The Venu 4 makes major changes to Garmin's health and fitness coaching, and we're intrigued

What you need to know

• The Garmin Venu 4 ships in two sizes starting at $549, with 10–12 days of battery life.
• This new model adds a brighter display, LED flashlight, dual-band GPS, and a stainless steel/ polymer case blend.
• A new "Garmin Fitness Coach" offers personalized workouts across 25 activity types instead of sticking to running or cycling.
• The "Health Status" tracker will warn you if metrics like HRV, skin temp, or respiration are "trending away from their usual range" due to illness or activity.

The long-awaited Garmin Venu 4 offers serious hardware and software upgrades over the Venu 3, our favorite Garmin watch of the last two years. It shows us Garmin's template for how it's going to compete with brands like Apple and Samsung, which are pivoting to more personalized health data and coaching.

The Venu 4 itself is similar in style to its predecessor, fairly skinny and light with limited buttons and an AMOLED display surrounded by a metal bezel. But Garmin packed in better GPS accuracy and the same LED flashlight found on the Fenix 8, while giving it a more premium steel look along the sides.

Also like its predecessor, which introduced Garmin's excellent wheelchair mode, the Venu 4 introduces new accessibility features like color filters for colorblind athletes or a spoken watch face for the visually impaired.

To compete with mainline smartwatch brands, Garmin has added Health Status: A measure of whether your heart rate, HRV, skin temperature, or blood oxygen levels are normal or irregular on a nightly basis. Currently in beta, Health Status will show the physical impacts of poor sleep, stress, alcohol, or illness.

Garmin will encourage you to use its latest Lifestyle Logging feature, where you can note things like alcohol or caffeine consumption so that Garmin's algorithm can link lifestyle choices to specific changes to your HRV, stess, and overall Health Status.

On a similar note, Garmin is once again revamping its sleep summaries, now offering "sleep alignment" data to judge whether your circadian rhythm matches your inner sleep cycle, while sleep consistency judges your last seven nights of data. The Galaxy Watch 8 also recently used circadian rhythm for its new Bedtime Guidance.

Comparing health data against your baseline is increasingly popular on both smartwatches and smart rings; it's natural that Garmin would try to compete with its own offerings, even if it doesn't have an equivalent to Apple's hypertension yet.

You'll need to be comfortable sleeping with the Venu 4 — or wearing the new Garmin Sleep Index — to get the most from this data.

On the fitness side, Garmin brought daily suggested workouts for running, cycling, walking, or general "fitness" to the Venu 4, along with Garmin Coach for running, cycling, and strength. It makes the Venu 4 much better as a training guide than the Venu 3 was.

As for what's new, the Venu 4 is introducing a Garmin Fitness Coach that creates a workout plan that includes 25 different types of workouts, designed for athletes who do a variety of indoor and gym workouts in addition to outdoor training. It's perfect for well-rounded athletes.

On a similar note, you can now log several activity types in one with the "mixed session activity profile." So if you switch from treadmill running to stair stepping to jump roping at the gym, you can incorporate all three into one exported activity.

The Venu 4 also receives features previously restricted on its predecessor, such as following downloaded GPX courses, training load and effect, lactate threshold, performance condition, and other perks you'd find on the Forerunner 570. You'll still need the Venu X1 to get maps and other premium features, however.

Available starting September 22, the Garmin Venu 4 41mm and 45mm both start at $549, or $599 with a premium leather band. This makes it $100 more expensive than the Venu 3; we've seen Garmin prices rising sharply in 2025, so we expected this change. Since the Venu 4's new software tools will eventually come to other models, you'll have to decide if these extra perks justify the cost.

Garmin also announced the Instinct Crossover AMOLED and Bounce 2 kids watch on Wednesday.