate variability — the variation in time between heartbeats — is one of the better proxy measures we have for how well your nervous system is coping with its current load. When HRV is consistently low, your body is under stress: physical, psychological, or both. What makes it interesting is how often it tells a different story to the one you're telling yourself. "I'm fine, just busy" is a sentence most people in demanding jobs say regularly. Your HRV might have a different view.

There's no hiding from measurements. That's uncomfortable, and also quite useful.

What It's Good For, Honestly

For people who want to use health data to train smarter, there's plenty here. Runners especially will find the training load and recovery features useful. But I think there's also a case for it as a tool for people who don't think of themselves as athletes — people who live full, demanding lives and tend to deprioritise the basics. Sleep, rest, recovery. The watch doesn't nag, but it does keep asking the question.

As a chiropractor, I spend a lot of time talking to patients about the relationship between how they feel and how they move, recover, and manage load. The Forerunner 165 isn't going to replace that conversation. But it might be a useful starting point for people who've never had it.

A Few Caveats

It's not a medical device. HRV and stress scores are estimates based on optical heart rate monitoring, which has limitations, particularly if you move around a lot during measurement periods. Treat the numbers as directional rather than definitive.

The app (Garmin Connect) is functional but not especially elegant. You'll find what you need, but it's not a seamless experience.

And if you're someone who already checks in regularly with their own health — who sleeps well, manages stress consciously, knows when they're overdoing it — you'll get less from the wellness features. They're most useful as a prompt for people who don't yet have that habit.

The Bottom Line

The Forerunner 165 is a genuinely good running watch that also happens to ask useful questions about how you're living. If you're active and want music without your phone, it's an easy recommendation and doesn’t break the bank compared to lots of fitness watches out there. If you're curious about tracking your recovery and sleep without getting deep into sports science, it's worth a look. And if you were already paying close attention to your health, you probably don't need it — but it won't hurt.

Questions about recovery, sleep, or how your lifestyle might be affecting how your body feels? That's exactly what we talk about at Pyramid Health.